The nominations for the 97th Academy Awards ceremony took place on Thursday, January 23rd. “Emilia Perez” picked up the most nominations with 13, followed by “The Brutalist” and “Wicked”, who both got 10 nominations. The nominees for the big award, Best Picture, were: “Anora”, “The Brutalist”, “A Complete Unknown”, “Conclave”, “Dune: Part Two”, “Emilia Perez”, “I’m Still Here”, “Nickel Boys”, “The Substance”, and “Wicked”.
Other big categories include Best Actor, with the race for that seemingly being between Adrien Brody in “The Brutalist” and Timothee Chalamet in “A Complete Unknown”, and Best Actress, which seems to be between Demi Moore in “The Substance” and Mikey Madison in “Anora”. For Best Animated Feature, the nominees were “Flow”, which was also nominated for Best International Feature Film, “Inside Out 2”, “Memoir of a Snail”, “Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl”, and “The Wild Robot”, which got nominations for Best Original Score and Best Original Sound as well.
The main conversations after the nominations were revealed revolved around the two international films that got nominated for Best Picture, those being “Emilia Perez” and “I’m Still Here”, though they had very different reasons for getting that attention. For “I’m Still Here”, people were just generally shocked it got into Best Picture, as many thought it’d only get nominations for Best International Feature Film and Best Actress for Fernanda Torres.
Meanwhile there’s the situation with “Emilia Perez”, which despite leading all movies in nominations with 13, is widely seen as a bad movie by the public, with it having a 19% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes on over 5,000 reviews. Even people who review movies as their job don’t think it’s good, with Paul Tassi of Forbes saying, “Emilia Pérez is not a good movie. Not a good crime drama, not a good musical and by all accounts, not a good representation of the groups it focuses on, namely Mexicans and trans people. And that is also according to many Mexicans and trans people” (Tassi, Jan 28).
The Oscars take place on March 2nd, and will be hosted by Conan O’Brien, who in an interview with ABC News about preparing to host, said, “When it comes to poking fun at the celebrities in the audience that night, O’Brien joked and said that he’ll “go after the ones that have personally been cruel” to him over the years” (Bernabe, Jan 29).
