Numlock Awards: The 2022 Oscar Nominations

Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter, and it’s back! Every week, join Walt Hickey and Michael Domanico as they break down the math behind the Oscars and the best narratives going into film’s biggest night. Today’s edition comes from Walter.

Just wanted to really quickly update you now that the nominations posted, really exciting list this year. To familiarize yourself on where these scores come from, check out Sunday’s post.

Best Picture

Nothing too unexpected here, like I wrote on Sunday the new ten-nomination threshold means that a film with a dedicated set of fans can get in there and clear the threshold a little easier than one of the edge cases. When Being the Ricardos and tick, tick… BOOM! got the “snub” in favor of Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car — a great Japanese movie that’s been on a tear — that makes a great deal of sense. After all, the Academy getting more international in its composition and its taste has been the big shift we’ve observed.

Best Director

The “snub” here is Denis Villeneuve missing out for Dune, but Hamaguchi getting the nod is very cool. This is, notably, some of the only bits of BAFTA prescience you’re going to see on the board today outside of the supporting acting categories.

Best Actor

Pretty much what we saw coming, but Mahershala Ali’s (Swan Song) spot went to Javier Bardem, they just stole the SAG nominations list nothing really to see here.

Best Actress

No Gaga!

This is why I don’t predict nominations — there’s just too little to work with — and why it’s reckless and foolish to put a hard percentage to the probability someone gets a nomination. The Academy has changed too significantly and too quickly to treat this like a precision, one-decimal-place prediction; even your local television weatherman will at best round it to ten and give you a “sixty percent chance of rain,” and the data she’s working with is orders of magnitude better than the stuff we are.

No Lady Gaga (House of Gucci), who was leading in precursors, and no Alana Haim (Licorice Pizza); the Cruz nomination came out of nowhere, you love to see it.

Best Supporting Actor

I am very interested in why the BAFTAs were pretty decent here and why the Golden Globes were rough, I wrote about how this year is a perfect experimental condition for the power of the Golden Globes. I’m even more interested in why the SAG Awards were a nearly complete whiff.

Best Supporting Actress

The “snubs” were for Caitriona Balfe (Belfast) and Ruth Negga (Passing), but if anything this just bolds and triple underscores Michael’s post about this category from a few weeks ago — this has been a two-person race between Dunst and DeBose.

Dame Judi Dench, off the top rope.