When you hear people gasping in the room where the Academy Award nominations are read aloud, you know you’ve got some snubs and surprises on your hand. The 2015 batch of Oscar nominations had plenty of shockers in store, from snubs for beloved actresses who were believed to be locked down in their category to the inclusion of movies that seemed to be all but out of the race. Here were the 8 moments that had our jaws dropping this morning.Marion Cotillard: Here is the biggest surprise. It’s true that Cotillard won a ton of critical awards leading up to the Oscars. (Like, all of them.) But her name still wasn’t being bandied about when it came to the big Oscar race. She wasn’t nominated at all for the Golden Globes, an awards show with ten opportunities to honor actresses. But mega-stars Amy Adams and Jennifer Aniston are out, and Cotillard is in. Cotillard is the longest shot in a category where Julianne Moore is finally bound to get her due. But it is refreshing to see that Academy think outside the box and not fall in lockstep with all the other awards shows.
Cotillard, no stranger to the Academy, was wonderful in both 2014 films she was nominated for, Two Days, One Night, and the criminally under-seen The Immigrant. She deserves all the love she gets.Jennifer Aniston: What a disappointing morning for the Cake star. Her dramatic performance as a chronic pain sufferer was so surprisingly great in Daniel Barnz’s intimate drama that it earned her a wave of critical praise plus Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations. Making this particular snub worse is the fact that Cake’s Los Angeles premiere was just last night, where the actress was peppered with Oscar-nomination questions on the red carpet. that she was going to stay in bed this morning rather than “torture [her]self” watching the announcement. Maybe that was for the best. Some on Twitter are saying that Aniston got too little buzz too late but Cake premiered back at the Toronto Film Festival this fall. It seems more likely that voters simply weren’t ready to give a former sitcom star one of their coveted nods.
Foxcatcher: Team Foxcatcher wins out. Virtually no one was expecting five nominations for a film that was largely ignored by preceding guild awards, to the point that we predicted yesterday that Mark Ruffalo might be the film’s sole nominee. Instead, it seems the chilly drama barely missed a best picture nod, as evidenced by Bennett Miller’s genuinely shocking presence in the best director category. It’s not likely to win any of its categories, but for a film this difficult for many to love, the nominations are likely victory enough.Jake Gyllenhaal: No love for the year’s weirdest performance. It seemed unlikely that such an authentically creepy indie that premiered on Halloween would somehow appeal to Academy awards voters months later. (As Gyllenhaal’s Nightcrawler co-star Rene Russo put it when we saw her this past weekend, it makes more sense that the Brits overseas would be able to appreciate this kind of subversive fare.) Still, we had hoped, based on both Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations, that Gyllenhaal would have sneaked into the Oscar running based on the strength of his total transformation into a nocturnal sociopath in Dan Gilroy’s thriller with real-life media resonance.
Our consolations to Gyllenhaal. We hope that those 15-mile runs on zero calories seem worth it, even without the accolades you deserved.The Lego Movie: Everything’s not awesome. The Lego Movie may have made beaucoup bucks and gotten everyone humming, but that doesn’t guarantee Academy love. The Warner Bros. production lost out to mainstays like Dreamworks (How to Train Your Dragon 2) and Disney (Big Hero 6) and artistic outliers like Song of the Sea, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, and The Boxtrolls. If The Lego Movie can’t have an Oscar, it would be a lovely surprise to see one of those less mainstream efforts walk home with the prize.Laura Dern: One of the more pleasant surprises of the morning. Dern’s appearance in Wild was wonderfully evocative as Cheryl Strayed’s real-life mother, who died suddenly sending her daughter (played by Reese Witherspoon) heartbroken and reeling through various modes of self-destruction. She turned in another impressively nuanced performance here, and somehow made scenes in which she plays Witherspoon’s mother, despite their nine-year age gap in real life, seem convincing.
Even though Dern’s character is integral as the emotional catalyst to Witherspoon’s journey, we weren’t banking on her nomination because she simply had so little screen time—she only occupied flashbacks—as opposed to Jessica Chastain, whom Dern edged out of the category in spite of her near-leading role in A Most Violent Year.Selma: Selma was snubbed, sort of. We don’t have the stats handy, but we’re guessing very, very few other films have scored a best picture nomination and a single other nod . . . for best original song. It’s hard to say what happened with Selma—the screeners went too late? The stars were too unknown? The cynical Academy didn’t want to pick two movies about African-American history in a row?—but we’ll just be sure that both director Ava DuVernay and star David Oyelowo will do enough great work in the future to allow the Academy to make up for its oversight.Gillian Flynn: Our thoughts go out to the best-selling Gone Girl author this morning, whose adapted screenplay was all the more impressive considering that this was her first-ever attempt at the format.
If you’ve read Flynn’s thriller, you understand how much the plot’s effectiveness depends on its pacing and unique story structure. And yet, Flynn succeeded in translating both elements for David Fincher’s big-screen adaptation, keeping the narrative just as tightly suspenseful as the book. If anything good comes of this snub, let it be that Flynn can skip all of the awards-season hoopla and get to work on that Gone Girl sequel she has been teasing.Best Song: The Academy played it safe. While they definitely get some hipness points for including Golden Globe-winning “Glory” from Selma, all other potentially youth-skewing songs, like Lorde’s hypnotic “Yellow Flicker Beat” or Lana Del Rey “Big Eyes,” were abandoned for less on-the-radar choices like “Lost Stars” from Begin Again or Beyond the Lights’s “Grateful,” penned by six-time nominee Diane Warren. It may not matter at all; John Legend and Common all but have this thing locked up after their emotional speech at the Golden Globes and the Academy’s general lack of love for Selma.