THE LL WORLD

Contributing editor LEILA LATIF has something to say…

Awards season is a strange time of year for us film nerds. All of a sudden, the ‘normies’ want to weigh in on The Globes v The Oscars and whether Sandra Hüller’s acting performance in Anatomy of a Fall was more awards-worthy than her performance in The Zone of Interest, despite any sensible person knowing that she actually should have been nominated for 2016’s Toni Erdmann.

Hüller aside, online Oscar debates focus on ‘snubs’ v ‘pleasant surprises’ and this year’s noms had more of the latter. My money is on Oppenheimer storming it, but I could not have been happier to see Jonathan Glazer, Io Capitano, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Justine Triet, Four Daughters and The Boy and the Heron make the cut. And my heart soared when Lily Gladstone became the first Native American to be nominated for Best Actress. There are always people complaining about their favourites missing out and issues of inclusivity, but this year I not only want to leave the internet but potentially the solar system, given how Margot Robbie’s ‘snub’ for playing Barbie is being framed as a slight against womankind.

Let’s not disrespect Robbie by forgetting her talents as a film producer

Firstly, Robbie is nominated as she produced Barbie, and it’s up for Best Picture. This is incredibly cool! The cries of ‘snub’ here downplay her quirky feminist comedy being in a category typically filled with serious dramas, but they’re also outrageously disrespectful of the women nominated. When Hillary Clinton tweeted her disapproval of Robbie not making the cut, the implication was that one of the other women wasn’t as deserving, ignoring Gladstone’s historic accomplishment and co-star America Ferrera’s moment of glory. This pitting of women against women is not something Barbie would approve of.

While I understand Robbie fans’ disappointment, actual ‘snubs’ are few and far between. After all, what makes something a ‘snub’ is not just that it’s excellent but that it’s patently the sort of thing the Academy goes for. You don’t win for being the best. You win because you were the best at being an Oscar winner. So perfect performances from Toni Collette in Hereditary, Lupita Nyong’o in Us, Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder or even Leslie Nielsen in Airplane! aren’t really ‘snubs’ because they are in no way Oscar bait, and are probably all the better for it.

An example of an actual ‘snub’ is Denzel Washington not winning for Spike Lee’s Malcolm X in 1993. Washington was a bona fide movie star, giving one of the best performances ever committed to celluloid, as a complex historical figure in three-and-a-half-hour epic. This is what the Academy usually devours (it’s why my money is on Oppenheimer), but he lost to Al Pacino. No shame in that under normal circumstances, but he lost to Pacino in Scent of a Woman. Ditto Ava DuVernay not getting a nod for directing Martin Luther King biopic Selma, Barbra Streisand being shut out for devastating drama The Prince of Tides and the frequently billed ‘Best Film of All Time’ Citizen Kane failing on the Best Picture and Best Director fronts.

It’s ultimately down to who gets to vote, the influence of groupthink, awards campaign investment, and nebulous ideas of where cinema should be headed. But the outrage shouldn’t be individualistic and focused on supposed ‘snubs’, but around how narrow a path films must walk to presumed Oscar glory, shutting out so much horror, comedy and arthouse. Maybe one year soon, a scary, funny, genre-bending movie that reinvents the form won’t be nominated and it will be an actual ‘snub’ because in this bright future, that’s what the Oscars have come to regularly reward. Now that’s a snub I’d like to see…

LEILA WILL BE BACK NEXT ISSUE. FOR FURTHER MUSINGS AND MISSIVES FOLLOW @LEILA_LATIF ON X/TWITTER.