The ceremony for the 90th Academy Awards, which will be honouring the best in Film for 2017, will be taking place in a few weeks on 4 March. Last night, the nominations in each category were announced in anticipation of the ceremony. The awards will be hosted by comedian and late-night TV star Jimmy Kimmel, who also hosted last year. This will be the first time that a host has led two consecutive Oscars ceremonies since Billy Crystal did it in 1997 and 1998.
The film with the most nominations this year is “The Shape of Water,” which has been praised by critics and audiences alike as director Guillermo del Toro’s most mature film to date, as it tells the story of a janitor at a government facility during the Cold War who falls in love with a sea creature who is trapped in the lab, kind of a “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” meets “Romeo and Juliet” type story.
“The Shape of Water” has a grand total of thirteen nominations at this year’s awards, which is head and shoulders above its two closest runner-ups, “Dunkirk” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” which have eight and seven, respectively.
This year’s Academy Awards will certainly be an interesting one, as the shadow of Harvey Weinstein will bear over the ceremony, as well as all of the other stars who were outed as sexual perverts as the Weinstein effect spread and all of those brave men and women came forward with allegations against damn near all of them. Most of the ceremony’s patrons, if not all of them, will be dressed head to toe in black clothing to support the #MeToo movement.
Will the ceremony address the sexual misconduct in Hollywood? Only time will tell.
‘Logan’ becomes the first comic book movie to be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay
The recent feat achieved by James Mangold’s “Logan,” the latest and final movie to feature Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, is a landmark event for superhero and comic book movies.
It’s been nominated in the most recent awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, and it’s the first such nominee to have been adapted from a comic book in the decades-long history of the Academy Awards. Brad Bird’s “The Incredibles” by Pixar was nominated for a writing award, but that was an original story and not taken from comic book source material.
Also, Christopher Nolan’s nomination for Best Director for “Dunkirk” is his first ever, which seems astounding, since he’s everybody’s favourite director at the moment and all of his films, from “Inception” to “The Dark Knight” to “Interstellar” to “Memento,” have been ludicrously well-received. But there you have it. Great directors tend to get snubbed. Martin Scorsese didn’t win one until the mid-noughties for “The Departed,” despite having made a whole bunch of masterpieces since the 1970s. Also, oddly enough, while Steven Spielberg’s pertinent political docudrama “The Post” has been nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress, the director himself has been snubbed.
Christopher Plummer becomes the oldest ever acting nominee
At the ripe age of eighty-eight years old, Christopher Plummer has become the oldest actor to be nominated for a competitive award in the history of the Oscars. He plays the true-life figure J. Paul Getty in the Ridley Scott drama “All the Money in the World.” Plummer was never supposed to be in “All the Money in the World” – he replaced Kevin Spacey in the role, after allegations of sexual misconduct and assault were made against Spacey. Scott re-shot and re-edited the already-completed movie in a matter of days to get it done in time for its release and its Oscar campaign, and that was hard work, but clearly it’s paid off.
