Something is missing from the year’s Best Picture nominees.
Well, yes, The Woman King, Till and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. We know the black-themed films didn’t register.
But something even more elemental than race was shut out of the nominations for Hollywood’s top award, the Best Picture Oscar. There was no love story. No grand romance. We never got closer than the obligatory romantic subplot in Top Gun: Maverick, or the shattered blue idyll in Avatar: The Way Of Water, or the predations of Tár.
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Maybe there weren’t many love stories to choose from. Maybe film Academy voters just weren’t in the mood. In any case, they will have marked 2022/23 as a mostly loveless season in the upper ranks of filmdom—which is a departure.
In the last ten years, the Best Picture nominees have always included a love story or two (but usually not three—the Oscars are more inclined to importance, as with Spotlight, or clever contrivance, as in Parasite, than to simple romance).
Admittedly, 2020 brought a close call. The nominees from that year were unusually brittle: The Sound Of Metal, Judas And The Black Messiah, Promising Young Woman, The Trial Of The Chicago Seven and such. But the winner, Nomadland, when you look closely, turns out to have been a love story. Without the haunt of her lost, dead husband, Frances McDormand would have just been driving in circles.
In 2016, two romantic fables from the year before slugged it out. At the very last second, Moonlight, about two men who found each other after years apart, snatched the Oscar from the hands of La La Land, about two lovers who parted after their Hollywood moment together. It was a good year for love.
So was 2019. A Star Is Born didn’t win. But you could hardly untangle fact and fiction, Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, Jackson and Ally Maine by the time the season was over.
The Shape Of Water was a winner in 2018, as trans-species love conquered all. Marriage Story kept the fire burning, just barely, two years later. The aforementioned ten-year run began with Amour and Silver Linings Playbook in 2013, and continued with American Hustle and Her, The Theory Of Everything, Brooklyn, Call Me By Your Name, West Side Story.
Granted, these mostly weren’t romantic in the grandest manner, like Titanic or The English Patient or even Shakespeare In Love.
But they kept romance alive. They gave the Oscars a beating heart, which, sadly, they seem to lack this year.
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