Mike Leigh's Track Record at the Oscars

As compared with some preceding years the inevitable list of this year's Oscar snubs was not the cause of much drama--no howls of outrage, no campaigns to compel reconsideration of the nominee list or get the rules changed, such as we saw in recent years seemingly terribly likely at this time. This was partly because the slate was a bit thin, especially where movies that had a really excited following was concerned--this year having no Barbie, while I think it unlikely that we will see any of the nominees targeted for disqualification to force changes in the list the way that Andrea Riseborough so shamefully was the year before that.

Still, at least one of those snubs seemed worth expounding on a little, that of Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the Best Actress category for her performance in Mike Leigh's film Hard Truths (in its list of predictions in that category Variety had expected her to land a nomination that instead went to Karla Sofía Gascón), which I think had less to do with anything against Ms. Jean-Baptiste than the Academy's feeling toward Leigh, who given his acclaim might have been expected to draw a little more recognition from that source than he has done to date (certainly to go by his greater success internationally than with the American ceremony). Only one of Leigh's films has ever been nominated for Best Picture--1996's Secrets & Lies, while if Leigh has seen nominations for his writing and direction on other works (Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, Happy Go Lucky and Another Year), none resulted in a win, while he has not been nominated for anything for the three films he has made since. The Academy's recognition of Mr. Turner was limited to the more "technical" categories, while Peterloo and Hard Truths received no recognition in any category whatsoever.

My thought on the matter: Leigh suffers with the Academy for inclining to concerns that are not just unfashionable among them but to which they are often hostile, with Peterloo exemplary here. As they rushed to put down the film, the critics threw out what Upton Sinclair in Mammonart called the "great art lie" that "art excludes propaganda and has nothing to do with freedom and justice." Especially as this is, again, a lie--for all art is "universally and inescapably . . . often deliberately, propaganda"--what it really means is that the ranking art critics, historically no great friends of freedom and justice, find propaganda for such distasteful, and the film with it.

Of course, as Leigh himself remarks Peterloo is his only film "obviously concerned with the political"--but that he made it testifies to a sensibility the Academy is unlikely to award, in contrast with a movie like Emilia Pérez, graced with a record thirteen nominations, acclaim for which may be a matter of the critics' approving the film's Message as much as they disapprove the explicit or implicit politics of Leigh's works.