Snubs, nods and firsts: Oscar-nominated movies we’re watching this awards season
You know what’s more dramatic than the movies themselves? Awards season. The Golden Globes have already handed out their trophies, and last Thursday, the Academy dropped the nominations for the 98th Oscars. Some picks had us celebrating like we’d personally won, while others (or lack thereof) made us go iyoh!
So who’s scooping up the awards and who’s been snubbed? Let’s unpack all the drama!
One Battle After Another dominates
Action-comedy-drama One Battle After Another absolutely dominated at the Golden Globes earlier this month with four wins, including Best Director for Paul Thomas Anderson and Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for Teyana Taylor.
The film, starring Taylor alongside an ensemble cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Regina Hall, and Benicio Del Toro, follows a paranoid former revolutionary, “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, played by DiCaprio, who is pulled back into chaos when a rescue mission involving his daughter spirals out of control. If you’re looking for a loud, emotional and uncomfortable movie, then this is right up your alley.
It’s also set to dominate at the Oscars with 13 nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for leading man Leo. Could he be on his way to his second Oscar? We’ll have to wait until 15 March to find out.
Can Sinners come in?
The Ryan Coogler-produced offering, Sinners, made history by becoming the first film to be nominated for 16 Oscars, including Best Director for Coogler, Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, who plays twins Smoke and Stack and Best Supporting Actress for the amazing Wunmi Mosaku, who played Smoke’s wife Annie. Set in 1932 Mississippi, it tells the story of twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, who return home to open a juke joint but instead find themselves battling a dark supernatural force tied to the town’s history. It blends horror, music and racism in a way that feels stressful, in a good way.
Sinners won two awards at the Golden Globes despite being nominated for seven: the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement and the Best Original Score awards. The Cinematic and Box Office category was introduced in 2024 to finally acknowledge that popular films that aren’t “awards worthy” but perform really well at the box office. And Sinners deserves it too: it grossed close to $280 million (an eyewatering R4.45 billion) at the US box office, finishing as the seventh-largest movie of the year.
Even more impressive? It managed the rare trick of being both a crowd-pleaser and a critic darling, earning a 97% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Traditionally, horror movies haven’t fared well at the Oscars, so a Black-led horror movie having this many nominations is a big deal. But will it be a clean sweep?
‘Devastating’ Shakespearean tragedy wins big
While Hamnet might sound like what your neighbour calls their wifi, it’s actually a really tragic retelling of a sad time in the Bard’s family: The death of his only son, Hamnet Shakespeare. Starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, the film focuses on the grief that follows his death. Buckley delivered as grieving mother Agnes Hathaway and won the Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama category at the Globes. It also won the Best Motion Picture – Drama category and has been nominated for 8 Oscars, including Best Director for Chloé Zhao and Best Adapted Screenplay.
A word of warning, though: Watch this one when you are emotionally available, not after a long workday, unless you enjoy staring at the wall afterwards.
Is Timmy becoming a serious actor?
Marty Supreme is a sports drama set in the 1950s that follows Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a young Jewish American table tennis prodigy obsessed with becoming the best. It is about ambition, ego, obsession and how success can be both shiny and deeply inconvenient. At the Globes, Chalamet won Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy for this role.
At the Oscars, the film earned multiple nominations, including Best Actor for our fave nepo baby Timmy and Best Original Screenplay.
Defying nominations🧙♀️
You would think that the sequel of one of 2024’s biggest movies would be rolling in award nominations. But Wicked: For Good, despite strong fan reception and major box office success, was completely shut out of Oscar nominations. No Best Picture. No acting nominations. No technical categories. Nothing.
Variety and other outlets reported that anonymous Oscar voters described the press tour behaviour as “off-putting” and “strange”, saying it distracted from the performances and affected their perception of the campaign.
The viral moments referenced include the widely mocked “holding space” interview, which became a meme.
Awards season is messy. Some films will win, and some will get ignored while we all pretend we predicted everything correctly. So now, we wait for 15 March to see if we were right. Happy watching!
Tshego is a writer and law student from Pretoria. A keen follower of social media trends, his interests include high fantasy media, politics, science, talk radio, reading and listening to music.
He is also probably one of the only people left who still play Pokemon Go.
