2009's Biggest Oscar Snubs
By Joe Boden
19th February 2010
When talking about Oscar omissions, it would be too easy to let yourself get carried away and talk about films which never really stood a chance of getting even a nomination. Take this year’s Best Picture award for instance, which – despite the new update to ten nominees – is a pretty standard list of films. There are no documentary nominations, no foreign language nominations, and only one animated nomination. I guess this is one better than the worst case scenario, but even the best case scenario wouldn’t have been perfect. Maybe, in a world where we are blessed with an Academy that is fair even if they are wrong, we would see “A Prophet” and perhaps “The White Ribbon” sneak into the running. Even if there wasn’t any bias towards foreign films as a whole (and there is bias; a film that is nominated in the Best Foreign Language picture has seemingly been rewarded enough), there would still be bias towards certain types of foreign films.
“35 Shots of Rum” probably wouldn’t have been seen by the Academy selectors and voters simply because it wasn’t the official French submission. “Thirst” is too graphic and too genre-orientated to get a look in. “Home” is too low-key and overlooked. “Blue Eyelids” suffers the same fate. It’s rare that the Academy goes out of its way to recommend a film that most of us haven’t seen, instead simply resigning themselves to rewarding films that have already been rewarded too much by critics and word of mouth. Of course, I’m not demanding that the Academy overlooks the best films in favour of little known ones, but it would be nice to see them take into account a wide, varied range of films. I personally don’t think that “Sleep Furiously” stood even a slim modicum of a chance of being nominated, despite the fact that it was the best documentary of the year and also one of the best five films of the year. Why? For two reasons; it’s not a film that the Academy would generally reward, and because I doubt many of the selectors have seen it. This bias by ignorance is just as damaging as the more upfront bias shown by the Academy year in year out. Perhaps I’m talking rubbish, and perhaps the vast majority of the people at the Awards body have seen Koppell’s documentary, but I seriously doubt it.
And so it’s pretty much a pointless exercise to look down on the Academy for not nominating a film like Koppell’s “Sleep Furiously”, or Daly’s “Kisses”, or even something like Jarmusch’s “The Limits of Control”. None of these films ever stood a chance of getting nominated, and so it makes sense to restrict this column to those films that could have been nominated – whether they should have been or not – but were overlooked, snubbed, or omitted. It would also be stupid to attack the Academy for leaving “Antichrist” out of the Best Picture crowd. For me, it was the very best film of the year (by a considerable margin), but it was too violent, too gory, and too controversial to truly shine at this time of year. Its omission was unsurprising, and although that doesn’t make it right, it would – again – be silly to moan about it for the millionth time here.
One thing I will say about “Antichrist” is that it’s very, very surprising not to see Charlotte Gainsbourg’s name amongst those who have got the nod amongst the Best Actress category. Maybe this goes to show just how out of touch the Academy is; nominating safe, unengaging, and poor performances like Streep in “Julie & Julia” over brave, courageous, challenging performances like Gainsbourg’s, but that doesn’t explain the omission. Everybody at the Academy will have seen Lars von Trier’s latest film, and even though it’s understandable that it was left out of the Picture race, Gainsbourg’s omission is slightly harder to swallow. Even if you hate the film, or hate the violence, or hate the themes that it apparently conveys, there is no doubt that the performance of the leading lady was astounding. The same could probably be said about Willem Dafoe – perhaps more-so as he is a bigger, better known name – but personally I thought Gainsbourg was the stronger of the two and deserved to be here. Her album, IRM, is brilliant too, but that’s another story for another time.
Pixar's "Up" - the only special film of those nominated.
Heading back to the Best Picture side of things, and we find a pretty standard list. The surprise of seeing a nomination for Pixar’s “Up” is nothing more than a novelty – a trick from the Academy to show how capable they are of change – but surrounding it we see an overwhelming torrent of poor, average, or just good films. Out of the nine that I’ve seen, I’d say that the animation is the only special film there, and that “A Serious Man” is the only other excellent one. That these two are probably the least likely to win is agitating and disheartening. “Precious” and “Avatar” are the worst offenders; bloated Oscar baiters that make up two of the worst films of the year. Even “Invictus”, a poor film in its own right, would have been a more worthy nomination, and the fact that Clint Eastwood sat in director’s chair makes it even more surprising that it didn’t make the ten.
The films that should have made the ten but didn’t are numerous. Restricting myself to talking about the films that actually had a chance of being nominated, the biggest surprise is “Moon”. Its nomination at the BAFTAs for Best British Film (but not for Best Film, quite surprisingly) gave it a little bit of pedigree, and back in the summer when I first saw it I thought it would be the ideal candidate for an inclusion amongst the ten. It would certainly be a left wing choice, it’s universally loved, and it’s genuinely one of the ten best films of the year – including both films with and without a chance at the Oscars. Maybe the fact that it was omitted at both the BAFTAs (in the big categories) and the Golden Globes hindered its chances, but it’s still a big, English language film that should have been recognized, but wasn’t.
If “Moon” not being chosen as one of the ten Best Films of the year was a slight, minor surprise, the lack of its star amongst the actors is a major one. Sam Rockwell’s diverse and committed performance as astronaut Sam Bell was beautiful in its emotion, portraying paranoia, loneliness, and alienation wonderfully. His turn was one of the surprises of the summer, and one of the reasons that “Moon” was so intelligent and so good was because of him. He is the drive at the heart of the film, and if there is one aspect of it that I’d commend over any other, it’s the acting (that’s his acting; Kevin Spacey’s voice joins him on screen every now and again but Rockwell is the only real screen presence). Other annoyances when it comes to the Best Actor race came in the form of Michael Stuhlbarg, the aforementioned Dafoe, and little Max Records, who could have very well made my ten favourite performances of the year.
Max Records in "Where the Wild Things Are"...
Back to the Best Picture race, and we have a film like “Where the Wild Things Are”, which had huge public support and considerable critical support behind it going into the revelation of the nominations. What’s more, Spike Jonze is a well respected artistic director, and the dark take of childhood innocence being stripped away had many intelligent themes and ideas lurking just under its buoyant and visually breathtaking surface. Perhaps it wasn’t a frontrunner, but it was a film that was gaining in popularity and, when we finally saw those ten little blocks being filled in, actually stood an outside chance of proving the move to ten nominees was a good move. Of course, it didn’t, and Jonze and co will have to settle with their mass public acclaim.
The main hope, though, when it came to the Best Picture nominations were that documentaries and foreign language films would get a little bit of recognition. As stated earlier, there were two foreign films that stood a minor chance of getting a nomination. “A Prophet” and “The White Ribbon” have pretty much been duelling it out when it comes to both critics lists and other Awards ceremonies, and you would hope (and probably expect) that at least one of them had a chance of sneaking a crafty nomination when it came to the Academy Awards. It’s not even like they are un-Academy in any way, but for the fact that one of them is in French and the other in German. Indeed, if there is one reason in particular for me to look down disdainfully on the failure of the move to ten, it’s the lack of foreign language pictures making the cut. Does Hollywood actually believe that it made eight of the ten best films of 2009, and that the other two were English language too?
Documentaries were also under-represented, like you would imagine. As stated at the top of this column, “Sleep Furiously” was the very best of the bunch for the year, but didn’t really have a hope of recognition here. “Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country”, on the other hand, was in with a fighting chance. It was nominated for the Best Documentary award, as would be expected, and it has been getting rave reviews pretty much everywhere (including on this website). It’s a film that preaches the themes that the Academy loves; honesty, truth, and justice. It’s a film with an electric pace, that merges big ideas with entertainment (if you can call it that) and heart wrenching emotion. It’s a film that I placed as my eleventh favourite of 2009, and one that I would certainly include in any list of # films that stood a chance of Academy recognition this year.
Alas, it wasn’t to be. “Burma VJ”, “The White Ribbon”, and “Moon” didn’t make the cut for Best Picture. Charlotte Gainsbourg wasn’t nominated for Best Actress. Willem Dafoe, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Sam Rockwell weren’t nominated for Best Actor. Richard Kind and James Gandolfini (for two different films) weren’t nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke weren’t recognized in the Director category. This year comes with its fair share of poor omissions, as you would very much expect it too, but there is nothing here that you wouldn't expect. Maybe the Academy are saving their biggest mistakes for on the night.
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