April is almost here, which means it’s almost Academy Awards night. With about a month before the big day, Hollywood is abuzz with talk about surprise nominations, the biggest snubs, and who might take home the top golden eunuchs. Check out a list of what surprised the most along with snubs and why Hollywood remains stuck in the 1940’s. Let’s jump right into action so you can continue making your bets against their Academy Award odds.
Entertainment Betting News: 93rd Academy Awards Biggest Surprises and Snubs
- When: April 25, 2021
- Where: Dolby Theatre, Hollywood, CA
Yes, two women are nominated for best director, but . . .
The Academy nominated a couple of women for best director, Chloe Zhao for Nomadland and Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman. But voters didn’t go so far as to nominate a woman director who made a film that wasn’t anything about women.
For sure, Promising Young Woman and Nomadland are awesome movies. Both are brilliantly directed, and both are directed by women. But by not nominating Regina King for directing One Night in Miami, some analysts and critics are missing the real point.
Yes, Regina King is a black woman, and she would have been the first black woman be nominated for directing a movie. But what makes One Night in Miami so great isn’t because King is black. Where the Academy whiffed is that it failed to realize that Regina King made a film about four of the most important men in U.S. history.
How could critics and the Academy miss that? A great movie from the viewpoint of a woman about those four men? That’s not worth a nomination?
More thoughts on the best director category
Thomas Vintenberg picked up a nom for directing four great actors playing directors who decide to drink as an experiment and then one becomes an alcoholic. That’s the plot of Another Round. David Fincher picked up a nomination for Mank, a movie about a screenwriter.
Both great directors. Both really good movies. But Trial of the Chicago 7 picked up a nomination for best movie and Aaron Sorkin didn’t. Sound of Metal and Judas and the Black Messiah got nominations for Best Picture and neither Metal’s director, Darius Marder, nor Messiah’s director, Shaka King, picked up a best director nom.
The Academy really missed the boat when it came to the best director category.
Speaking of Mank . . .
Mank got 10 Oscar nominations. What is Mank? It’s a good, not great, movie about the screenwriter who wrote Citizen Kane.
It’s about the amazing difficulties Herman J. Mankiewicz had writing the script. You see, Mankiewicz was under contract with MGM. And, so, when Welles recruited him to write Citizen Kane, and Mank started, he got a bunch of blowback because the main character in the script resembled one of the most powerful men in the world, Randolph Hearst.
Eventually, the movie gets made and Welles and Mankiewicz win Oscars for best screenplay. Good triumphs over evil.
In a year full of meaningful films, the Academy Awards decided to hand out the most recognitions to the one movie that was, yep, about Hollywood. Only an industry that remains in the 1940’s, or in the decade preceding the 40s, could pull off something like that.
