…and the Nominees are…

    Hello and welcome to Cinema Wellman, and it’s now officially the “busy time” of the year here at Cinema Wellman as the nominations for the 96th Academy Awards were announced earlier this week which means we are now frantically trying to watch as many nominated films as possible before the winners are revealed on March 10th.

There was a total of 53 films nominated this year, which is actually quite close to the “average” number of nominated films according to my own records and calculations which exist, as you can imagine. 

As of right now, I’ve seen 17 of the 53, or 32% of this year’s nominated films. I’ve figured out where to see many of the rest, which I’ll share today, and there are only 14 that aren’t available anywhere.

Yet.

It’s scavenger hunt time, and I will leave no cinematic rock unturned as I continue my ridiculous quest to see every movie ever nominated for an Academy Award in any category.

Fifteen movies received more than one nomination. The remaining 38 films received one nomination each. 

Since there are two more Oscar themed episodes over the next couple of months, I won’t go into too much depth about the films since there will be plenty of time for that later.

Our “Best Picture Rundown” episode will be on February 16th, and our Oscar Preview (Cinema Wellman Oscar Ballot Reveal) will be available on March 8th, two days before the ceremony.

Today I’d just like to give you an overall perusal of this year’s ballot along with some commentary about the films I’ve already seen.

Let’s start by looking at some of the single nominee films, which usually tend to be the shorts and the documentaries.

Five categories were made up of all one nominee films.

First up we have Animated Feature Films; The Boy and the Heron (theaters), Elemental (Disney+), Nimona (Netflix), Robot Dreams (nowhere), and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Netflix). 

I haven’t seen the latest from the brilliant Miyazaki, but I’m looking forward to it. 

I have already seen Elemental and the latest Spiderinstallment, and didn’t think much of either of them, so I’m really looking forward to The Boy and the Heron.

The Documentary Feature Film category is also made up of single nominee films. I have yet to see any of them.

Bobi Wine: The People’s President is available on Disney+/hulu, The Eternal Memory on Paramount+, both Four Daughters and 20 Days in Mariupol are available for rental, while To Kill a Tiger isn’t available anywhere as of yet. 

The Documentary Short Film category features single nominees; The ABCs of Book Banning (Netflix), The Barber of Little Rock (YouTube), Island in Between (YouTube), The Last Repair Shop (Disney+), and Nai Nai & Wai Po which I can’t locate anywhere so far. 

YouTube has been a great source for Oscar nominated short films over the years, and I salute them for it.

The Animated Short Film category is made up of five one nominee films; Letter to a Pig (not available), Ninety-Five Senses (not available), Our Uniform (not available), Pachyderme (YouTube), and WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko (also not available). 

Hopefully YouTube will step up and procure the other four so we can see them.

The final category of just single nominee films is Live Action Short Film. 

We have The After (Netflix), Invincible (not available), Knight of Fortune (YouTube), Red, White, and Blue (not available), and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. 

I watched The After last night and it absolutely destroyed me.

More on that in our future Oscar episodes.

Single nominee films in other categories include Best Actor nominee Colman Domingo in Rustin (Netflix), and Best Supporting Actress Danielle Brooks in The Color Purple (available to rent). 

It’s always worth paying attention to films whose one nomination is an acting nomination. Something special was going on there and someone stood out.

That was also the case with Nyad whose two nominations were both acting nominations for Annette Bening and Jodi Foster in the true story of long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad.

The film El Conde (Netflix) also got only one nomination, but it was in the Cinematography category, which is also a “heavy hitter” category. The other four films up against El Conde have a combined 41 nominations!

Golda (available to rent) earned a single nomination for Makeup and Hairstyling for making Helen Mirren look like Golda Meir. No simple task there!

Two single nominee films appear in the Original Song category. I usually hate films in this category, but one of these is a movie about the guy who created Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and the other is a film I was told was tremendous by someone whose film opinion I highly value. 

Flamin’ Hot (Disney+) and American Symphony (Netflix) are those two films. 

Before I get to the heavy hitters with multiple nominations, I have to say that there are three films I know I’m going to hate that I have to watch because they were nominated. 

I can hear Hannah now reminding me that these are my rules, and nobody cares if I don’t follow them.

But still…

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was a farewell nomination to the great John Williams, but this series jumped the snake after the first one. The rest are pure trash, as I’m sure this one will be.

Speaking of tired series that should go away, they made another Guardians of the Galaxy nobody asked for. That earned a nomination for Best Visual Effects. It’s on Disney+ if you enjoy those films, which is fine.

I don’t.

AND Tom Cruise is back in yet another franchise I have ZERO interest in. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One actually got TWO nominations. That’s available for rental only, and I will be pirating that thing, and I will sleep soundly that night. 

The fact that this is one of those “Part One” scams that I despise, I know there’s another one in my future that will get nominated, and that steams my clams. 

I know I’m probably going to leave out a couple of films, but I wanted to run down the films that received the most nominations and where you can find them.

I won’t go through all of the categories for each film since you can just go online if you’re interested. Print yourself a nice ballot and start checking off what you’ve seen!

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon with Joaquin Phoenix in the title role earned three nominations and is available for rental.

American Fiction is still in theaters and earned five nominations. I saw it, and highly recommend it. 

Speaking of the theaters, now that the nominations are out, a ton of films should be making their way back into the theater, so the local movie house is also a solid option to see some of these films along with your normal streaming platforms. 

Anatomy of a Fall is a French film (available for rental) that earned five nominations. It’s about a woman suspected of her husband’s murder and the only witness was their blind son. 

I like a nice French thriller!

Paul Giamatti leads a strong cast in The Holdovers (Peacock) about a grumpy boarding school professor forced to stay at school over the two-week holiday break with students who have no place to go.

I watched it last night and applauded the final scene. 

I can’t wait to see The Zone of Interest (currently unavailable) which is about the commandant of Auschwitz and his wife building their dream house and a garden right next to the camp. 

I cannot imagine what that is going to be like. 

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro earned seven nominations and you can watch that on Netflix. Cooper directs and stars as the great conductor Leonard Bernstein.

One of the hits of the summer, Barbie (Max), earned eight nominations but not one for director Greta Gerwig which puzzled me. Two of the eight nominations are for Best Original Song which happens from time to time.

Three films earned DOUBLE DIGIT nominations! And while this doesn’t always pay off on Oscar night with multiple wins, it certainly means there were a lot of things being done very well during these productions. 

Apple TV has Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon which is about the murder of several members of the Osage Nation back in 1920s Oklahoma. Ten nominations went to this true and shocking story being told for the first time.

I’m very pleased to say that a film by Greek filmmaker and friend of Cinema Wellman Yorgos Lanthimos was nominated for 11 Oscars!

Poor Things is still in the theater, and I highly recommend it with one word of, I guess, caution.

Yorgos Lanthimos does not make “normal” movies. Just check out The Lobster or Dogtooth. Or por que no las dos?!

Much, much more on this in our future Oscar episodes as I loved it and can’t wait to talk more about it.

The leader in nominations this year with 13 is a film that was the other half of last summer’s unlikely double feature Barbenheimer, and it’s the one with not so much pink in it.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is the story of the man who helped develop the atomic bomb and how that work impacted his life. When I was teaching, I did extensive research on WWII and the Manhattan Project, but this was a master class. 

More on Oppenheimer to come. I just want to say how happy I am that Christopher Nolan finally made another movie that I could understand. Thank you, Christopher. I appreciate you. 

Before we finish, I did want to mention the South Korean film Past Lives which is a romantic drama about childhood friends separated then reunited 20 years later. 

Worth mentioning because it got two nominations. One is for Original Screenplay, which is nice, but the other is for Best Picture.

That doesn’t happen often, and those movies are worth a look. Films with only two nominations, but one was Best Picture. That may be a future episode.

Well, that is a wrap from here at Cinema Wellman for our 96th Academy Awards preview of sorts as we took a first glance at this year’s nominated films and where to see them. 

We hope you’re back with us next week when we take a look at the Best and Worst films screened here in the month of January.

January is almost over?

Really?  Yikes.

Until then, take care.