Several underperforming films at the Oscars had one thing in common: A blunt willingness to deal with sex.
To wit: “Babygirl” star Nicole Kidman, playing a woman who comes closer to understanding her carnal side after an affair with her intern, campaigned harder than she ever had before; so did “Queer” lead actor Daniel Craig, as a lovelorn gay man who expresses through physicality what he cannot with words. Neither got a nomination. “Challengers,” a spring sensation that seemed set to compete for its pulsating score and boundary-pushing screenplay, got in nowhere, while “Nosferatu,” a ravishing Gothic depiction of lust at the edge of death, didn’t get the surprise Best Picture nod that some speculated it might.
None of these come as true shocks, exactly; Kidman’s and Craig’s campaigns seemed to lose steam as precursor nominations eluded their grasps, while “Challengers” may just have faded from memory and “Nosferatu” can take its craft nominations (and its box-office haul) as the reward. And the films’ respective merits can be debated — from my perspective, the most unfortunate miss of this particular set of nominees is “Challengers,” whose music and whose writing evoked the pulse-pounding feeling of sexual gamesmanship.
Elsewhere, among the morning’s biggest surprises was the absence of both Pamela Anderson and (especially) the hard-charging campaigner Jamie Lee Curtis for “The Last Showgirl,” a movie about Las Vegas burlesque that went the way of its East Coast counterpart, “Hustlers,” another well-liked movie that the Oscars didn’t make room for.
“Hustlers” provides an intriguing comparison. In the 2019 Oscar race, Jennifer Lopez had been tipped as a possible winner for her performance as a stripper who gets one over on her clients — it was a raw and frank piece of work from a superstar we were unaccustomed to seeing in quite such a light. And Lopez losing out on a nomination suggests that this particular iteration of the Academy doesn’t prize that particular tone. In its subject matter, “Hustlers” looks like “The Last Showgirl,” with its jobbing dancer left out in the cold; in its treatment of lust as the source of painful comedy, it’s more akin to “Challengers.”
Among the films that were nominated, “The Substance,” an overperforming Best Picture nominee, bears in its astonishing frankness about the extremity to which the human body can be pushed an old, familiar argument: Violence, perhaps, is always more acceptable in Hollywood than sex. And “Anora,” a Best Picture nominee this year, would seem to provide the counterargument to the idea that the Academy looks down on films about sexual matters: It, like “Hustlers,” is about a stripper whose physicality takes her places she might never have imagined. But that film’s road-movie middle third, in which it becomes a madcap chase through the Brooklyn night, takes sex off the table, at least for a while. “Anora” is about the delicate web of relationships between its characters. Sex, in “Anora” (as in last year’s multi-Oscar-winning “Poor Things”) is ultimately a device that allows the real story to begin.
Whereas in “Queer,” in “Babygirl,” and especially in “Challengers,” sex is the story — to a degree that one must sit with, perhaps uncomfortably. (While “Challengers” is a work of supreme control, both “Queer” and “Babygirl” push their lead actors into baroque and revealing expressions of lust, ones that court uncomfortable laughter in their directness.) It’s Craig’s desire for Drew Starkey, Kidman’s desire for Harris Dickinson, and Zendaya’s desire to place the two men pursuing her on opposite sides of a tennis net that doesn’t just kick off each respective story but that propels them to new and strange places. This year’s Oscar nominations are laudably wide-ranging — surprisingly political (from “I’m Still Here” in Best Picture to “The Apprentice,” twice over, in the acting races) and ranging from blockbusters like “Wicked” and “Dune: Part Two” to little-seen films like “Nickel Boys” that will now get a boost. But there still may be places that Oscar, for now, doesn’t really want to go.