Oscar Award Snubs This Year That Deserve Their Flowers

For better or worse, the Oscars nominations, and winners, tend to create a list that canonizes each year in film. Any concise list is bound to leave notable work behind, the Academy Awards are no different. In contrast to lists made by critics or filmmakers themselves, however, awards shows have a massive political mechanism behind them that ends up playing a massive role in what gets the spotlight. Each film has to, unfortunately, whoo voters into seeing them and resonating with their overall narratives through events, cocktail parties, interviews with the talent, and gift baskets. One studio, or distributor, might have multiple worthwhile films but is forced to put all its resources into the one that seems the most promising. All this to say that the Oscar nominations can sometimes have a lot more to do with the campaigning  around a project than what’s actually on screen. Here, we simply intend to shine a light on exceptional work that, for whatever reason, has gone unrecognized by the most popular film awards. 

Original Score: Challengers (score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross)

Rarely does an original score take such bold risks and has them pay off. Released in April of last year, “Challengers” follows the deeply ambitious Tashi (Zendaya) back and forth between the beginning of her tennis career and her current life coaching her husband (Mike Faist) after her path was derailed by injury. Trying to redeem his recent struggles, she signs him up for a tournament where he’ll have to face his former best friend (Josh O’Connor) who also dated Tashi before her injury. Sexual tension and relentless ambition power the story. Far from the classical, string-based arrangements that usually come to mind when you think of a film score, composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross deliver pulsating 90’s techno and hard techno beats that enhance the already heated material. The score is also in conversation with director Luca Guadanigno’s visual approach to the film. No scene encapsulates this better than the climatic tennis match where the camera assumes the tennis ball’s POV and is literally being smacked from one end of the court to the other as the score explodes with all the energy dance music can muster. Reznor told IndieWire that Guadagnino said, “I think music should be a character in the film. It should be unavoidable. It should be propelling. I want the audience to feel like they can dance in their seats to the whole thing like it’s a fucking rave. I want it to be aggressive.” 

Going outside of the work itself, this is undoubtedly the most culturally relevant original score we’ve had in a long time. A brief look into its Spotify streams shows that it laps any of the nominated works by millions of streams as people became obsessed with its danceable quality and surely worked out listening to it in more ways than one.

Cinematography: Nickel Boys (Director of Photography: Jomo Frai)

“Nickel Boys” adapts the Colson Whitehead novel in a way that no story like this has ever been told. The film follows two young black men (Ethan Harisse and Brandon Wilson) as they become lifelong friends while trying to survive a brutal reform school in Florida.  As seen in the trailer, the story is told almost entirely through the literal point-of-view of the two leads in what director of photography Jomo Frai and director RaMell Ross have called “sentient vision.” While we’ve seen a version of this approach in more psychedelic work like in Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void" or for an action packed escapade like “Hardcore Henry”, never before has it been done for such an intimate coming-of-age drama. A rewardingly challenging viewing experience, the commitment to this approach allows Frai to craft some quietly stunning frames that all feel of a piece rather than gratuitous beauty shots. The young men are reflected on windows, their hands grab onto dry leaves, they peek through wooden planks, characters look right at the camera when delivering a sobering speech or a warm smile. This being Ross’ first narrative fiction film he relied heavily on Fray’s experience to execute on this ambitious yet considered vision. When talking to BK Mag about how operating the camera on this project stands out from his previous work Fray said, “This is just such an interesting process because when you’re operating the camera, it’s not me operating anymore as Jomo, I need to operate as Elwood. And so when Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor hugs me, it’s not Aunjanue hugging Jomo. At that moment, through the camera and when we’re running that scene, it is Elwood hugging Hattie. When the camera pulls away the audience sees Hattie differently.”

Best Actress: Nicole Kidman for Babygirl

The Australian actress has now appeared in 98 film and television roles, yet continues to dig for interesting work and filmmakers. Strangely enough, one could argue that her five Oscar nominations don’t recognize her best performances. This continues to be the case this year as she plays Romy in Halina Reign’s “Babygirl”, a tech CEO who begins to indulge in her most intrusive thoughts through a torrid affair with a recently hired intern (Harris Dickinson). Kidman exhibits a level of vulnerability rarely seen in actors of her age and stature, beyond the complex intimate sequences. Romy is constantly trying to keep it together even before her affair begins, during boring sex with her husband (Antonio Banderas) and mundane corporate events. While observing her routine we see that she gets plastic surgery in an attempt to preserve her looks, Kidman’s decision to play such a character shouldn’t go unnoticed as most actors try to keep playing “normal” people and never quite acknowledge the work they’ve had done. Morally conflicted, Kidman dares to portray a person trying to have it all while “enjoying the warm embrace of the transgressive, how good it feels to do something wrong” as Sean Fennessy said on The Big Picture. 

International feature: On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Zambia)

Zambian filmmaker Rungano Ngoni returns with her second feature film, exploring how tradition and our desire to preserve our own image can suppress the suffering around us. “On an empty road in the middle of the night, Shula stumbles across the body of her uncle. As funeral proceedings begin around them, she and her cousins bring to light the buried secrets of their middle-class Zambian family.” While Shula (played by Susan Chardy in her on-screen debut) lives in the UK, she is not the expected protagonist who comes to teach the locals a lesson, or necessarily learn something from them. The film takes us in unexpected directions showing her perspective as well as that of two of her cousins and how the legacy of their now deceased uncle affected them. Using sound design to create a dreamlike quality coupled with a deft implementation of magical realism, this dive into Zambian tradition might have you questioning what skeletons hide in your family’s closet. 

Director:  Andrea Arnold for Bird 

On first impression, Andrea Arnold’s coming-of-age social drama about a young Bailey (Nykiya Adams) growing up in a squat home in Kent with her young father (Barry Keoghan) sounds like a story you’ve heard before. How Arnold decided to tell this story is what left me transfixed and constantly moved. Bird preserves its core as a bitingly raw depiction of life in this abandoned part of England yet refuses to wallow in the characters’ suffering for an easy tear. As we move deeper into the story, Arnold starts sprinkling moments of sincere sentimentality and magical realism that give more dimension to the landscape and those who inhabit it beyond the hardships of living on the margins. Formally, Arnold embraces our modern fixation with recording ourselves while also engaging with analog shooting styles. Bailey loves to record moments of her daily life through her smartphone and later projects them onto her bedroom walls. Arnold and DP Robbie Ryan embrace the vertical format, integrating it into the edit for moments of respite and dramatic tension. The rest of the film is captured in luminous 16mm film and the choice is made to show the edges of the celluloid along with light leaks. This aesthetic decision coupled with the use of vertical smartphone footage recognizes that as beautiful as the film is, it is a crafted image and therefore expression of what life can be like, not “realistic” portrayal. An important distinction to make when treating such delicate material. Arnold crafted a true ode to northern Kent, integrating the community along with the crew as seen in the credits sequence that simply lists the names of everyone involved in the film rather than separating them into their defined roles.