This year’s Academy Award nominations came with a few surprises – and, perhaps more importantly, a few notable snubs.
Fans of The Lego Movie were outraged that the film didn’t make it into the Best Animated Feature Film category, losing out to under-the-radar critical favorites Song of the Sea and The Tale of the Princess Kayuga. The movie’s creators weren’t fazed, though – they built their own Oscar out of Legos and posted a photo on Twitter. It seems that for them, everything is still awesome.
Feeling significantly less awesome is Jennifer Aniston, who was so certain that her performance in Cake would garner a Best Actress nomination that she scheduled a press junket in advance – which she then had to cancel when the Academy failed to give her a nod.
The Academy also failed to recognize Jake Gyllenhaal’s standout lead performance in Nightcrawler, which earned him nominations for a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a BAFTA Award, as well as a win from the Austin Film Critics Association.
Conspicuously missing from every Oscar category is J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, which earned the National Board of Review’s top prize of the year – as well as their Best Actor Award, which went to Oscar Isaac (in a tie with Michael Keaton), and their Best Supporting Actress Award, given to Jessica Chastain.
However, the most egregious mistake made by the Academy this year is their failure to nominate Selma for anything but Best Picture and Best Song. No acknowledgment was given to director Ava DuVernay or lead actors David Oyelowo and Carmen Ejogo – which seems odd, given that it’s difficult to consider a movie to be one of the year’s best without also recognizing the people who made it great. The Best Picture nom therefore comes across as an obligatory pity nod, which is ridiculous, given the undeniable quality of the film. Luckily, the public isn’t standing for such nonsense, rising to the occasion on Twitter (creating the hashtag #Oscarssowhite) and other areas of the World Wide Web to protest the Academy’s exclusion of the movie in favor of whiter films.
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