Oscars 2022: The biggest snubs from the Academy Awards
Everyone has been eagerly waiting for the Academy Award nominations to get a proper grasp of this year’s awards season and the Oscars bids are finally in. The Academy has been criticised in recent years for its inability to promote diversity and look beyond the western-centric lenses through which it analyses the cinematic outputs of each year.
This year’s lineup has been a strange one in many ways. One of the most celebrated and acclaimed international features of 2021 – Drive My Car – got four nominations including one for Best Picture. The film’s director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has also picked up a very well-deserved nomination for Best Director which won’t surprise anyone who is familiar with his works.
However, the Academy slipped spectacularly by failing to nominate Denis Villeneuve for Best Director even though Dune picked up several nominations in a multitude of categories including Best Picture. That was undoubtedly one of the biggest snubs in recent Oscars history, unlike Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog which was the biggest winner of the Oscar nominations round – scoring 12 nods.
While Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley secured a nomination for Best Picture, Bradley Cooper missed out on a nomination for Best Actor despite the fact that the Best Picture bid was completely undeserved and his performance was one of the few redeemable things about the mediocre film from del Toro who, in truth, did rightly miss out on a Best Director spot.
The Academy definitely doubled down on celebrating mediocrity, giving Javier Bardem a Best Actor nomination for Being The Ricardos. The truly unimpressive feature film picked up three nominations which must seem baffling to the poor audience members who had to sit through it. However, when it comes to the glorified mediocrity of 2022, nothing can beat Don’t Look Up.
The star-studded Netflix project picked up four nominations, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing which makes me question whether the Academy saw the same movie that the rest of us did. The Best Director nominees include Steven Spielberg who also produced a lacklustre adaptation of West Side Story, signifying snubs for Joel Coen and Julia Ducournau who deserved it much more.
Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast also scored big but Caitríona Balfe missed out on a Best Supporting Actress nomination, losing out to Judi Dench who managed to get on the list but Passing’s Ruth Negga didn’t. The Best Actress category wasn’t any better, with The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve and The Last Duel’s Jodie Comer missing out but Kristen Stewart did score her first Best Actress nomination.
Neither of Ridley Scott’s 2021 productions were nominated for major categories, with only one Oscar bid for House of Gucci’s makeup and hairstyling. If anything, Lady Gaga’s performance in that particular project definitely deserved a nomination more than Nicole Kidman’s starring turn in Being the Ricardos.
At the end of it all, the Oscar nominations for this year have proven all the claims about the fading relevance of the Academy Awards. The one category that it did manage to get right was the Best International Feature Films, with nods for Drive My Car and The Worst Person in the World. The fact that only Drive My Car made it into the running for Best Picture while more accomplished international projects were left out for terrible films such as Nightmare Alley continues the debate that Parasite started.
