c/o Oscar Bauman, Executive Editor

Welcome back to Oscar on the Oscars, the annual column in which I dissect the film awards with which I share a name. Last week, the nominees for the 95th Academy Awards, which are scheduled for Sunday, March 12, were unveiled. Having largely escaped the pandemic’s long shadow on the film industry, this year’s pool of nominees is an exciting one that reflects the ways in which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is attempting to define itself.

A common complaint regarding the Oscars is that they don’t nominate more popular fare that reflects what most Americans are going to the movies to see. The Academy has tried various measures in recent years to address this. In 2018, the Academy floated the idea of adding a “Best Popular Film” category before backtracking and scrapping the idea. Last year’s ceremony included the clunkily-implemented “Oscars Cheer Moment” and “Oscars Fan Favorite,” two pseudo-awards determined by Twitter campaigns that were honored not with trophies but with video clips inserted into the telecast. This year, two massive blockbusters, “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water,” the two highest-grossing films of last year, both scored nominations for Best Picture.

“Maverick,” the Tom Cruise-starring sequel to 1986’s “Top Gun,” is an action-packed story of a group of naval aviators training for a top-secret mission and also scored nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Song, Best Sound, and Best Film Editing. “The Way of Water,” a sequel to 2009’s “Avatar,” sees director James Cameron returning to the sci-fi world of Pandora and the continued conflict between the blue-skinned Na’vi and human invaders, and also was nominated in the categories of Best Sound, Best Production Design, and Best Visual Effects.

One easy, though flawed, metric for understanding the attention that any year’s Oscars slate is getting from the public is to look at the combined box office receipts for the Best Picture nominees. As a pre-pandemic reference point, the Best Picture nominees at the 92nd Academy Awards, honoring the films of 2019, grossed $2 billion in total. The nominees in 2021 brought in a paltry $35 million, owing to the fact that cinemas remained largely shuttered during 2020. Last year, the Best Picture nominees made over half a billion dollars, reflecting the box office’s return from pandemic closures. This year’s slate, though, has a combined gross of nearly $4 billion. The bulk of this comes from “Maverick” and “The Way of Water,” whose massive hauls rank them as the 12th and 4th-highest-grossing films ever made, respectively, but also includes the considerable sums made by other films like the musical biopic “Elvis” and the sci-fi action-comedy-drama “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” which both brought in hundreds of millions.

The nominees for Best Picture also include “All Quiet on the Western Front,” a German anti-war film set in World War I that is based on the 1929 novel of the same name. “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a pitch-black comedy centered on the dissolution of a friendship between two men living on a small Irish island, is also up for the award, as is “The Fabelmans,” a semi-autobiographical drama based on director Steven Spielberg’s childhood experiences of discovering filmmaking amid familial turmoil. Meanwhile, “Tár,” a drama centered on the downfall of a brilliant but troubled conductor, as well as “Triangle of Sadness,” a satire following a group of wealthy guests on a luxury cruise, join the list of nominees. “Women Talking,” a drama based on true events in which the women of an isolated Mennonite colony contend with sexual assaults committed by the group’s men, completes the list of nominees. 

This slate of nominees marks the second year since the field for Best Picture was set at 10. The Best Picture category was historically capped at five, but allowed for between 5 and 10 nominees between 2010 and 2021, with the number depending on how many films received at least 5% of nominating votes from Academy members. In this period, eight or nine films would often be nominated. However, since last year’s ceremony, the category was once again altered, and now will always feature ten nominees unless the rules are changed again.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a spectacular, dizzyingly kinetic family story directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as the Daniels), snagged 11 nominations, the most of any movie this year. The film was not considered to be a major contender upon its release—an often sophomorically humorous, eclectic mashup of sci-fi and martial arts, released in March, from indie directors on their second feature doesn’t exactly fit the traditional “Oscar bait” mold. But the film garnered widespread word-of-mouth popularity for its originality and heartfelt storyline, and it has gained momentum over the months, becoming this Oscars season’s surprise frontrunner. 

With a story centered on a nuanced portrayal of a Chinese-American family, the nominations for “Everything Everywhere” have also broken new ground for Asian nominees at the Oscars. Kwan is the ninth Asian nominee for Best Director. Malaysian-born film icon Michelle Yeoh, who stars as the harried immigrant matriarch Evelyn Wang, is the second-ever Asian nominee in the category of Best Actress, though this designation comes with a bit of an asterisk.

The first Asian nominee for Best Actress, Merle Oberon, was nominated in 1936 for her role in “The Dark Angel.” Though Oberon was born in India and was of mixed Irish, Indian, and Māori descent, she claimed to be an Australian of English ancestry, allegedly undergoing skin lightening and changing her accent to avoid racial discrimination in Hollywood. Though rumors that she was multiracial followed her for years, the detailed truth of Oberon’s heritage only became known with the publication of a biography years after her death. Because of this, awkward qualifiers such as “first Asian-identifying nominee” and “first openly Asian nominee” have been used to refer to Yeoh.

Including Yeoh, four of this year’s 20 acting nominees are Asian, the most ever nominated in a single year. These include two more “Everything Everywhere” cast members. Ke Huy Quan, born in Vietnam to parents of Chinese ancestry, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as the flustered, kind-hearted father Waymond Wang. Stephanie Hsu, who is of Chinese descent, was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her dual role as Joy Wang, Evelyn and Waymond’s daughter, and Jobu Tupaki, Joy’s villainous alternate universe counterpart. Hong Chau, who was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Liz, the caring friend of an obese shut-in professor in “The Whale,” was born to Vietnamese parents and came to the United States as a child.

Also notable among the slate of acting nominees is the fact that 16 of the 20 actors up for awards are first-time nominees, including all five nominees for Best Actor. Several of these nominations were for standout performances in films that otherwise got few or no nominations, such as Bill Nighy’s turn as a terminally ill civil servant in “Living,” Andrea Riseborough’s portrayal of a struggling single mother in “To Leslie,” Ana de Armas’s performance as film icon Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde,” and Bryan Tyree Henry’s role as a traumatized auto mechanic in “Causeway.”

In less uplifting news, the slate of Best Director nominees is drawing controversy. Directing is a historically male-dominated field, with less than one-fifth of major Hollywood films in recent years being directed by women. The Oscars, though, appeared to be seeing a degree of progress in recognizing women behind the camera, as the last two Best Director winners, Chloé Zhao in 2021 for “Nomadland” and Jane Campion in 2022 for “The Power of the Dog,” are both women. Indeed, Zhao and Campion were only the second and third women to ever win Best Director, the first being Kathryn Bigelow in 2010 for “The Hurt Locker.” 

However, this year’s group contains no women for the first time in three years. This is despite the fact that multiple films made by women, such as “Aftersun,” directed by Charlotte Wells, and “Women Talking,” directed by Sarah Polley, received nominations in other categories, and other acclaimed women-directed films such as “She Said,” directed by Maria Schrader; “Till,” directed by Chinonye Chukwu;  and “The Woman King,” directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, were shut out of nominations entirely. While the six men nominated are all undeniable talents, the total exclusion of women from the category following two years of women directors being awarded is an unfortunate step backward.

Beyond the nominees, this year’s Oscars, even more so than last year, seem to be aiming for a true sense of post-pandemic normalcy. For years, the Academy has struggled with issues over choosing a host. After Kevin Hart dropped out of hosting in 2019 amid controversy surrounding his homophobic jokes, the 91st, 92nd, and 93rd Oscars all went hostless, while the 94th last year saw an awkwardly executed three-host setup. This year, Jimmy Kimmel, a safe, inoffensive choice, will host for the third time, after previously hosting in 2017 and 2018. The Academy also plans to present all the categories during the live telecast as usual, moving away from a controversial initiative from last year that saw eight categories presented beforehand and later stitched in briefly.

Of course, last year’s Oscars also aimed for a return to normalcy but were marred by a disjointed ceremony full of shoehorned-in pop culture references, and are perhaps best remembered not for any of the films involved, but for the infamous onstage altercation between Will Smith and Chris Rock. Only time will tell whether this year’s ceremony will occur without incident and truly focus on the exciting collection of films being honored that night.

Oscar Kim Bauman can be reached at obauman@wesleyan.edu.