Netflix Triumphs, Bradley Cooper Not so Much: Oscar 2019 Snubs & Surprises

Even the most rosy predictions for Netflix’s Oscar chances on nomination morning probably didn’t envision a haul quite this abundant. With 10 total nominations — including surprise nods in Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress — director Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma leads all nominated films, in a tie with the Yorgos Lanthimos-directed The Favourite. [See the FULL LIST of Academy Award nominations here.]

In perhaps the biggest surprise of the morning — in the very first category announced by Kumail Nanjiani and Tracee Ellis Ross, no less — Marina De Tavira was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, for her role as the increasingly beleaguered matriarch of the main family in Roma. Some several minutes later, her co-star Yalitza Aparicio, as the family’s maid, Cleo, was nominated for Best Actress. These mark the second and third nominations in Netflix’s short Oscar history, after last year’s breakthrough nod for Mary J. Blige in Mudbound.

But when we talk about Netflix breakthroughs, we’ll be talking about Roma for years to come. After making a concerted effort this year towards campaigning — including a push into theatrical distribution that Netflix had previously eschewed — it paid off with Netflix’s first Best Picture and Best Director nominations. Roma was also nominated for its screenplay and cinematography (both for Cuaron himself), as well as production design, sound mixing, sound editing, and a nomination in Best Foreign Language film.

And the good news for Netflix did not stop with Roma. With three rather unexpected nominations, the Coen brothers’ anthology western The Ballad of Buster Scruggs had a great morning. The Coens landed their seventh career screenplay nomination (this one an Original Screenplay), the film’s costumes were nominated, and the catchy little ditty that Tim Blake Nelson sings in the opening segment  — “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings” — got a shocker of a nod for Best Original Song.

Netflix wasn’t the only streaming platform that got great news from the Academy. Hulu may have only gotten one nomination, but it was the nomination they were hoping for: a Best Documentary Feature for their excellent Minding the Gap.

Meanwhile, despite suffering a disappointing snub for supporting-actor hopeful Timothée Chalamet and Beautiful Boy, Amazon Studios got a surprisingly robust three nominations for its Polish acquisition Cold War, including Pawel Pawlikowski in Best Director. It was the kind of fifth-slot foreign director nod that used to happen semi-frequently with directors like Pedro Almodovar, Akira Kurosawa, and Krzysztof Kieślowski in the days before the Best Picture category expanded to 10 nominees. In getting a Best Director nod without a corresponding Best Picture nomination, Cold War joins the 2014 Bennett Miller film Foxcatcher as the only two films in the expanded Best Picture era to pull that off.

In the realm of snubs, none stung quite so loudly as Bradley Cooper failing to show up on the Best Director list. A Star Is Born had been considered a frontrunner throughout awards season, and with 8 nominations, it still had a very robust showing this morning, but Cooper was only able to cash in on his Best Actor buzz, not Best Director. As for whether this snub hampers A Star Is Born‘s chances to win Best Picture, it’s only happened four times in the long history of Oscar that a Best Picture winner had no Best Director nomination (the last was for Argo in 2012).

Besides Cooper and Chalamet, the biggest snub of Oscar nomination morning may well have been Fred Rodgers. The documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor, about the TV history of the beloved Mr. Rodgers, was considered a frontrunner in Best Documentary, but it was given the cold shoulder.

Other nominations that did not pan out included First Man, which expectedly fell short in the major categories like Picture, Director, Actor, and Supporting Actress, but didn’t even pull in the expected nod for its Golden Globe-winning Justin Hurwitz score.

And in a pair of snubs of note to Oscar prognosticators considering the category’s tendency to match up with Best Picture, the omission of Roma and A Star Is Born in the Best Editing category led to some raised eyebrows. It was pretty much the only category Roma missed out on, but with 36 of the last 37 Best Picture winners having received a Best Editing nomination, the snub bolstered the hopes of films like co-nomination leader The Favourite and the Producers Guild champ Green Book.

Stream Roma on Netflix