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Clockwise from top left: Nomadland director Chloe Zhao (Charly Triballeau/AFP for Getty Images); Delroy Lino in Da 5 Bloods (Netflix); LaKeith Stanfield in Judas And The Black Messiah (Warner Media)
The nominations for the 2021 Academy Awards were announced a few hours ago, at the ass crack of dawn, as per tradition. There were, as always, winners and losers, frontrunners confirmed and surprises to celebrate. There was not a fundamental change in the kind of movies or, at the very least, the kind of distribution players that tend to come out on top at Hollywood’s annual ode to itself. Halfway through 2020, we here at
For a while, the biggest film story of 2020 was what movies
weren’t coming out, as the pandemic closed theaters and bumped release dates for some of the year’s biggest would-be blockbusters (see you later,
Black Widow and
No Time to Die, hopefully) and buzziest awards-bait (or is there another reason Spielberg directed a remake of
West Side Story?). But no more, because it turns out a lot of good movies were still released last year and lots of them have just been nominated for Oscars.
But the biggest difference between this Oscar year and any other is that you can easily (if not necessarily