Oscar Nominations: A Few Firsts
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Splitting the critics in Cannes, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, a musical about a Mexican drug lord who undergoes gender-affirming surgery and becomes a philanthropist, won the Jury Prize and the award for Best Actress—shared by Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, and Zoe Saldaña. Then it swept the European Film Awards and picked up four Golden Globes, so it’s hardly a shock that it’s leading the Oscar nominations announced on Thursday morning with thirteen. As the Guardian’s Catherine Shoard points out, that’s a record for a film whose language is not English. But the Academy did pop a few surprises by putting two films shunned by broad swaths of the industry back in the running.
No Other Land, codirected by two Palestinians (Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal) and two Israelis (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor) and focusing on the destruction of Palestinian villages in the West Bank by the Israeli military, still has no distributor in the U.S., even though it’s been picked up in twenty-four other countries. Now, along with Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries, Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s Porcelain War, Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, and Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s Sugarcane, No Other Land has been nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film.
Sebastian Stan took on leading roles in two films in 2024, Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, which won the Best Feature award at the Gothams, and Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, which saw a theatrical release so quick and quiet that the filmmakers felt compelled to launch a Kickstarter in order to prolong the run. Stan plays Donald Trump as the aspiring real-estate mogul he was in the 1970s and ’80s, when he fell under the spell of the contentious lawyer Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong.
Last fall, when Variety ran Actors on Actors, its awards-season series of conversations between performers, Stan was shut out. Variety coeditor Ramin Setoodeh told IndieWire that he was invited, “but other actors didn’t want to pair with him because they didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump.” On Thursday, both Stan and Strong were nominated for their performances in The Apprentice.
Stan’s competition in the Best Actor race includes Adrien Brody, who plays architect László Tóth in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which has scored ten nominations to tie for second-most nominated film this year with Jon M. Chu’s Wicked. James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown and Edward Berger’s Conclave follow with eight each, and Sean Baker’s Anora has six. Berger is not nominated for Best Director, but Audiard, Baker, Corbet, and Mangold are—along with a sole female director, Coralie Fargeat.
The star of Fargeat’s The Substance, Demi Moore, has scored her first Oscar nomination for playing a once-famous star sidelined by the industry as she grows older. Also nominated for Best Actress are Fernanda Torres, who won the Golden Globe for her performance in Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, Mikey Madison for Anora, Cynthia Erivo for Wicked, and Karla Sofía Gascón, the category’s first transgender nominee.
Another first is Latvia. The country has submitted work to the Academy fifteen times over the years, and it’s now got its first two nominations, Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature, for Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow, the story of a cat who teams up with a capybara, a lemur, a bird, and a dog to survive a flooded planet. Wordless, Flow makes no overt references to climate change, but in a letter to members, Academy CEO Bill Kramer and president Janet Yang have promised to “acknowledge those who fought so bravely against the wildfires” when the Oscars ceremony takes place in Los Angeles on March 2.
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