Oscar Nominations: Lady Gaga, Denis Villeneuve Snubbed; Buckley, Simmons, Dench Surprise
Oscar nominations are here, and there were quite a few surprises! First and foremost, Lady Gaga got railed. No two ways about it.
She was nominated in every single precursor — the only potential Best Actress nominee to do so — and came out of it empty-handed for her everything-but-the-kitchen-sink performance in House of Gucci, which was also overlooked for Best Picture (it was a dark-horse contender) and Best Supporting Actor (Jared Leto was thought to have had a real shot).
That category had several other names with reasonably expectations that they'd be called — the absence of Alana Haim (Licorice Pizza) kills me, Renate Reinsve (who gives the perf of the year in The Worst Person in the World) was always probably a true dark horse, but Rachel Zegler (West Side Story) and Jennifer Hudson (Respect) were likely Top 10.
Almost as shocking, Denis Villeneuve was overlooked for Best Director for his universally admired work on Dune. Dune received numerous technical nominations, but with voters apparently detached from it as a film (no acting nominations were ever really thought possible; maybe it's a case of stodgy voters not connecting emotionally with sci-fi, but throwing tech noms at it?), it was displaced by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose film Drive My Car (a Japanese production) overperformed — along with Best Director, it scored a coveted Best Picture nomination as well as Best International Feature.
