Oscar nods find excellence in more than one colour
There were few surprises and even fewer snubs among Tuesday’s diverse nominees for the 89th Academy Awards, which is exactly as it should have been.
There’s not a single undeserved nomination amongst the lot of them, even if academy voters rightly felt pressure to address the dearth of people of colour in two previous years of acting nomina- tions. Sometimes a little push is needed to get people to do the right thing.
As predicted by pundits and earlier wins, Damien Chazelle’s Hollywood ode La La Land topped the golden list with 14 nominations, including best picture, director, actor (Ryan Gosling) and actress (Emma Stone), tying Titanic (1997) and All About Eve (1950) for the Oscar noms record.
The singing-and-dancing sensation also breaks the record for most nominated musical, set a half-century ago by Mary Poppins, which had 13 nods.
Tied as the closest challengers to La La Land, with eight nominations apiece including best picture and director, are Barry Jenkins’ coming-of-age drama Moonlight and Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi thriller Arrival.
The other six best picture nominees — Manchester by the Sea, Fences, Lion, Hidden Figures, Hacksaw Ridge and Hell or High Water — make for a total of nine, one more than last year, and all of them dramas.
Most significant of all is the large amount of diversity in the nominations,
La La Land breaks the record for most nominations for a musical, originally set by Mary Poppins half a century ago
even if leader La La Land has a mostly white cast and features vanilla-hued Gosling as a defender of jazz, a musical form created by African-Americans and indigenous North Americans.
Seven of the 20 acting nominees are people of colour.
And four of the nine best picture contenders — Moonlight, Fences, Lion and Hidden Figures — tell diverse stories with actors of colour filling most of the leading roles.
After two years when people of colour were conspicuously absent from the Oscar leaders board, this is a welcome development, if also a completely expected one.
The nominations seemed to please April Reign, the New York writer and editor who coined the #OscarsSoWhite Twitter hashtag that helped push a foot-dragging academy into making needed changes to promote diversity, including increasing the number of non-white voters.
“Some surprises, some spot-on decisions . . . Things are changing because our voices are strongest together,” Reign wrote in a pair of tweets.
It was particularly gratifying to see Oscar nominations for Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins, and also Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris in the respective best supporting actor and actress categories, three of the reasons why this wise film topped my list of best movies of 2016.
It’s also great to see Meryl Streep get her record 20th Oscar nomination for playing a tone-deaf singer in Florence Foster Jenkins, a nomination she likely gained not only for her considerable talent but also in appreciation of her marvellous rip into Donald Trump’s xenophobic ways at the Golden Globes earlier this month, who retaliated by childishly calling her “one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood.”
Also nice are the long-overdue best actress nod for Isabelle Huppert ( Elle) and best actor nom for Viggo Mortensen ( Captain Fantastic), indicating that the academy is willing to recognize overlooked actors of any colour.
What few snubs there were — the acting MIA include Tom Hanks for Sully, Amy Adams for Arrival, Annette Bening for 20th Century Women — are fewer than in previous years and not unexpected in a year so rich with talent.
Oscar can’t get everything right. But at least this year, it got the most important thing right, by recognizing that talent doesn’t just come in one colour. Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic.