Unreality Companion: 5 Big Oscar Nomination Upsets

In which I expand on the content from my weekly Unrealitymag.com article.

Since this week at Unreality I again talk about the Oscar nominees, I thought that there would be a certain poeticism in addressing the opposite here.  There's always a few every year: the snubbed, overlooked movies that the Academy simply ignores.  I'm not talking about in general; many of the films listed here have been nominated (in some cases multiple times) for Academy Awards.  Herein, however, are the specific categories that were expected to, and often as not should have, been nominated for, but for whatever reason were passed over for other candidates.

5) Snowpiercer for Best Production Design - 2015 was a good year for post-apocalyptic sci-fi.  Interstellar took things cosmic, Mockingjay Part 1 took things to the bank and Snowpiercer became a cult hit.  Unlike some people, I am not at all surprised that Snowpiercer didn't take the Oscars by storm.  This is not at all the kind of movie that the Academy tends to watch, let alone like.  It's the same reason why I wasn't surprised by Captain America: The Winter Soldier's lack of nominations despite being my hands down favorite movie of the year.\\

What does surprise me, however, is that the film was completely overlooked by the technical branches of the Academy, which tend to honor the less seen, less likely and less traditional of the year.  Snowpiercer was able to distill an entire geopolitical world - from lower-class squalor to upper class decadence - into a series of train cars.  Fruit gardens, aquariums, sushi bars, elementary schools, day spas, prisons, industrial machinations: all linked together in an utterly surreal procession.  Now having seen the film, I wonder if anybody at the Academy had bothered to do likewise.

4) Ava DuVernay for Best Director - Don't misunderstand me, I'm not part of the #OscarsSoWhite movement.  I don't believe that there was some racially motivated conspiracy trying to keep Selma out of serious awards contention.  I mean, if that was the case, why would they even bother at nominating the film, let along for Best Picture?  Selma suffered not from being a "Black movie," but from a crowded field of showier, more proven directors.

That being said, it does come as a surprise that the indelibly progressive Academy did not make room for the first black woman nominee in the category.  12 Years a Slave gave them their first Black nominee and Zero Dark Thirty gave them their first woman.  It only seems natural for them to keep up their momentum on awarding worthy minority filmmakers who are plagued with fewer opportunities in Hollywood than their white, male colleagues.

3) David Oyelowo for Best Actor - Again, I swear that I'm not shouting #OscarsSoWhite.  David Oyelowo gave the breakout performance of the year in a film centered entirely around his performance as an American icon.  He successfully captured the timber and resonance of King's voice, and absolutely nailed every scene that he was in.

And given how enamored the Academy is of actors portraying actual people, it's especially surprising that such a monumental performance portraying such a monumental individual somehow escaped their notice.  Granted, the category seems to be especially crowded this year, but Bradley Cooper, nominated for the third year in a row for an excellent but comparatively weak performance, seems like an easy cut to make, or Eddie Redmayne's generally uncelebrated performance as Stephen Hawking, whose nomination came as a real surprise to me.

2) Interstellar for Best Picture - This is one that I was completely expecting to make the grade.  With the Academy's 10% rule - in which Best Picture nominees had to secure at least 10% of the overall vote to earn a nomination - Interstellar seemed like a virtual lock in the category.  Nolan's most recent film inspired intensely passionate responses in virtually everybody who saw it, what I like to call the Whiplash effect.  How Academy voters could be immune to this I honestly have no idea.

Interstellar actually calls to mind an interesting thought.  Originally, the Academy Awards were used as a marketing tool to promote little seen films with lower profiles.  This changed after The Dark Knight's snub in the category, prompting an immediate and visceral backlash against the organization.  They expanded the nominees to ten in order to include more popular choices worthy of recognition, but in recent, and especially this, year(s) have failed to live up to the promise of the reconceived category.  If Interstellar isn't a worthy popular movie, then what is?

1) The Lego Movie for Best Animated Feature - Everything is, in fact, not awesome.  Going into the nominations, The Lego Movie was the obvious favorite in this category.  Hell, arguing against it winning would have been like making a case for any film not named Frozen last year.  And yet nominations came and went and The Lego Movie was nowhere to be found in the category that it was sure to win.

This upset actively throws the Best Animated Feature race into complete chaos.  The four other snubs, although each shocking and infuriating in their own right, would not likely have changed the eventual outcome of their respective races if they had been among the nominees.  The Lego Movie's absence makes this any film's game (although the likeliest to capitalize on the removed competition in How to Train Your Dragon 2).

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