The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
By Alvin I. Dacanay
Last Tuesday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas) revealed online its list of nominees for the 89th Academy Awards. As expected, this year’s list offers several surprises, among these Mel Gibson’s best-director nomination for the World War II drama Hacksaw Ridge and the exclusion of Arrival’s Amy Adams from the best actress category.
This year’s list also shows some records set, matched or broken, as well as a few notable firsts. Chief among these are the astounding 14 nominations received by the Los Angeles-set musical La La Land, including for picture, director and original screenplay for Damien Chazelle, actor for Ryan Gosling, and actress for Emma Stone. It’s a record matched only by 1950’s All About Eve (which won six Oscars) and 1997’s Titanic (which earned 11, tying with 1959’s Ben-Hur).
If it wins as much as Titanic did, La La Land would beat 1961’s West Side Story—which garnered 10 Oscars—as the most honored musical at the Academy Awards.
Among nominated performers, the most high-profile of them all is Meryl Streep, who broke her own record after earning her 20th acting nomination for her turn as a wealthy New York socialite with an atrocious singing voice in Florence Foster Jenkins. First nominated as supporting actress for her role in 1978’s The Deer Hunter, Streep has since collected three Oscars (for 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer, 1982’s Sophie’s Choice, and 2001’s The Iron Lady)—a distinction she shares with Ingrid Bergman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jack Nicholson, and Walter Brennan.
No one is expecting Streep to win this time around, but if she does, she would tie with the great Katharine Hepburn, who won four acting Oscars during her stellar career.
This year’s nominations also see more non-white performers appear in the acting derbies, unlike in the last two years (remember the #OscarSoWhite controversy?). The most prominent of these is two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington, who copped his seventh and eighth nominations for co-producing and acting in the screen adaptation of the late August Wilson’s Tony-winning play Fences, making him the most nominated performer of color.
Other non-white performers in the acting categories are Washington’s Fences co-star Viola Davis, who’s favored to win the supporting actress plum over, among others, Hidden Figures’ Octavia Spencer and Moonlight’s Naomie Harris; Harris’ Moonlight co-star Mahershala Ali, who’s competing with Lion’s Dev Patel and three others for the supporting actor prize; and Loving’s Ruth Negga, one of Streep’s fellow best actress nominees.
Speaking of Patel, the Slumdog Millionaire star whom Streep described at the recent Golden Globes Awards as “born in Kenya and raised in London,” his nomination makes him the third performer of Indian descent to vie for an Oscar, after Indian-British actor Ben Kingsley and 1930s Hollywood star Merle Oberon. If Lion has a good shot of winning an Academy Award, it’s with him.
The original-song category also yielded a few firsts. Pop superstar Justin Timberlake received his first nomination this year for co-writing the song “Can’t Stop the Feeling” from Trolls, as did Broadway wunderkind and Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda for writing “How Far I’ll Go” from Moana. They’re unlikely to win, though; either La La Land’s “Audition (The Fools Who Dream)” or “City of Stars” will prevail in this category.
Would any or all of them win? We’ll only know for sure when the envelopes are unsealed the 89th Academy Awards ceremony on February 27 (Manila time).
For the complete list of nominations, visit www.oscar.go.com.