A Hollywood drama from Netflix leading the Oscar race.
The Academy unveiled, Monday, March 15, the list of selected for its 2021 edition and it is the drama of the 1930s "Mank", directed by David Fincher and produced by Netflix, which wins the stake with 10 nominations, including those Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Gary Oldman and Best Supporting Actor for Amanda Seyfried.
Then come six films with six nominations, including "Nomadland" by Chloe Zhao starring Frances McDormand, considered the favorite by many experts after his victory at the Golden Globes, and "The Chicago Seven", Aaron Sorkin's legal drama around the repression of demonstrations against the Vietnam War, with Sacha Baron Cohen.
Often criticized for its lack of representativeness, the Academy of Oscars has selected this year two women out of five in the category of "best director", Chloe Zhao and Emerald Fennell for "Promising Young Woman".
This is a first.
Hollywood darling this year, Chloe Zhao is also the first woman to compete for the Oscars in four different categories (best film, direction, cut and screenplay), notes the Academy.
Another historic record: 76 nominations in total went to women.
"Judas and the Black Messiah"
Cinemas have remained completely closed since mid-March in Los Angeles due to health restrictions linked to the pandemic, which forced the Oscars to postpone the unprecedented awards ceremony to April 25.
Coincidentally, the dark rooms of "LA" have been given the green light for a partial reopening from Monday.
The Golden Globes were lambasted for the lack of films featuring black actors, but the Oscars avoided this pitfall and six times selected "Judas and the Black Messiah", which highlights the fight for civil rights in the 1960s and the action of the Black Panthers.
Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield are both in the running for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for this film, notably against Leslie Odom Jr ("One Night in Miami") and Sacha Baron Cohen.
Other serious candidates of this 93rd edition, "Minari" and his family of Americans of South Korean origin settling in the countryside, "The Father" with the legendary Anthony Hopkins, directed by the French author Florian Zeller, and "Sound of Metal", with rapper Riz Ahmed.
They all collected six nominations as well.
On the foreign film side, the French candidate "Deux" was not selected and it is the Danish film "Drunk", with Mads Mikkelsen, which seems to be the favorite.
Note the highly anticipated posthumous nomination of the late Chadwick Boseman, who died last year of cancer at the age of 43, for his role in "The Blues of My Rainey", another Netflix production.
With its many films, whose audiences have been boosted by the confinements linked to the pandemic, the video-on-demand platform Netflix seems to be off to a good start for this 93rd edition of the Oscars.
With Reuters and AFP
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