The Revenant received 12 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Hardy and Best Actor for DiCaprio, at the Oscar nominations announcement on Thursday morning.
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Oscar nominees for Best Actress are shown in this combination of file photos (L-R) Brie Larson, Saoirse Ronan, Charlotte Rampling, Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett.
Star Leonardo DiCaprio will vie for Best Actor, Alejandro G Inarritu is up for Best Director, Tom Hardy has been nominated for Best Supporting Actor and the movie will compete for Best Picture.
Joining “Mad Max: Fury Road”, “Room” and “Brooklyn” in the best picture competition are “The Big Short”, “Bridge of Spies”, “The Martian”, “The Revenant” and “Spotlight”.
The original song category was full of surprises – especially with its inclusion of documentary songs “Manta Ray” from “Racing Extinction” and “Til It Happens to You” from “The Hunting Ground”.
Oscar voters, who usually favor artistic fare over blockbuster films for the coveted best picture prize, this year put three big budget films in the race: “The Revenant” and “The Martian”, which earned seven nods, and “Mad Max: Fury Road”.
Alicia Vikander picked up a supporting actress nomination for her role as the wife of a transgender pioneer in “The Danish Girl”.
Like past year, there was an absence of performers of color.
Alongside DiCaprio and Damon, the best actor nominees were: Michael Fassbender (“Steve Jobs”), Redmayne (“The Danish Girl”) and Bryan Cranston (“Trumbo”).
Not long after the nominations were announced, Twitter was already abuzz about the lack of diversity in the acting categories, despite strong performances by actors such as Idris Elba (“Beasts of No Nation”), Tessa Thompson (“Creed”), and O’Shea Jackson Jr. This year may hear some of the same chatter, as the only best picture nominees among 2015’s top 20 hits were “Mad Max” and “The Martian”.
Stallone in the movie reprises his iconic role of boxer Rocky Balboa, for which he was nominated but failed to win an Oscar when the original “Rocky” came out in 1976.
Aside from a nomination for composer John Williams (his 45th for scoring, and 50th overall), “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” did not break through the technical achievements wall. That’s Walt Disney with 59 nominations.
Left on the outside were Todd Haynes’ acclaimed lesbian romance “Carol” and the N.W.A biopic “Straight Outta Compton”.
Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion animated film about a sad-sack middle-aged motivational speaker, “Anomalisa”, was nominated for Best Animated Feature, and is scheduled to open in Madison on January 22. The other five were: Tom McCarthy’s investigative journalistic procedural “Spotlight”, Steven Spielberg’s Cold War thriller “Bridge of Spies”, Adam McKay’s Michael Lewis adaptation “The Big Short”, the mother-son captive drama “Room” and the ’50s Irish immigrant tale “Brooklyn”.
The Oscars will be held February 28 at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre.
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April Reign, managing editor of BroadwayBlack.com, who identifies herself as the creator of the #Oscarssowhite hashtag, tweeted on Thursday: “A five-minute opening by brilliant Chris Rock will not make up for over 80 years of erasure of marginalized communities”.
