The 2023 Oscar Nominations Are A Pleasant Surprise

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will never, ever get it entirely "right" on Oscar nomination morning. There will always be baffling misses and outright travesties. Comedies will always get overlooked in favor of weightier dramatic works. The Best Animated Feature bias against anime is, sadly, very real. And if you're a horror fan, there's never a reason to get out of bed at an unreasonable hour to discover that — shock, gasp — the year's best fright flicks were once again completely shut out of every category (including Makeup and Hairstyling, where they should thrive).

The Oscar nominations are always about adjusted expectations. The major Oscar contenders are, like politics, predetermined by campaign spending. Publicists have to trot the hopefuls out for cocktail receptions and Q&As. Typically, you know weeks ahead which films and artists are serious contenders, so if you were hoping that, say, Nicolas Cage was going to come flying off the top rope with a stunner of a Best Actor nod for "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent," you were essentially pulling for the Detroit Lions to win the Super Bowl after they'd been eliminated from the playoffs.

With this in mind, the 2023 Academy Award nominations, announced this morning by Riz Ahmed and Allison Williams, are pleasantly, almost perfectly reasonable. There was one glaring, across-the-board omission, but, overall, the membership got it as close to right as you can expect. Allow me to show my math.

At the outset of 2022, no one was looking to the Daniels' "Swiss Army Man" follow-up, "Everything Everywhere All at Once," to be more than a curiosity worthy of a design or Original Screenplay nomination. Even after it earned raves at SXSW in March, awards pundits were focused on the late summer/early fall film festivals for awards season's major contenders.

One year later, "Everything Everywhere All at Once" leads the 2023 Oscar class with 11 nominations, including Best Picture, Director, Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Supporting Actress (Stephanie Hsu) and Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan). The exhilarating, parallel universe free-for-all looks like the frontrunner for the top prize, which would make it the most unconventional Best Picture choice since Guillermo del Toro's romantic fishman fantasy, "The Shape of Water." This is a huge win for outside-the-box filmmaking (and, obviously, Asian representation). Producers worried that a project might be too weird for Oscar voters can now look to the Daniels' movie for proof that oddball visionaries can break through the awards season din.

There is justifiable consternation that S.S. Rajamouli's Indian action epic "RRR" failed to crack the 10-film-deep Best Picture category, but the majority of Academy voters aren't accustomed to the non-stop, go-for-broke ravishments of Indian cinema. It's been a longstanding shame that Bollywood movies are almost completely relegated to their own awards arena (unless they're Western-ized like Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire"), but now that "RRR" has a Best Original Song nomination for the glorious "Naatu Naatu," it's going to be impossible to deny the sensory-overloading joy of these movies (particularly those directed by Rajamouli). If "Naatu Naatu" doesn't win the Oscar, it's because people didn't watch "RRR." At all. Because you'd have to be dead inside to turn off "RRR" once you've started it.

Another unexpected triumph is Andrea Riseborough's Best Actress nomination for her portrayal of an alcoholic single mother in "To Leslie." The film had been mostly overlooked during awards season — it barely received a theatrical release from Momentum Pictures — until Riseborough scored an Independent Spirit nomination. Thanks to praise from fellow performers like Kate Winslet and Cate Blanchett, along with a last-second "grassroots" campaign, Riseborough was able to nudge out more high profile contenders like Viola Davis ("The Woman King") and Danielle Deadwyler ("Till") for a spot in the final five. While it's a bummer that these two hugely deserving performers were left out in the cold (particularly Deadwyler, who's never been nominated), anyone who can upset the conventional wisdom that awards finalists are a foregone conclusion by November is a hero in my book.

Aside from Deadwyler missing out on a Best Actress nod, the only major disappointments were Park Chan-wook's superb "Decision to Leave" getting excluded from the ever unpredictable International Feature Film category, and Gina Prince-Bythewood's immensely satisfying "The Woman King" failing to earn a single nomination. The latter is particularly surprising given its mainstream appeal and box-office success. It felt like a sure-fire Oscar movie from jump. I've seen some pundits suggest that it was too entertaining, but that theory falls completely apart with the Best Picture nomination of "Top Gun: Maverick." In any event, Prince-Bythewood's day will come (and while we're waiting, you should check out her wonderful "Love & Basketball" and "Beyond the Lights" if you've never seen them).

And while I think Darren Aronofsky is a world-class filmmaker when he's on his game (as he was with 2017's "mother!"), "The Whale" was a baffling whiff. I'm relieved that the stiffly-written, stagily-directed awards wannabe couldn't crack the Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay categories.

The worst I can say about the 2023 Oscar nominations is that they were mostly to form. The pundits' predictions were spot-on, but, then again, there wasn't much room for error. That's fine, but it's also not a lot of fun. We need more Riseboroughs and "RRR"s. Now that we know there's room for them in the Oscar derby, there's no excuse to not continue pushing the boundaries.