All the snubs, surprises, and LGBTQ+ nods from this year’s Oscar nominations

2022 was a banner year for LGBTQ+ film, but did that pan out in the nominations for the 95th annual Academy Awards? Well… yes and no!

Just take a look at the Best Picture field, which includes a number of films with prominent queer characters (Everything Everywhere All At Once, Tár), but is relatively light on queer talent, both in front of or behind the camera.

Still there’s plenty to be excited about—and rant about—after this morning’s Oscar nomination announcement, co-hosted by Sound Of Metal‘s Riz Ahmed and M3GAN‘s Allison Williams. (Which feels like the Academy pandering to the gays—and we’re not mad about it!)

Below, we’ve got a round-up of the nominees in the major categories—as well as some hot takes on who (and who didn’t) make the cut. You can see a complete list of nominees on the Academy’s website, and don’t miss the live show, airing Sunday, March 12 on ABC.

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Best Picture

• All Quiet On The Western Front
• Avatar: The Way Of Water
• The Banshees Of Inisherin
• Elvis
• Everything Everywhere All At Once
• The Fabelmans
• Tár
• Top Gun: Maverick
• Triangle Of Sadness
• Women Talking

Queerty’s Hot Takes: Like we mentioned above, we’re thrilled to see some films in here that prominently feature queer characters, like Everything Everywhere All At Once (the relationship between mother and daughter is the big beating heart of the movie) and Tár (is Lydia Tár problematic? Sure, but it’s still a fascinating character study!). Plus, there’s Women Talking, with a small but memorable role for nonbinary actor August Winter (a recent Dishin’ It guest). And we’re pretty tickled to see the Academy recognize the homoerotic moment of the year: The beach football scene in Top Gun: Maverick.

Best Director

• The Daniels, Everything Everywhere All At Once
• Todd Field, Tár
• Martin McDonagh, The Banshees Of Inisherin
• Ruben Ostlund, Triangle Of Sadness
• Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans

Queerty’s Hot Takes: As per usual, it’s a category dominated by straight men, but, look, there’s Everything Everywhere All At Once and Tár again! And, well, depending on who you ask, Steven Spielberg is a bi icon (a bi-con?) now, nabbing the ninth Best Director nod of his career.

Related: Twitter is Convinced That This Major Director Just Came Out of the Closet

Best Actress

• Cate Blanchett, Tár
• Ana de Armas, Blonde
• Andrea Riseborough, To Leslie
• Michelle Williams, The Fabelmans
• Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All At Once

Queerty’s Hot Takes: Well… this one’s a doozy. We expected to see our projected frontrunners Cate Blanchett (as “U-Haul lesbian” Lydia Tár) and Michelle Yeoh here, as well as Michelle Williams, despite some uncertainty over whether her The Fabelmans performance was technically a lead role or supporting. But it is downright shocking that Viola Davis (The Woman King) and Danielle Deadwyler (Till) missed out for their incredible performances—and more than a little bit concerning that the Academy failed to recognize these two talented Black women. In their places? Ana de Armas for her role in a movie we’re pretty sure no one liked, and Andrea Riseborough for the indie To Leslie, pushed across the finish line by a strange last-minute word-of-mouth campaign.

Best Actor

• Austin Butler, Elvis
• Colin Farrell, The Banshees Of Inisherin
• Brendan Fraser, The Whale
• Paul Mescal, Aftersun
• Bill Nighy, Living

Queerty’s Hot Takes: Best Actor proved a little less shocking, but it was still a pleasant surprise to see Paul Mescal make the cut for Aftersun with a role that’s [spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the film] definitely-maybe queer. And, as expected, Brendan Fraser received a nomination for his transformative role as 600-pound gay man in the controversial The Whale. Fun fact: These are all first-time nominees! Congrats, gents!

Related: ‘The Whale’s’ problems are much bigger than casting, and critics worry about who will pay the price

Best Supporting Actress

• Angela Bassett, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• Hong Chau, The Whale
• Kerry Condon, The Banshees Of Inisherin
• Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All At Once
• Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All At Once

Queerty’s Hot Takes: STEPHANIE HSU!!!!!! Don’t get us wrong, we like all five nominees, but we screamed with glee when Hsu’s name was announced—especially after it felt like her performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once was being overshadowed in the category by her A-list co-star Jamie Lee Curtis. Across all four acting categories, she’s the lone queer actor playing a queer role, so we will absolutely be knocking on doors in Hollywood campaigning for her.

Related: Stephanie Hsu on how ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ is helping people come out

Best Supporting Actor

• Brendan Gleeson, The Banshees Of Inisherin
• Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway
• Judd Hirsch, The Fabelmans
• Barry Keoghan, The Banshees Of Inisherin
• Key Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All At Once

Queerty’s Hot Takes: As on-the-record Everything Everywhere All At Once stans, we’re delighted by Key Huy Quan’s nod—after racking up plenty of other Best Supporting Actor wins throughout awards season thus far, he’s the odd-on favorite to win. The category’s most welcome surprise is Causeway‘s incredible Brian Tyree Henry, who notably played a gay superhero in Marvel’s Eternals and has long been an LGBTQ+ advocate.

Best Original Screenplay

• The Banshees Of Inisherin
• Everything Everywhere All At Once
• The Fabelmans
• Tár
• Triangle Of Sadness

Queerty’s Hot Takes: We’ll need an Oscar historian to check the record on this, but is this the first time the Best Original Screenplay and Best Director categories have lined up exactly? Wild! Anyway, you already know how we feel about Everything Everywhere All At Once and Tár, in particular (we love them). And The Fabelmans, by the way, was co-written by Spielberg and frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, the celebrate gay playwright who wrote Angels In America.

Best Adapted Screenplay

• All Quiet On The Western Front
• Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
• Living
• Top Gun: Maverick
• Women Talking

Queerty’s Hot Takes: As we all know, the whodunit is our queerest genre, so Glass Onion‘s inclusion here is a big win for the gays, especially now that it’s confirmed world-famous detective Benoit Blanc is part of the family. Plus, we love the nomination for Never Let Me Go novelist Kazuo Ishiguro who wrote the screenplay for the lovely indie Living, which was directed by queer filmmaker Oliver Hermanus.

Best Animated Feature Film

• Marcel The Shell With Shoes On
• Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
• Puss In Boots: The Last Wish
• The Sea Beast
• Turning Red

Queerty’s Hot Takes: Marcel The Shell is a queer icon, period. What a joy to see that sweet, special movie receive the recognition it deserves. Actually, we adore everything in this category (shout out to the better-than-it-should-be Puss In Boots film starring our fave Harvey Guillén!)–we’re just a little sad to see the queer-inclusive Wendell & Wild get snubbed.

Related: Marcel The Shell is the tiny queer icon we need right now

Best International Feature Film

• All Quiet on the Western Front (Germany)
• Argentina, 1985 (Argentina)
• Close (Belgium)
• EO (Poland)
• The Quiet Girl (Ireland)

Queerty’s Hot Takes: This was one of All Quiet on the Western Front‘s whopping nine nominations, but the real story here is the inclusion of Close from gay filmmaker Lukas Dhont, about two young boys whose intimate friendship changes dramatically when a new school year begins (we won’t spoil any more here, but grab some tissues if you plan to watch).

Best Documentary Feature

• All That Breathes
• All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
• Fire of Love
• A House Made of Splinters
• Navalny

Queerty’s Hot Takes: This is a great selection of docs, though our favorite by a mile is All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a stunning portrait of queer activist and photographer Nan Goldin, whose work has been celebrated for exploring the burgeoning LGBTQ+ scene in New York City “post-Stonewall,” as well as gay life during the AIDS epidemic.

Best Original Song

• “Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (performed by Rihanna)
• “This Is A Life” from Everything Everywhere All at Once (performed by Son Lux, David Byrne, and Mitski)
• “Naatu Naatu” from RRR (performed by N. T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan)
• “Applause” from Tell It like a Woman (performed by Sofia Carson)
• “Hold My Hand” from Top Gun: Maverick (performed by Lady Gaga)

Queerty’s Hot Takes: Alright gays, choose your diva: Do we go for Gaga (“Hold My Hand”), ride for Rihanna (“Lift Me Up”), or die for Diane Warren (she wrote “Applause”)? It’s going to be a war on Twitter over this one, isn’t it? But, to be honest, we’ll be rooting for “Naatu Naatu” from the bromantic Indian action epic RRR—we just hope the Oscars producers are smart enough to let that movie’s stars perform it on stage, because that would be a gag.

Related: Indian action epic ‘RRR’ becomes instant gay classic for its unintentional homoerotic vibes

Best Animated Short Film

• The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
• The Flying Sailor
• Ice Merchants
• My Year of Dicks
• An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It

Queerty’s Hot Takes: We’ll be honest that we haven’t seen any of the nominated films in this category yet, but we wanted to include it for two reasons: (1) In our minds, the biggest snub of the morning was the fact that the short-listed New Moon didn’t get nominated—it’s a beautiful film from Queerty favorites Colman Domingo and his husband Raúl, and it absolutely deserved. (2) What the **** is My Year of Dicks and when can we watch it???