The Academy is changing, but it has a long way to go before it is diverse
Over the past few years, it has been noted that Oscar voters love nothing more than piling praise on old white men – and this year’s Academy Awards nominations have saluted two of the oldest and whitest around. One was Christopher Plummer, who at the age of 88 years, one month and 10 days, became the oldest acting nominee in the ceremony’s history. While over in the best adapted screenplay category, James Ivory, who is 18 months and six days older, made him look like a whippersnapper.
Plummer and Ivory were deservedly nominated for very fine work – the former for playing J Paul Getty in All The Money In The World, the latter for his script for Call Me By Your Name
– and in any other year, either would have been record-breakers outright. But in the class of 2018, both fell in the venerable shadow of Agnès Varda, the French director, who at the fine age of 89 years, 7 months and 24 days, became the oldest nominee on record.
So yesterday’s nominations were unquestionably a celebration of the old – but crucially, not the same old.
The films in contention are an impressively wide range of prestige pictures, critical darlings and punchy left-field choices without a hint of dutiful box-ticking, which suggests the Academy’s initiative to diversify their membership is bearing fruit.
The best picture line-up includes two heavyweight historical dramas, Darkest Hour and The Post; two horror films in The Shape of Water and Get Out; two very different coming-of-age tales in Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird; a bona fide blockbuster in Dunkirk, a jet-black comedy in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; and whatever-on-earth the Daniel Daylewis swansong Phantom Thread is.
For the most part, British cinemagoers also escaped the usual frustration of a shortlist crammed with films that haven’t actually opened here yet – although Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, arguably now the front-runner with 13 nominations, is one of them. (It arrives in the UK on Valentine’s Day, which is as good a time as any for the tender tale of a mute cleaning lady who falls in love with a glistening fish-man.)
Britain’s surest bet is still Gary Oldman, whose career-crowning performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour has made him a frontrunner for this year’s best actor award for months. But I’m not convinced Oldman can rest easy just yet: the Academy’s newer voters may not be as keen to honour the old guard.
Other British contenders are Lesley Manville, for her tremendous role in Phantom Thread, and Sally Hawkins, the lead in The Shape of Water.
Netflix’s Mudbound is up for four awards including best cinematography, making Rachel Morrison the first woman ever nominated in that category – the last remaining all-male Oscar stronghold to date. The ceremony might be approaching its ninth decade, but there are many milestones it has yet to pass.