DAVID DUNN

Life is all about accepting the good with the bad, and the Academy Awards are the same way. Every year, they fill us with boundless joy and endless betrayal. They excite us, and they frustrate us. They make us happy, and they make us sad. They give, and they take. I’ve let the Academy Awards drive me insane for well over 10 years now, and I’ve learned the key to not letting them get to you is to just accept that they’re going to make at least one bad decision every year. That’s the key to happiness, my friends: accepting mediocrity. 

No year exemplifies the Academy Awards’ inconsistency more than 2024, which has some of the most ballistic nominations I’ve ever seen from the Academy. There are some nominations that make me very excited and eager to see how things will play out on Oscar night. There are other nominations that make me confused as to why they’re even on here. Then there are snubs so stupid and outrageous that I’m tempted to bomb the Dolby Theatre with pixie dust. But we’ll get to that in a bit. 

First of all, the good news: Oppenheimer earned a whopping 13 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Makeup, Best Original Score, and Best Sound. About damn time. As a prominent filmmaker who’s released one mindbending blockbuster hit after another for over 25 years, Christopher Nolan is one of the best filmmakers of our time and is always on the cutting edge of cinematic innovation. It’s outright insane that Oppenheimer marks only his second Best Director nomination, especially since his first nomination was with 2018’s Dunkirk. I don’t think anyone will be surprised when I say that I will be rooting for Oppenheimer big-time on Oscar night. It deserves everything that it’s been nominated for, and I’m excited that Christopher Nolan might finally get the recognition he’s always deserved. 

Then we get our first surprise from this year’s Best Picture nominees: Yorgos Lathimos’ beautiful and bizarre experimental drama Poor Things, which earned 11 nominations total. Most of the nominations I’m not surprised at, especially when you see how gorgeous the costuming, production design, makeup, and cinematography is. Emma Stone ain’t no pushover either, so she’ll definitely be one to dethrone in the Best Actress race. 

No, what I’m more surprised by is how many nominations it received. Aside from sweeping most of the technical categories, Poor Things also secured a supporting actor nomination for Mark Ruffalo, as well as Best Picture and Director nominations for Yorgos Lanthimos. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I wasn’t expecting it to be the second frontrunner in the Best Picture race. We’ll see how many Oscars it ends up winning the night of the ceremony. It’s very possible that Barbie could snatch up most of the categories Poor Things is nominated in. 

After that, we have Martin Scorsese’s phenomenal historical drama Killers Of The Flower Moon, which is easily the coldest and cruelest film to come out from last year. At 10 nominations, Killers Of The Flower Moon is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Costume and Production Design, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song. I’m grateful that Robbie Robertson got nominated for the movie’s unsettling and uneasy score, especially since he passed away from prostate cancer last year. But the nominee I’m most pining for is Lily Gladstone. Her gripping, passionate performance felt so human and raw, it was hard to imagine that someone actually lived through the things she did. She was a tour de force in the movie and easily outshines the leads above her. She’s my favorite to win Best Actress, but we’ll see if the scales are tipped in her favor later this spring. 

Now here comes Barbie, and this one actually really pisses me off. Barbie scored eight nominations total for this year’s ceremony, including Best Picture. Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera secured supporting actor nominations, Noah Baumbach got nominated for adapted screenplay, and the film is an easy frontrunner for costume, production design, and original song. 

All of those nominations the Academy got right. What it got wrong was what it chose not to nominate. For one thing, Margot Robbie is noticeably absent from the Best Actress category, which is beyond ridiculous since it’s her performance that makes the entire film work. Going from a generic and artificial Barbie doll and learning to grow and develop into her own person was such a sweet arc, and it’s her performance that gives the character gravity and humanity. I haven’t seen all of the movies nominated under the Best Actress category, but I’m willing to bet that Nyad and Maestro do NOT feature performances as strong as Margot Robbie’s. If Ryan Gosling can get nominated for going shirtless and screaming “I’m just Ken,” Margot damn sure can get nominated for playing the MAIN FREAKING CHARACTER. 

Snubbing Margot was bad enough, but snubbing the film’s director is even worse. While Greta Gerwig did get nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, she got shoved to the sidelines when it came to Best Director, which is even more baffling to me. Greta’s creativity, ingenuity, and artistry brought the entire film together and made everything work as cohesively as it did. Barbieland is beautiful. The lore and the world-building is fully fleshed out. The corporate and Kenfluence loomed large. And Barbie’s arc of learning to become a woman and be proud to be one is just captivating and awe-inspiring. Absolutely no one else could have made a Barbie movie work as well as she did, let alone make one PERIOD. The fact that she got snubbed despite directing the most influential film of the year is idiocy to the Kenth degree.

And who took her spot in the Best Director category, you may ask? Why, it’s none other than Justine Triet and Jonathan Glazer, who respectively directed Anatomy Of A Fall and The Zone Of Interest. Both films look really good, with one being about a writer trying to prove her innocence for allegedly murdering her husband and another being a drama about a Nazi family trying to build their dream life next to a concentration camp. But I haven’t seen either movie, and more to the point, I don’t know of many people who have. I appreciate when the Academy branches out and tries to recognize smaller films that some moviegoers might have missed, but not at the expense of a billion-dollar blockbuster hit that broke through gender barriers to tell a story that’s as daring and emotional as it is funny and entertaining. I don’t know who I would replace under the director category to make room for Greta, but let’s start with “anybody except Christopher Nolan” and go from there. 

Finally, let’s do a lightning round of “Best Picture nominees I haven’t seen yet.” Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, secured seven nominations, which is one less than Barbie, but at least the Academy had the good sense to nominate its star. The satire of stereotypes, American Fiction, received five nominations, as did Alexander Payne’s newest comedic high school drama, The Holdovers. Perhaps most perplexingly, Celine Song’s heartfelt romantic drama, Past Lives, got only two nominations: one for Best Picture, the other for Best Original Screenplay. I’ve written about my frustrations about Best Picture nominees only getting two nominations before, so I won’t go down that rabbit hole again. What I will say is that it’s ABSURD that Past Lives got the same amount of nominations as both The Creator and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One — and one less nomination than Napoleon. I guess Past Lives needed more pyramids blowing up in it. 

And just like any other year, there are a slew of snubs that didn’t make the cut in this year’s Oscar race. Air, Talk To Me, and Ferrari all got zero nominations despite how creative and compelling all of them were. Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse got robbed of both music and VFX noms, which is especially maddening since there are nominees that Across The Spider-Verse is emphatically BETTER than. Perhaps most upsetting is that the devastating Von Erich family drama The Iron Claw got a resounding ZERO nominations. No acting nominations for either Zac Efron, Lily James, or Holt McCallany. No director or writing noms for Sean Durkin. No cinematography nomination for Matyas Erdely, no editing nomination for Matthew Hannam, and no music nomination for Richard Reed Perry. If I had to point to a snub that was the most egregious, it would probably be the Academy ignoring The Iron Claw across the entire board. 

That doesn’t change how obscene it is that Greta Gerwig or Margot Robbie didn’t get nominated. Regardless of how dumb or nonsensical some of the other snubs may be, there is a set limit for how many noms each category can have, so I understand that the Academy can’t fit EVERYBODY in. Snubs are going to happen, but what happened with Barbie isn’t a snub — it’s stupidity. It’s pure idiocy thinking that the most commercially and critically successful film of the year isn’t worth not only a Best Actress nomination, but a Best Director nomination either — especially since those two people were the most ESSENTIAL part of your movie. It’s like nominating Oppenheimer for Best Picture but then snubbing Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy in their own categories. It’s beyond insanity. 

At the end of the day, moviegoers know just how special Barbie is and the women who brought it to life. So tonight, I hope these amazing artists are sipping on the tallest glass of Moscato along with their millions knowing that their movie made a greater impact on film than any other Best Picture nominee this year. Cheers to you, ladies — you are more than Kenough. 

– David Dunn