A Star Is Born Gets 8 Oscar Nominations Including Best Picture, Actress, & Song
This morning the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences unveiled its nominations for the biggest annual awards show, the Oscars. And in this year’s slate of nominees, music-themed movies did very well. Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born and the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody are both up for Best Picture.
A Star Is Born is up for eight awards total, and that includes a Best Actress nomination for Lady Gaga and a Best Actor nod for Bradley Cooper. (No Best Director, though. The spot that a lot of people thought would go to Cooper instead went to Pawel Pawlikowski, the director behind the Polish period romance Cold War. The nominee champs are Roma and The Favourite, each of which is up for 10 awards.) Meanwhile, Bohemian Rhapsody is up for five awards, including a Best Actor nod for Rami Malek, who plays Freddie Mercury.
We’ve been paying close attention to the Best Original Score awards, as plenty of the heavyweights of ’90s alt-rock have been making big moves this year. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke made his film-score debut with Suspiria this year, while his bandmate Johnny Greenwood scored Lynn Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here. Neither were nominated. Nor were Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who scored Mid90s and Bird Box.
Instead, the Best Original Score nominees are all film-score lifers, including longtime Spike Lee collaborator Terrance Blanchard, for BlacKkKlansman, and Childish Gambino collaborator Ludwig Goransson, for Black Panther. The other nominees are Nicholas Britell for If Beale Street Could Talk, Alexandre Desplat for Isle Of Dogs, and Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman for Mary Poppins Returns.
In the Best Original Song category, Lady Gaga is now the second person ever to be nominated for acting and song awards in the same year. (The other was Mary J. Blige, nominated for both for Mudbound last year.) A Star Is Born’s “Shallow” is the presumable frontrunner for Best Original Song; Gaga co-wrote it with Mark Ronson, Dirty Pretty Things frontman Anthony Rossomando, and Miike Snow singer Andrew Wyatt.
Gaga is up against her onetime collaborator Kendrick Lamar. Kendrick and SZA’s “All The Stars,” from Black Panther, is also up for Best Original Song. In a bit of a surprise, “When A Cowboy Trades His Spurs For Wings,” which roots veterans Gillian Welch and David Rawlings wrote for the Coen Brothers’ Netflix anthology-Western The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, is also nominated, as are “The Place Where Lost Things Go,” which Emily Blunt sings in Mary Poppins Returns, and “I’ll Fight,” the Diane Warren ballad that Jennifer Hudson sings on the RBG soundtrack. Shortlisted songs from artists like Thom Yorke, Sampha, and the Coup did not make the cut.