This year's Oscar nominations are out and I have no reaction to any of them. I didn't see that many movies that came out last year and nothing in the ones I did see cried out to me as so deserving of honor that I want to go picket the Academy building over their omission. There are all these articles appearing on the 'net this morning about "snubs" and the work that was supposedly snubbed strikes me as having been done by folks who were well-compensated and probably getting all sorts of good offers. Some of them will doubtlessly snag one or more of those little statuettes when it's their time.
My favorite actor of all time might just be Jack Lemmon. He made, by some counts, 48 movies. He was nominated for Oscars eight times and won two. So was he "snubbed" forty times or forty-six?
"Snub" has always seemed to me the wrong word for this situation. Makes it sound like all the voters got together and said, "Hey, Tom Cruise is getting a real swelled head. Let's teach him a lesson he'll never forget and not nominate him for Best Actor in Top Gun: Maverick. And everyone else says, "Yeah, that'll show him! He'll have to be content with a producer nomination and only $100 million for his next movie!" The man is probably inconsolable.
Of course, this is what happens when you have categories where you nominate five people. If eight people do superior work, three get "snubbed." And to nominate Cruise, they'd have to not nominate someone else who made the cut and then that person would be "snubbed." (Then again, if only three actors give Oscar-worthy performances in a year, two guys get nominated who didn't. Simple math can be so maddening.)
Some people seem to find it incredulous that the film Elvis scored seven nominations including Best Picture and Actor in a Leading Role…but its director, Baz Luhrmann, wasn't nominated. "Did that picture direct itself?" they ask, forgetting two things…
One is that the Academy nominates ten movies for Best Picture and five for Best Director. So every year, and there's no way around this, at least five people are going to not be nominated for directing a film nominated for Best Picture. Again, simple math.
And the other thing is that while everyone who votes gets to vote on Best Picture, only directors nominate directors, only actors nominate actors, etc. It's a different block of voters. It's like being amazed that one county in a state voted for Joe Biden and another county voted for Donald Trump.
And this is already way more than I really care about these nominations. I don't think most people do these days. Just take a look at the ratings when they do the Oscar Telecast on March 12. Even if they guarantee that some superstar is going to get up and slap someone, a large part of America won't be watching.