It’s award season, babyyyy!!!! For movie makers, it’s the most exciting time of the year; When their hard work pays off, when they get to walk the red carpet, when they finally get noticed in Hollywood. But for others, it can be a disappointing season….
Here’s the movies that didn’t get the recognition they deserve!
Adam Driver – Anette (dir. Leos Carax) 2021
Adam Driver has quickly grown into one of this generation’s greatest film stars. Though involved in a number of low-key supporting roles of the early 2010s, it wasn’t until his impressive career-changing turn as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel trilogy that Driver began to attract attention. Since that moment on, Driver has been seized upon by a number of significant directors, from Jim Jarmusch, Ridley Scott, Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh to massive acclaim. All outstanding performances, across the board.
It is therefore utterly bewildering how overlooked his jaw-dropping turn in Leos Carax’s extraordinarily rock opera musical, Annette, has remained not just to audiences but awards circles. Driver has always been excellent, but his skills are taken to a whole other level of indescribable magnificence here as an utterly pathetic, super despicable, yet darkly hilarious stand-up comedian. There’s a rare physicality and presence to Driver in Annette nigh-impossible to replicate, being taken to the absolute heights of ability. His range continues to astound, with Driver’s dancing and singing throughout being particularly impressive. One such scene has him singing one of the film’s signature songs, mid-coitus. Yes, I’m serious – and it is utterly brilliant.
Driver is simply effortless in his handling of a vast range of emotions and immense depth that needs to be seen to be believe. Without a doubt, Driver blew away the competition of best lead male performance of 2021, and it is utterly inexcusable that he nor the film had so much as a whiff of recognition at the years Oscars. As Driver belts out in-song at one point in the film, “what’s your f***in’ problem?”
Callum Nelmes
Via Canal +
Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee) – Best Picture 1989
It is 1989, and young black director Spike Lee has made the incredible Do The Right Thing, a film so important culturally and so relevant that it even made its way into the minds of Hollywood enough to be nominated for best picture that year. A challenging film made by a young director about racism and its aftermath, a film made with distinct passion and fury, being nominated for Best Picture must have seen like the progression Hollywood is always talking about, when the greatest films are nominated regardless of who made them.
And then… Driving Miss Daisy won, that film being another film on race positioned from the perspective of a bigoted white woman who must ‘learn to love’ (or tolerate) her black driver, a man who must simply take racial abuse and prejudice throughout the film because, eventually, things will change (somehow).
Just to make this snub worse, Spike Lee was once again nominated for Best Picture in 2018 with his remarkable BlacKkKlansman… only to lose to another film about a white man learning to ‘tolerate’ his black driver. It’s a bizarre coincidence, to both a humorous and enraging degree.
Reece Beckett
Via Shutterstock / Universal Pictures
