The nominations for the 89th Academy Awards are out, and several science and science fiction films were honored! Hidden Figures and Arrival both earned Best Picture nominations, along with a host of other. Octavia Spencer, who plays Dorothy Vaughan, was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and the film was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film tells the true story of a group of African-American female mathematicians who fight prejudice and segregation to work for NASA’s Apollo Program. Arrival, adapted from the Ted Chiang short story “Story of Your Life”, is up for eight awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture, and tells a tense story of first contact between humans and aliens.
Genre films also showed up in the more technical categories, with Passengers nominated for Best Original Score and Best Production Design, and Doctor Strange up for Best Visual Effects. and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them earning two nominations, in Best Costume Design and Best Production Design. And this year’s Animated Feature is particularly strong, with nominations for Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, Zootopia, The Red Turtle, and My Life As a Zucchini.
The Academy Awards will air on Sunday, February 26, on ABC. While we wait, what are your picks for the best films of the year?
I think what’s particularly significant is that Arrival was nominated for both Best Picture and Best Director, which has been a pretty accurate bellwether for which of the Best Picture nominees in the expanded category are the serious contenders for the award. Also the screenplay nomination, which I think reflects on Ted Chiang as well as the screenwriting team. I hope to see more novellas and novelettes considered for screen treatment based on this precedent. It’s a deep well of high-quality speculative content.
I was also intrigued by the choice of Kubo and the Two Strings for Visual Effects. While there is no reason why an animated film can’t be nominated for its special effects, and it’s an inventive way of rewarding it for its technical advances in stop-motion in an extremely difficult year for Best Animated when it would be an underdog to win that category, I’m curious: is there any precedent for an animated nominee in this category before?
mutantalbinocrocodile @1:
… is there any precedent for an animated nominee in this category before?
I believe The Nightmare Before Christmas (nominated for Visual Effects in 1993) would qualify…