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    25 Biggest Oscar Snubs of All Time

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    Every year since the Academy Awards were invented, somebody has been overlooked, ignored, passed over, disregarded or brushed off. You know what they say about beauty and beholders.But perceived Oscar omissions — snubs, as we have come to call them — have grown into a frenzied annual conversation, with people left off the nomination list, or nominated but denied a statuette, sometimes receiving as much attention, or more, as those who win.These are the 25 true snubs and unjust losses that Times film critics, columnists, writers and editors still can’t get over. Read more →‘Do the Right Thing’ for Best Picture (1990)Actual winner: “Driving Miss Daisy”Spike Lee and Danny Aiello in the Brooklyn-set drama.Universal PicturesSome people hated this movie. Others, more ominously, feared it, or claimed to. News articles and reviews imagined riots sprouting in its wake (they never came), seeing in the character of Mookie — who, in a fit of righteous fury, smashes a pizzeria window in the film’s famous climax — confirmation of Lee’s insidious intent. Did academy voters have similar misgivings? Lee, who was shut out of the directing category, did receive a nomination for his screenplay, suggesting at least one branch of the organization had his back. (Danny Aiello was also nominated for supporting actor.) But it’s hard to look at the eventual best picture winner, “Driving Miss Daisy” — a film in which Morgan Freeman plays Hoke Colburn, the patient chauffeur of a bigoted, elderly white woman — and not see a statement of preference. In 1990, it was the Hoke Colburns of the world, not the Mookies, who were welcome on the academy’s biggest stage. REGGIE UGWU, pop culture reporterWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Becoming King’ Review: An Actor Marches On

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      This documentary about Ava DuVernay’s 2014 Martin Luther King drama “Selma” plays more like a David Oyelowo tribute than a proper look at the difficulties of making the film.“Becoming King,” a documentary on Paramount+, traces the actor David Oyelowo’s journey to playing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Ava DuVernay’s 2014 drama “Selma.”Directed by Jessica Oyelowo (the actor’s wife), it’s a lackluster, dutiful affair that plays more like a hagiographic appreciation of David Oyelowo than a tribute to the making of “Selma.” In part, the documentary seems like a reaction to Oyelowo’s Oscars snub the following year in the best actor category, though it does a lousy job at making its case.The first part of the film digs into Oyelowo’s origins: first, as a child who grew up poor in Lagos, Nigeria; and then, as a theater prodigy who took on leading roles in London’s Royal Shakespeare Company. The next step was Hollywood, where Oyelowo established himself with parts in films that, when strung together, create a history of civil rights in America: Think “Lincoln,” “Red Tails” and “The Help.”Throughout, the director weaves what appears to be home-video footage from the nearly seven-year process it took to make “Selma.” Around these snippets, which show David at home, taking work calls, or verbalizing his anxieties about playing the civil rights leader, we hear from talking heads like Oprah Winfrey (a producer on the film), Lee Daniels (who was at one point signed on to direct) and DuVernay.Nothing they say is particularly interesting; they shower the expected compliments on Oyelowo and, otherwise, offer little else beyond their own symbolic power. These are Black entertainers, coming together to make a rare high-profile Hollywood feature about Dr. King, but the documentary only rehashes these facts without truly exploring what made “Selma” such a risky project to mount. Aside from a brief segment with the actor’s dialect coach, we never really get a sense of Oyelowo’s process, either — or the challenges he faced portraying an icon who was also a flesh-and-bones human with imperfections and ambiguities. “Becoming King” exhibits the kind of self-importance that ultimately diminishes the subject, be it Dr. King or Oyelowo.Becoming KingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 6 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      ‘Role Play’ Review: Mommy by Day, Killer by Night

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      Kaley Cuoco plays a woman balancing a life of domesticity with her career as an assassin in this spineless comedy thriller.Kaley Cuoco may be our newest caper girl Friday, but even her flame of charisma tapers off early in “Role Play,” directed by Thomas Vincent. Calling on the same knack for high jinks that she perfected on the Max series “The Flight Attendant,” the onetime sitcom actress plays Emma, a suburban mom with a secret: she is actually an internationally-wanted assassin.A minivan wife leading a double life as a professional killer is an agreeable enough premise for a broad action comedy, but the movie’s biggest idea lies not in content, but structure. As the hit woman and her clueless but loyal husband, Dave (David Oyelowo), get sucked into an improbable game of cat and mouse with her former employer, the film takes pride in flashing back to preceding scenes to unveil new details. The point is that Emma is always one step ahead — even of the audience.These mini-twists might have felt exciting had the film waited longer before each reveal; as it stands, the stretches between scene and flashback are shorter than commercial breaks. It is perhaps needless to add that the story often stretches credulity. What does Emma’s ex-boss have against her? Why aren’t the F.B.I. all over Emma’s recent sloppy murder? One is quick to forgive faulty plot machinations when an action movie really revs; “Role Play” merely spins its wheels.Role PlayRated R. She’s number one with a bullet. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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      ‘Lawmen: Bass Reeves’ Review: A Frontier Injustice

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      David Oyelowo gives an unimpeachable performance, but Taylor Sheridan still hasn’t met a western that he can’t turn into an overheated melodrama.What we know, or have decided to accept, about the life of the deputy U.S. marshal Bass Reeves has more of the flavor of carnival legend than of scholarship. The Paramount+ series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves,” which concluded on Sunday, was based not on history books or biographies but on novels. The most prominent telling of his story so far was a dramatization of a dramatization.That kind of haziness leaves room for invention, and the tales that have settled around Reeves — a former slave credited with 3,000 arrests; a crack shot said to have killed 14 men in the line of duty — could be the basis for a new take on classic western action and adventure. The tales also suggest that the career Reeves carved out for himself, and the extreme success he found, would at least occasionally have caused him some excitement and joy. That is not where “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” ended up.David Oyelowo gave an unimpeachable performance as Reeves, focused and intense and emotionally true. And the show’s creator, Chad Feehan, and his directors, Christina Alexandra Voros and Damian Marcano, put onscreen a notably handsome and visually credible evocation of the American West in the 1870s. The show had texture — it gave a tactile pleasure throughout its eight episodes.But as it went along, it became less of a treat to watch and more of a chore. Its story of heroism against all odds had gun battles and frontier romance, but we were almost never allowed to simply enjoy them. And poor David Oyelowo appeared to be having less fun than anyone.It was to the show’s credit that it didn’t try to make Reeves a six-gun superman — he operated with guile and caution, letting other people’s carelessness and hotheadedness work for him, and he grimaced and cowered when under fire. But the show’s one-note insistence on his beleaguered nobility, even as his composure faded and his trigger finger got too itchy, was so continual and unmodulated that it flattened the character and drained the story of humor.Reeves’s arc in the early episodes, as he emerged from slavery, tried his hand at farming and then was recruited into the marshals’ service by a sympathetic judge (played by Donald Sutherland), had an urgent, realistic snap to it. But once he put on the badge, the show slowed and got down to its real business, which wasn’t dramatizing the exploits of an exceptional lawman under grueling circumstances.Lauren E. Banks as Jennie Reeves and Demi Singleton as her daughter Sally. The best moments in “Lawmen” were its domestic scenes.Emerson Miller/Paramount+The latter half of the season was, instead, about putting Reeves through a crisis of conscience over his enforcement of laws enacted and administered by the same white men who had once enslaved him. (The more interesting choice dramatically, and probably the one better supported by the historical record, would have been for him not to care.) And having established its seriousness, the show went big, inventing as its embodiment of racist evil an ex-Confederate Texas Ranger (played by Barry Pepper) who used Black prisoners as slave labor and, just to drive home his odiousness, quoted French Enlightenment drama.That “Lawmen” would undergo a mytho-melodramatic implosion is perhaps not surprising. It is in the purview of the executive producer Taylor Sheridan, who has shown a bent for gaseous mythologizing in westerns like “Yellowstone” and “1883.” And Feehan has a history with shows that privileged macho poetics over straightforward action, like “Ray Donovan,” “Banshee” and “Rectify.”The best moments in “Lawmen” were its domestic scenes, which ran in counterpoint to the alternately depressive and histrionic story of Reeves’s work. Reeves’s wife, Jennie, and his oldest daughter, Sally, who kept the farm running in his absence, were played with warmth and great feeling by Lauren E. Banks and Demi Singleton; as impressive as Oyelowo was, it was always a relief when the action shifted to the farm.And racism and racial oppression in the post-Reconstruction era were treated more cogently and dramatically in those scenes as well. The awakening of the pragmatic Jennie to the larger issues championed by her sister Esme (Joaquina Kalukango) was subtle and touching; by contrast, the closing scene of Reeves leading a column of Black prisoners to freedom bordered on camp.Sheridan’s track record as a producer has ticked up lately, with “Tulsa King” and “Special Ops: Lioness” and even the early episodes of “Lawmen.” But when he makes westerns, modern or historical, he always seems to be caught between two conflicting impulses. One is to make anti-westerns like those of the 1960s and ’70s, in which the clichés of the genre are exposed and debunked; the other is to make deluxe versions of the classically sentimental western, in which those same clichés are renewed and celebrated. There’s another choice, of course, which would be just to make a good western. More

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      A Look at ‘Ten Percent,’ a British ‘Call My Agent!’ Remake

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      The remake of the French show “Call My Agent!” is far more preoccupied with American influences and unspoken emotion than the original.LONDON — About five minutes into the first episode of “Ten Percent,” the British remake of the hit French show “Call My Agent!,” the partners and their assistants at the fictional talent agency Nightingale Hart are debating how to tell a famous actor that she has been deemed too old for a movie role.“I can’t lie to her, obviously,” Dan (Prasanna Puwanarajah) says. “No, no, no,” the other agents chime in. “But obviously I can’t tell her the truth,” he continues, prompting another horrified chorus of “nooo.”“That’s the narrow edge along which agents must inch every day of their lives,” said John Morton, an executive producer and scriptwriter who developed the series, which premieres on Amazon’s Prime Video on April 28 in Britain and on Sundance Now and AMC+ on April 29 in the United States. “The relationship with the truth is a fascinating juggling act in this world,” he said. “It’s a problem not much understood outside the industry — and not even by clients inside it — and a really interesting area to have fun with.”The very British style of understatement and indirection that pervades the dialogue is a notable tonal difference from the French series.Rob Youngson/Sundance NowThe connections, dependencies and emotional ties between four agents and their clients are at the comic heart of “Ten Percent,” just as they were at the fictional Parisian agency in “Call My Agent!” (“Dix Pour Cent” in French).That series was a hit in France after its 2015 debut there, but it received little international attention until the coronavirus pandemic hit, when the show became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. (Turkish and Indian versions have been released, and South Korea, Italy, Malaysia and Poland all have adaptations in development.)Prasanna Puwanarajah plays the slightly bumbling, likable Dan.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesLydia Leonard is Rebecca, a tough career woman.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesMaggie Steed’s Stella is an old-guard patrician.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesJack Davenport plays the self-deceiving Jonathan.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesWhen Morton — the award-winning writer and director of the British shows “Twenty Twelve” and “W1A” — had his first meeting about “Ten Percent” in 2019, the French series was still “a cult hit with a number of very loyal followers,” he said. “I was a huge fan, and my first thought was, ‘the bar is already so high, how do you not mess this up?’ Then the bar got higher.”Morton has retained much of the structural framework of “Call My Agent!,” with four central characters who are at least superficially similar to their French counterparts. There is the tough career woman Rebecca (Lydia Leonard); the slightly bumbling, likable Dan; the old-guard patrician Stella (Maggie Steed); and the controlling, self-deceiving Jonathan (Jack Davenport), who in this rendition is the son of Richard Nightingale (Jim Broadbent), a founder of the agency.There is also Misha (Hiftu Quasem), the daughter Jonathan is keeping a secret, who bags a job as Rebecca’s assistant early in the first episode. And the catnip factor of the original series remains: a plethora of big-name actors (Kelly MacDonald, Helena Bonham Carter, Dominic West, Phoebe Dynevor, David and Jessica Oyelowo among them) playing themselves in story lines that touch on ageism, stage fright, pay parity and the cost (for actresses) of having children.Helena Bonham Carter, left, is one of the celebrities playing a version of themselves in the show in story lines that touch on ageism, pay parity and the cost of having children.Rob Youngson/Sundance NowSo far, so familiar. But after a first episode that closely follows the opening of the French series, the show’s plotlines gradually begin to differ, and to cater more closely to the specific preoccupations of the British cultural industry, with its greater ties to — and anxieties about — American partnerships and influences.Unlike the British cultural industry, and partly because of the language factor, Morton said: “the French entertainment and creative world does not feel secondary or beholden to Hollywood, and in fact celebrates that it isn’t. But if you are British and in this industry, whatever you think about it, you feel that the mother ship, the big factories, are over there. To fold that into the show felt true.”After Richard’s unexpected death, Jonathan sells a majority share to a large American agency, which promptly sends an executive, Kirsten (Chelsey Crisp), to London to oversee Nightingale Hart. “She might be nice,” Dan says hopefully. “I’ve met some perfectly normal Americans.”There is plenty of humor to be had through the clash of cultures, a perfect vehicle for Morton’s trademark brand of dry humor, as the British team mutter “yes,” “no” or “right,” while the Americans tell them repeatedly how excited they are about the new relationship.The very British style of understatement and indirection that pervades the dialogue is a notable tonal difference from the French series. This is taken to a masterly height in the character of Julia (Rebecca Humphries), Jonathan’s assistant, who rarely utters more than “yes” or “no” but manages to infuse the words with a repressed intensity that conveys her obsession with her boss.“We all adored the French series, but weirdly it never came on set with us because every scene was a John Morton scene,” Puwanarajah, far right, said of the British show and a producer.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York Times“The French do everything stylishly and passionately and articulately,” Davenport said. “And our characters have to be hyper-articulate, professionally. But personally, they are as inarticulate as the average Brit. We are not a culture which is encouraged to say what we think or feel.”Morton’s writing, said Puwanarajah, reveals how fast the characters’s “legs are paddling under the surface under ‘yes, yes, I mean, maybe, carry on.’ It’s funny and real and dissonant in a Chekhovian way. We all adored the French series, but weirdly it never came on set with us because every scene was a John Morton scene.”Like the French series, the show uses its guest stars to evoke the realities and vulnerabilities of those who seem most successful. When MacDonald’s real-life agent called to tell the actress about her character being informed that she was too old for a role, the agent “was struggling a bit to find the right words,” MacDonald said. “I realized that it was a bit awkward for her to say that, just like in the show, which was quite funny.”In an episode featuring the married actors Jessica and David Oyelowo, the relevant issue of pay parity and its accompanying complexities are evoked: “Your market rate is higher,” Jonathan tells David; but “Jess has given me her life!” David replies — a line he suggested, he said in a joint video interview with his wife.Jessica Oyelowo and David Oyelowo play versions of themselves in the show.Rob Youngson/Sundance Now“It made me cry when I read the script,” Jessica said. “Because if you are an actress and you have babies, you feel that career loss. It was lovely that they added those personal tweaks.”Playing yourself isn’t easy, David said humorously. “I tried to think of myself as a character, but every time someone said ‘David and Jess’ on set, my brain short-circuited. There was a moment when the director asked me to play ‘him’ as more pathetic, and I was like, is David Oyelowo pathetic, or is the character pathetic?” When Jessica said she found it easier to separate the real and onscreen self, her husband nodded. “She was never asked to be pathetic,” he said.The show gives time to these issues in the cultural workplace, but Morton said this wasn’t his primary intention. “The French did something which I admire them for, something kinder and more nuanced, which I hope we captured,” he said. “There is a kind of dysfunctional family here, who we care about.”As Simon (Tim McInnerny), an aging, alcoholic actor, puts it to a politely smiling Bonham Carter: “However tragic one’s own life might seem, in the end it does become funny.” More

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      ‘The Water Man’ Review: Oyelowo Directs With a Touch of Magic

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      As a newly transplanted family tries to adjust to the countryside, the son is desperately pulling strings to cure his seriously ill mother.The keen affinity the actor David Oyelowo has for his fellow performers is the best thing about “The Water Man,” his feature directorial debut. Scripted by Emily A. Needell, the picture is a family drama with a supernatural angle, centered on illness.Lonnie Chavis plays Gunner, a sensitive and creative tween who works on his graphic novel (the inked frames become animated and speak to him as he draws) while his parents deal with life in a rural town. (The movie was shot in Oregon.) As the father, Oyelowo is a little dim about his son’s real passions — he accidentally overturns a bottle of Gunner’s ink when asking him to come outside to “toss the ball around.”And his mother, (Rosario Dawson), is increasingly challenged by illness. One morning, Gunner goes into his favorite fantasy bookshop and says “I’m gonna need every book you have on leukemia.”Gunner soon learns about “the water man,” a local legend who walks the earth with a flame of hope in his heart. He gets more information from a reclusive eccentric (Alfred Molina). Then he enlists a slightly older semi-Goth tough girl (Amiah Miller) — whose background of abuse is the polar opposite of Gunner’s loving home — in an ill-advised forest trek.The mythos the movie trucks in carries hints of Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” and the Y.A. novel and film adaptation “A Monster Calls.” But this picture is a more anodyne vision overall; even when the narrative calls in a wildfire to raise the emotional stakes, the viewer remains confident that things will work out. That the movie’s executive producer is Oprah Winfrey kind of tips the movie’s hand; the ultimate point here is that flame of hope.The Water ManRated PG for mature themes. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More