Matt Spencer-Skeen on his top five snubs from this week’s Oscar nominations…
So the Oscar nominations have been announced (in case you’ve missed all this you can find the nominations here) and what a wonderful array of very predictable picks they were. The most interesting part of the Oscar nom for me though is all the furore afterwards about who and what got ‘snubbed’ by the Academy. Every year there are message boards filled with outrage over this very subject and I just love it!
Already today we are hearing that Robert Redford feels like the film distributor did not do enough to publicize the film and campaign for him to get the nomination. I definitely feel like he has a point, as although I love him in All is Lost I’d forgotten about it somewhat amongst everything else that has been released, considering it debuted back in May.
So who else was potentially deserving of a nomination this year but has been unrewarded for whatever reason? Well here are my top 5 Oscar snubs…
5. Tom Hanks – Whilst he did do an excellent job in Captain Phillips, do we expect anything otherwise from him? He has sustained such a high level over his career that this feels more like a regression to the mean when you look at some of his other non-Oscar nominated performances.
4. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom – Okay this is more me being surprised that it was snubbed as opposed to feeling it deserved a nomination. I’m glad that they weren’t blinded by sentimentality and judged the film for what it was. An average film, about a brilliant man, with a good song earning it its only Oscar nod.
3. Lee Daniels’ The Butler – this is another film that, when released, looked Oscar bound. Loosely based on real life of Eugene Allen and set during a period of turmoil and depicting different American Presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan this seemed like an Oscar shoo in. However, I feel that with 12 Years a Slave being so well received and rated the American people struggle reminding themselves of two different periods of such racial hatred and rewarding those films that do so.
2. Emma Thompson – I thought she did a fantastic job portraying P.L. Travers in this with excellent haughtiness and comic timing to make hers one of the more memorable performances of the year. Couple that with the film being about making a film and Hollywood, (something which, funnily enough, Hollywood normally loves) it is surprising to see her without a nomination and the film receiving just the one. It appears that the Academy have reserved the last place of the Best Actress award for Meryl Streep indefinitely.
1. American Hustle – Best Makeup and Hairstyling- I know you’re wondering how can a film with 10 nominations be snubbed? Well the film hasn’t but how on earth did it not receive a nomination in the above category?! Did you see the amount of effort that went into the various hairstyles? Bale’s comb-over, Adam’s perm, Cooper’s perm! They even showed us that Jeremy Renner can have more than 1 hairstyle. It was nominated for Best Original Screenplay but not this? I really feel for those hairstylists not being nominated when The Lone Ranger somehow managed to scrape one for this.
So those are my top 5, what do you think?
Matt Spencer-Skeen
Originally published January 17, 2014. Updated December 13, 2019.
