Oscars 2022: Favs that didn’t make the cut

24 categories, 120 nominations and thousands of films from worldwide trying to inch their way in. Safe to say that shortlisting a handful of films would be daunting for the members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. But it’s also unavoidable to be disappointed when your favourite film doesn’t make the cut. National Herald talked to a few film critics on what they consider glaring omissions this year, the films they feel deserved to be nominated across various categories for the 94th Academy Awards but got disregarded. Here’s what they had to say.

Sukanya Verma

Oscars forgetting to nominate films of significance is as unsurprising as Oscars handing out awards to the worst possible candidates for Best Picture. The debacle of Crash, Green Book are still fresh in public memory. Crash won over Brokeback Mountain and Munich. Green Book beat the likes of Roma, BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite.

Though things are starting to look a teensy bit more inclusive now, there’s always that one laudable film or performance that gets left behind.

I am stunned by Denis Villeneuve’s omission from the Best Director category considering his Dune has grabbed 10 nominations, only second to The Power of the Dog, which has 12. When you acknowledge a film and its vision but not the man behind it, the one who has made all its compartments a whole, you’re doing a great disservice to his commitment and contribution. Dune is a masterful adaptation of Frank Herbert’s book and Villeneuve is plain genius. He creates worlds. He is the master of nuance. Dune is his passion project, and it is sad that the Academy isn’t celebrating him as it should.

I was hoping to see France’s Petite Maman up there in the Best International Feature Film category. Céline Sciamma is one of the finest filmmakers of these times. Europe gets it. America does not. First, they snubbed the absolutely perfect Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). This year, the magical mother-daughter story in Petite Maman was tragically overlooked. Drive My Car is a hot favourite, but Petite Maman at most deserved a nomination.

Ben Affleck is another snub that comes to mind. Both his movies this year -- The Last Duel and The Tender Bar show what a delightful actor he’s evolved into. If his measured, magnetic act in The Tender Bar is the heart and soul of the drama, the man’s a complete hoot as the debauched Count in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, whose screenplay he co-adapted along with best friend and co-star Matt Damon. The Last Duel is an incredibly relevant period drama in the #MeToo era and deserved a little more love at the Oscars. It may have flopped but so did Hugo.

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Aditya Shrikrishna

The films that were snubbed according to me are possibly C'mon C'mon, Zola, Passing, The Green Knight, and Annette.

I think Mike Mills's C'mon C'mon is a wonderful film exploring the tricky subject of nature and nurture, something his earlier film 20th Century Women also did very well.

Zola is a film I absolutely loved for how daring it is in terms of filmmaking and form, and definitely deserved nominations in directing, editing, and cinematography (Ari Wegner is nominated for The Power of the Dog though). Same reasons for The Green Knight. I thought it had a fascinating premise and was well made. But it's also true that The Green Knight, C'mon C'mon, Zola, Red Rocket, The Tragedy of Macbeth are all A24 produced, and they decided to run with The Tragedy of Macbeth for awards season with the reviews and names involved.

The same is true for Passing, a superbly made film with two women in the lead and also directed by a woman. But Netflix prioritized the bigger names like Don't Look Up, Tick Tick..Boom and The Power of the Dog (which scored great and maybe justifiably so, I liked it a lot so no regrets there) to feature as awards material.

I liked Annette a lot but it is too much of a narrative leap for a mostly orthodox Academy and then later in the year they had a great musical in West Side Story which I think deserves the nominations it received.

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Aseem Chhabra

There are a few films in the acting categories that are very strong. But what ends up happening is that often smaller, independent films get deflected because the Academy Awards are drawn by big Hollywood productions.

There is a beautiful film called Passing, which is available on Netflix, with very strong performances. Ruth Negga’s performance as a supporting category stunned everybody. Tessa Thompson, the lead, was also very, very good. Peter Dinklage was so good in Cyrano, what a volatile performance! Because of his physical condition, he hasn’t been given very different roles, but he’s a brilliant actor who deserved to be nominated for Cyrano.

Richard Jenkins in The Humans, Ann Dowd and Martha Plimpton in Mass were also terrific performances that were snubbed. A lot of the finer performances get overlooked for the flashier Hollywood films, because there can be only five nominations. It’s only for the Best Picture that there can be 10 nominations.

There’s an independent British film called After Love, which is the story of a woman whose husband dies, and in trying to sort through her husband’s papers, she discovers that her husband had a secret life in France. It’s a beautiful performance by Joanna Scanlan.

Another film from Finland called Compartment No. 6, tells the story of a PhD student travelling to Moscow, who meets someone in the compartment, and doesn’t care about them for the longest time, but then they do start to care for each other and it's very romantic and yet nothing happens and it's very heartbreaking. It has a tone of the Before Sunrise series.

There’s also a Mexican film called Prayers for the Stolen, a beautiful film about young girls up in the mountains who have been kidnapped by drug mafia or something like that. Very powerful.

Petite Maman, a French film, is the story of a young girl whose mother is missing and father sort of busy. She meets in the forest a younger version of her mother and so while she is dealing with not being able to have the comfort of a mother, she meets her.

Another one is Shiva Baby. But it is too small for the Academy to focus on when you have a very big picture like The Power of the Dog with huge stars.

But you can’t really blame anyone. There are so many films for the members to watch. It's really hard for them to be able to be objective. So, a lot of times, they vote for the bigger pictures that are out there. It's never a perfect situation. There are a lot of worthy people who never got the Oscar, like Alfred Hitchcock. Al Pacino received one very late in his career. But an Oscar recognition doesn’t also necessarily certify if a specific film is good or must watch. My favourite films will remain my favourites, whether they receive an Oscar or not!

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Rahul Desai

The Best Picture Oscar race is mostly one of the big names, often missing the more acclaimed ones. Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero was the best international feature, which is the strongest category in my opinion. And even though he has won two Oscars, this is arguably his best film yet.

Annette, a French film, which won at Cannes, was also supposed to be nominated, but wasn’t finally. There was also Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, Passing, which was actually one of the early favourites to be nominated for Best Picture, but fizzled out eventually.

I honestly felt that even Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple stood a good chance to be nominated for the International section this year. They completely ignored Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci and The Last Duel, which were very divisive, but excellent.

By merit alone, these were films that deserved to be nominated. On the actual nominations list, you’ll find the names of big directors, the safe choices. And none of these films are actually even the best films of each of these legacy directors. In an ideal world, if the Oscars wasn’t about politics, about campaigning, marketing strategy, having the right people to push your films, getting the voters to watch your film, then these films would have been nominated. To be honest, I liked very few films on the list. This year’s Best Picture list is one of the weakest.

But I was honestly a big fan of Leos Carax’s Annette. It did very well at film festivals all over the world, even Cannes. Adam Driver was very, very good in that film. And it's a musical and a very weird film. But I also thought it was right down the alley of Oscar voters. It's the director’s first film in 10 years and one of his better ones. It's also one of the riskiest films. It cannot be slotted into any particular genre. It's neither a musical nor tragedy nor a romance. It's a bunch of things all put together. And I thought it was a very, very compelling film. It also deserved to be nominated for the kind of craft it brought to you because it's very difficult to make an original musical in 2021. It was audacious, risky, and a big miss by the Oscars.

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Raja Sen

As always, many fine films were snubbed this year. One is Titane by Julia Ducournau, a very extreme French film that won the Palm d’Or at Cannes Film Festival. She is the first female director to win the award solo. Titane is a really astonishing, really remarkable piece of filmmaking and I'm very surprised that it didn't even make the shortlist for Best Foreign Film because it really is a brave and striking work of art.

Then Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, which is a very pleasurable and very Wes film, but also a very elaborately constructed film celebrating how magazines work, how they are structured and come together. Anderson handles every storytelling detail meticulously. It would never win Best Picture, but should have been nominated for Best Score, Production Design, Screenplay. I may naturally be biased towards a film raising a toast to long-form journalism.

Then there was Michael Sarnoski’s film called Pig, starring Nicolas Cage, which I feel was really remarkable and surprising. The film is an exploration of food, what food can do and the kind of emotional triggers food has! I think Nicolas Cage should have been nominated certainly for the Best Actor award because it was one of his career highlights. So strange and unpredictable, pleasing and tender. The film keeps changing shape and subverting all the expectations you may have from a Nic Cage film, a revenge film… It’s quite special.

Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple, language, no bar, was one of the best films, and the best Indian film of last year.

But I also realize that these are the kind of films possibly better suited for platforms like the Independent Spirit Awards because they're not showy. With the exception of Titane, all these films are special in the sense that they are intimate, discreet, and speak to the viewer softly, one on one.

Titane is extreme and revolutionary, and it may have been too radical for the Oscar voters. It’s a hard film to watch, and tough to digest on the first viewing. It tells the story of a woman who makes love to a car and becomes pregnant with its child. It's body-horror, but it’s also startlingly original and unlike anything else I’ve ever seen.

Some outstanding performances were ignored. I thought Ben Affleck delivered one of his bests in The Tender Bar by George Clooney. Joaquin Phoenix was wonderful in C’mon C’mon. Jeffrey Wright is immaculate in The French Dispatch. Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person In The World should rightly win Best Foreign Film, but its lead actress Renate Reinsve should also have been the favourite in the Best Actress race.

Complaints aside, I think there are some strong nominees this year. In terms of sheer cinematic craft, what Steven Spielberg has done with West Side Story is really hard to match. I think most directors in the world would watch that movie with their jaws hanging open because it is such overwhelming filmmaking. A master at play. I’ll be rooting for him to win Best Director.