Justin Chang: Forget 'snubs.' The real winner in this year's Oscar nominations is international cinema
LOS ANGELES — February is well upon us, and it wouldn't take a groundhog sighting on Hollywood Boulevard to know that the interminable rituals of Academy Awards season will grind on for another several weeks. We have entered what I have come to think of as the Oscars' interregnum, that anxious, frequently tedious period between the announcement of the nominees and the unveiling of the winners. During this period, which Judi Dench described in her own 1999 acceptance speech as the best part of the Academy Awards ("You live in a kind of haze for several weeks, and the terrible thing is that somebody's got to win"), the movie industry primps, preens and prepares itself for battle. On Sunday, March 10, all will converge at the Dolby Theatre, surrounded by paparazzi battalions on a carpet fittingly dyed the color of blood: It's Oscar night, baby, and all's fair in self-love and war.
For now, though, a mild if suspicious calm seems to have descended on Hollywood, disrupted every so often by a fresh renewal of controversy around what too many ostensible journalists have called "the 'Barbie' snubs." May I propose that, deserved to be nominated for director or Margot Robbie for lead actress, it takes a ludicrous suspension of disbelief to assume that academy voters deliberately and maliciously conspired to deny them. (Especially since they both received nominations in other major categories: Gerwig and her co-writer, Noah Baumbach, are up for adapted screenplay, while Robbie and her three fellow "Barbie" producers are nominated for best picture.)
