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Matt wrote: Thu Mar 19, 2026 4:31 am
My god the grip Harvey Weinstein (who's in the clip linked above) had on the Oscars then, elevating mediocrities like The Hours, Chicago, and (I'm sorry) Gangs of New York, while great films like About Schmidt, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Catch Me If You Can (one of Spielberg's best, to me) go relatively unrecognized.

This is the year of Spike Lee's 25th Hour, Punch Drunk Love, and Soderbergh's Solaris, too.

I remember many of us here discussing this on one of the earliest iterations of this forum. Gangs of New York in particular seemed to be the worst out of them, one that even Daniel Day Lewis couldn't carry to be better, and that had a horrible performance by Cameron Diaz, whose character had 0 impact in the film and could easily be removed without affecting anything for any other character in the film. Leo's better film that year, Catch Me if You Can, holds up incredibly well 24 years later and it's certainly considered the must watch classic of the two.

And lets not forget that the best film of that year, City of God, wasn't even nominated for Best Foreign Film.

dx23 wrote: Sat Mar 21, 2026 3:12 am And lets not forget that the best film of that year, City of God, wasn't even nominated for Best Foreign Film.

I think that was down to the quirks of the nominating process for foreign films. It was Brazil's submission for the previous year's awards, but it was the small Foreign Language Film Award Committee (something like 30 people) that voted on nominations, and they passed on nominating it. Then the next year the film became a huge popular success in the US—thanks again to Harvey Weinstein—and it got 4 nominations in other categories.

Including Best Director, a major category (and more high profile than FLF anyway)

Looks like someone is looking for vengeance against the AwardsWorthy forum, as this is the first (and only) thing you see when you enter the site:

AMPAS changes some rules for some of its categories. The most important: actors can be nominated twice in the same category for different performances if they have the votes, and, even more importantly, films can become eligible for International Feature Film by winning a top award at one of several specified (Berlin, Busan(?), Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, and Venice) film festivals. This is intended to neuter the country selection committees in cases of either political dissidence (i.e., It Was Just an Accident would not need to be selected by the Iranian government or submitted by Germany to make the shortlist) or else in the quieter but more numerous cases of the selection committees having some kind of beef with the director (i.e., Anatomy of a Fall not being selected probably because of Justine Triet's political opinions)

EDIT: The rule changes also prohibit AI use in submissions in the acting and writing categories.

Under these new rules, could Michael B. Jordan's two Sinners roles have been up against each other?

I could see that actor change leading to vote splitting hindering their chances if a frontrunner

swo17 wrote: Fri May 01, 2026 6:54 pm Under these new rules, could Michael B. Jordan's two Sinners roles have been up against each other?

I think the two roles have to be in separate films.

This is an insane new rule. Previously having two strong perfs benefited the one that got nominated, this will be fascinating to see play out as I don’t think it will help (though the last double nominee above the line was Soderbergh and he won, so who knows)

There is an official Oscar nomination category that has never been utilized but remains an active category since 2000. This is legit crazy, I feel like I’m being Punk’d

domino harvey wrote: Fri Jun 26, 2026 9:26 pm There is an official Oscar nomination category that has never been utilized but remains an active category since 2000. This is legit crazy, I feel like I’m being Punk’d

Absolutely bizarre. It doesn't even make sense as a category to introduce in 2000 - given that the music has to be original, who were they thinking would be up for it besides the larger-budget Disney animated movies? It feels like a category that should be a holdover from the 50s or something, when there would have been serious competition for producing original musicals.

This definitely feels like a move to hand Disney (or Dreamworks) more Oscars, like introducing Best Animated Feature after Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture and didn't win.

As the article states, there used to be a Best Original Song Score (which Prince won for Purple Rain). This is basically that, but renamed? Or specifically designed to exclude things like the Top Gun soundtrack or something?

In its defense, bear in mind that new categories have been created when it's "too late" - i.e. in response to how something played out in a previous year (like a bumper crop of movies featuring impressive make-up or a boom in animated features), and obviously it takes time to create category, enough that you can't create one immediately to honor films from a year's slate that just happened. So having one on standby isn't unreasonable. Granted, I doubt we're going to get a glut of potential top-notch nominees anytime soon, but if it happens, at least there'll be a category for them ready to go.