Agree with them or not, these Oscar nominations deliver a pert slap to the accepted assumptions of awards season. The industry had been expecting landslides for classy upmarket fare such as Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and also for Josh Safdie’s delirious comedy Marty Supreme. And that’s what they got.
But perhaps no one expected these titles to get quite as colossal a smackdown as they got from Ryan Coogler’s vampire drama thriller Sinners: a violent, high-energy fantasia about racism, music and the black experience, which has soared ahead with 16 nominations – the most for any film in 97 years of the Academy Awards. Whatever happens on the night itself, Ryan Coogler has made Oscar history.
Despite the snubs to Paul Mescal (not nominated for playing Shakespeare), to the second half of the Wicked saga and to Chase Infiniti (ignored for her adored performance as Leonardo DiCaprio’s daughter in One Battle After Another), Sinners is now the big story of this Oscar season – perhaps its only story.
During the annual backlash season, the contrarians have been unburdening themselves of their views that no, Hamlet wasn’t inspired by Shakespeare’s dead son Hamnet, and no, One Battle After Another doesn’t address the reality of Trumpism. Meanwhile, Sinners has been fighting and winning a quite separate culture war, and bringing off a mighty achievement for a highly individual film, a freaky tale of supernatural evil that riffs shrewdly on the idea that the blues is a genre of music that is consumed by the enemies of its producers. In the words of a character played by Delroy Lindo, himself rightly nominated: “White folks like the blues just fine, just not the people who make it.” Sinners fans will be cheering on its subversion of placid awards-season verities.
I admit that Sinners isn’t my favourite Coogler film – preferring his world-conquering afrofuturist superhero adventure Black Panther, his boxing drama Creed and his social realist essay Fruitvale Station. . But, yes, I should also concede that those were films in accepted genres and Sinners is arguably more structurally ambitious, in that it refuses these generic expectations and challenges what is admissible in what appears at first to be a realist drama. Sinners could yet rule this awards season and reward a formidable film-maker and his very stylish leading man: Michael B Jordan.
Otherwise, Anderson’s counterculture trip One Battle After Another comes in behind with 13 nominations, including best picture and director: a bacchanal of strangeness and a delirious 162-minute cadenza of pure, exuberant film-making technique – I predict that the directing nod is the one it may beat Coogler in. But who knows?
Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value and Frankenstein are all behind with nine nominations: Marty, for me, is the movie touched with pure inspiration and Timothée Chalamet delivers the sugar rush of enjoyment. Sentimental Value is a good film, wonderfully acted by Renate Reinsve, though not as good as Joachim Trier’s previous film, The Worst Person in the World and perhaps straying a little too much into the (yes) sentimental movieland territory of George Clooney’s Jay Kelly. Frankenstein is a sumptuously crafted piece of tasteful filmic furniture, though for me lacking the electric spark of pure horror needed to bring it to life.
Hamnet gets eight: that extravagant romantic fantasy adored by many, including me, and resented by others who feel they are being browbeaten by a mixture of emotional coercion and preening literary prestige. It’s a lovely film, and Jessie Buckley is still in pole position for best actress, though I feel that it may fade at the Oscars and clean up more at the Baftas.
The best film of the year has four nominations: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s uproariously disturbing and yet somehow groovy Brazilian drama The Secret Agent – like Antonioni’s The Passenger rewritten by Elmore Leonard – with Wagner Moura getting a nomination for his performance as the scientist on the run from the authorities in 1970s Brazil. It’s a great film and it’s heartening to see it continue to find friends since its debut at Cannes.
