BlackkKlansman film director Spike Lee is nominated for Best Director at the Oscars. The ceremony will take place on Sunday Feb. 24. Films, their directors and casts will be awarded based on the characteristics of each production in categories such as Best Picture and Best Actress (courtesy of creative commons).
The 91st Academy Awards air on Sunday Feb. 24 and will be the culmination of a particularly contentious awards season. Many of the major awards still seem wide-open, with most lacking a clear front-runner. Yet, as is often the case, this year’s Oscars will be defined by its losers as much as it’s defined by who brings home a statue on Sunday.
The award for Best Picture, the Academy’s most coveted prize, proves to be one of the only races with a clear-cut favorite to win. Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma is a heartfelt, black-and-white foreign language film that follows the middle-class life of a disadvantaged maid named Cleo in 1970s Mexico City. A win for Roma would be particularly significant because, according to The Week, it would be the first non-English movie to ever win the award as well as the first Best Picture produced by an online streaming service, Netflix.
Perhaps the biggest potential snub of the Oscars comes in regard to Bradley Cooper’s work on the critically and commercially successful revival of A Star is Born. Cooper produced, co-wrote, directed and starred in the film which is nominated for eight Academy Awards. It was an early favorite when it entered theaters in October but lost steam as awards season moved along.
The snub is most obvious in the Best Director race, where Cooper was not even nominated. As such, Cuaron appears to be the favorite for Roma, although the award could also go to Yorgos Lanthimos for his quirky period piece The Favourite or Spike Lee, who could win his first Oscar for BlacKkKlansman. Cooper took his snub in stride, telling Oprah Winfrey that “[getting] the nomination [would] not give me any sense of whether I did my job or not … The only thing I set out to do was to tap into as authentic a place as possible.”
Cooper is nominated for Best Actor, this year’s most overwrought category. His heart-wrenching performance as Jackson Maine, however, will likely not prove enough to take home the award. The Best Actor trophy will likely go to a dramatization of a real-life figure this year; either Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody or Christian Bale’s shocking turn as Dick Cheney in Vice.
Best Actress is another category where A Star is Born will likely not be recognized. While Lady Gaga’s stunning film acting debut earned her a nomination, the early favorite will presumably lose the award to a more established actress. Contenders include Olivia Colman, who gave a humorous, complicated performance as Queen Anne in The Favourite, but seven-time nominee Glenn Close is the true favorite to win the award after her surprise Golden Globe win for The Wife.
While not traditionally considered to be one of the major awards, the Best Animated Picture race is unquestionably one of the most intriguing. It is a category typically dominated by Pixar, yet in a year where Incredibles 2 is nominated, it is not expected to win. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was one of the most surprising, refreshing movies to be released last year and is now the front-runner for the Oscar. Animation news site Cartoon Brew explains that “Spider-Man is shaping up as the most tonally and graphically experimental animated film released by a major US animation studio in a long time,” and it should be awarded as such.
The ceremony airs Sunday night and will mark the end of the most exhausting awards season in recent memory.