The waiting game
Image by Fergus Campbell
Three days ago the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced nominations for the 79th Golden Globes, which will be awarded without a television broadcast or the stars who have in years past laughed and lounged around extravagantly laid dinner tables at the Beverly Hilton. NBC’s “boycott” of the HFPA, in the wake of reports about the organization’s backroom dealings and lack of diversity, has real consequences; the denunciatory statements by Hollywood studios do more to reveal the absurdity of the power the Globes wielded in the first place. The show has not been that fun or dishy for a while, as the HFPA moved, pre-controversy, to define itself by good taste. More importantly for awards pundits, the Globes’ impact on Oscars outcomes has mostly centered on the reach a primetime pit stop gives contenders, to prove how good they’d sound accepting a little gold man. Absent such a platform, and with a slate of nominations that desperately proves inclusivity, instead of revealing which voter fell for a few themed Amazon brunches, the Globes feel uninteresting. They will almost certainly play no role in the forthcoming awards season.
Which is bound to last forever. The Academy announces Oscar nominations on February 8, a month later than normal (last year’s awards excepted). That delay coincides with a late-spring ceremony, presumably scheduled to avoid the disruptions of a winter pandemic surge. The decision upends the usual patterns of breaking late and sticking around—the former kind of contender will exist in a weakened state, because the Academy’s eligibility window ends on December 31, while the latter kind will have achieved a greater feat if it wins any trophies. October releases like Dune and The French Dispatch need strategies that remind Academy members of their personality in ways that are not repetitive, months after delivering on the separate promise of commercial success.
These new timing intricacies mean that The French Dispatch is disadvantaged and, if you believe Gold Derby, primed for an above-the-line shutout, while the potential for a Little Women scenario—a bevy of nominations two weeks after theatrical release—will, with an adjusted lag time of six weeks, be more susceptible to the wandering whims of a worn-out voting body, and harder to nail. What if we see surprises all over the place, “fourth” and “fifth” nomination slots going to a dozen cinematic gems (scripts, performances, direction) underestimated by prognosticators, rather than four or five?
The race still contains many of its contemporary trademark qualities and is, due to delayed releases, delightfully dense. Netflix again boasts a big contender, in The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s Montana-set literary adaptation which most critics have labeled a Western, even though it takes place early in the twentieth century. The film needs a faster pace to win Best Picture. The Toronto International Film Festival again produced a frontrunner with its People’s Choice Award, bestowed upon Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, which now stands a chance at racking up double-digit nods. The blockbuster-indie mélange reformed in the near-equal footing of Dune and Licorice Pizza, and there’s a Spielberg picture in the mix, although West Side Story bombed at the box office last weekend. Commercial appeal is impossible to gauge with such streaming dominance, and probably not a sticking point for voters; the film’s pressing deficit is in originality. Being richly acclaimed rather than well liked, it will still likely remain a strong presence through February.
The most intriguing question marks lie, as they always do, beyond the locks in each category. Can Lady Gaga manage a Best Actress nomination for House of Gucci, which is not very good? Her trajectory resembles Timothée Chalamet’s in 2018, when the Beautiful Boy star was tipped for a Supporting Actor nomination and missed out, maybe because it was his first high-profile role after being nominated for Call Me by Your Name. The Academy perhaps wants to show a capacity for discernment among relatively new performers. (Chalamet has not yet received his second nomination.) Will Joaquin Phoenix and Woody Norman, the tremendous duo at the center of C’mon C’mon, notch acting nods? Mike Mills, the film’s director, was nominated in 2017 for writing 20th Century Women, but Annette Bening, that film’s luminous lead, was crowded out of the Best Actress shortlist, in an extraordinarily competitive year. I can see Phoenix and Norman happening, because of the narrative importance of their conversations with each other. (Norman’s American accent doesn’t hurt either.)
Surely Alana Haim will join in on an over-performance by Licorice Pizza, and Penelope Cruz, in Parallel Mothers, could match Antonio Banderas’s recognition for the last Almodóvar contender, which was also nominated for Best International Feature. The Eyes of Tammy Faye has little traction beyond Best Actress, which doesn’t typically matter for the category; Jessica Chastain, who plays Faye in the film, should still worry—it’s getting busy!
Does King Richard have a shot at the night’s top award? The Academy has notably trended toward auteurs with its Picture picks, and while I haven’t seen King Richard (the clock is ticking on its HBO Max availability), the critical focus on Will Smith’s performance seems to be coming at the expense of the film’s competitiveness elsewhere. There is no way CODA won’t slip through the cracks; Nightmare Alley, in limited release this weekend, is kind of a shrug of a contender. How long campaigning remains energetic is anybody’s guess, especially if another Covid wave produces cancellations and Zoom links. The stakes are really too high for publicists and marketing teams to accept potentially derailing developments with anything less than denial, and forceful pushback, even if that’s papered over with the announcement of safety protocols. Regardless, we usually have a Best Picture to beat at this point in the cycle, and the lack of one will keep me engaged, if not until March, then at least until I’ve watched every movie with a chance. In the end, might the Santa Ana winds propel Mr. Anderson’s Valley epic to victory? Just maybe.
Fergus Campbell is a Culture writer and senior at Columbia College.
