Oscars 2022 nominations: From Kristen Stewart's Spencer to Kenneth Branagh's Belfast, a look at snubs and surprises

The Power of the Dog led the Oscar nominations Tuesday, but plenty of other high-profile contenders fell short. Here, the Projectionist muses on the morning’s most startling surprises and omissions. Kristen Stewart gets the royal treatment. Kristen Stewart’s role as Princess Diana in Spencer is the sort of thing Oscar voters usually rush to crown: It’s a juicy, transformative lead in a biopic, performed by a famous actress who has successfully leapt from blockbusters to prestige films. Then came a shocking snub from the Screen Actors Guild, followed by another shutout from BAFTA, and pundits worried whether she’d get nominated at all. Still, Stewart was game, continuing to do press and awards-season round tables, and the 31-year-old actress was rewarded Tuesday morning with her very first Oscar nomination. Lady Gaga and Jared Leto are shut out.

House of Gucci was stripped to its studs Tuesday, as former winners Lady Gaga and Jared Leto were both snubbed by the academy. Few performances this year were talked about more — both by audiences and by the two actors themselves — and the red carpet will be a little lesser for their absence. (Hey, nobody said the Oscars were particularly ethical … but they are fair.) Drive My Car overperforms. Coming out of last summer’s Cannes Film Festival, no one had tagged Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car as a major Oscar spoiler: Instead, films like Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero and Julia Ducournau’s Titane had all the buzz. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Dolby Theater: A year-end surge from critics’ groups put Hamaguchi’s contemplative three-hour drama in the thick of the awards conversation, thanks to high-profile best-film wins from the critics in New York and Los Angeles. Off that momentum, Drive My Car managed an astounding four Oscar nominations, with citations in picture, director, adapted screenplay and international film. Spider-Man: No Way Home is snubbed. There was no bigger film last year than Spider-Man: No Way Home — in fact, with a domestic gross of more than $748 million so far, there are only three other films that have ever been bigger. As the superhero movie kept raking in cash, the drumbeat grew louder that if the Oscars really wanted to reflect the year in film, they should honour one of the few movies that kept theatres open at all. And the academy did … but only with a nomination in visual effects. A best-picture nomination proved well outside the web-slinger’s reach. The director of Dune goes missing. [caption id=“attachment_10096431” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Denis Villeneuve and Timothee Chalamet on the sets of Dune (2021) | Courtesy Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros. Pictures.[/caption] The academy’s directing branch is often dazzled by technical achievement, and a filmmaker who can wield blockbuster scale in the service of a soulful story usually has a leg up over more intimate fare. That’s why it’s startling that this year’s best-director race didn’t make room for Denis Villeneuve, especially since his sci-fi film Dune did score 10 nominations in a host of categories. But history was made elsewhere in that category, as Jane Campion became the first woman to earn two directing nominations (for The Power of the Dog and 1993’s The Piano) and West Side Story filmmaker Steven Spielberg became the first person to be nominated in that category in six different decades. Two couples were nominated. Not only did real-life partners Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons score their first Oscar nominations this year for The Power of the Dog, so did Penélope Cruz (Parallel Mothers) and Javier Bardem (Being the Ricardos), the rare married couple to have already won before. Even better: It’s a four-category split, as Cruz and Bardem were nominated in the lead races while Dunst and Plemons continued the spread in the supporting categories. Talk about a double date! Kenneth Branagh makes history. Even before Belfast, Branagh was an Oscar favourite, collecting five nominations over the course of his career in categories as varied as director, actor, supporting actor, adapted screenplay and live-action short film. But Tuesday morning’s collection of nods for the black-and-white film Belfast vaulted Branagh to a surprising Oscar record: He is now the first person to be nominated in seven categories, having added citations for best picture and original screenplay to his haul. (Hopefully that makes up for a few surprising Belfast snubs in editing and cinematography.) Flee scores the hat trick. Look, it’s hard enough to earn just one Oscar nomination, as so many of the morning’s snubbed artists can attest. That makes what Flee just accomplished all the more remarkable: This animated documentary about an Afghan refugee is now the first film ever to receive Oscar nominations for documentary, animated film and international film all in the same year. A win in any of those categories seems unlikely, but at least when the makers of Flee claim it’s an honour just to be nominated, you’ll know that they mean it. Kyle Buchanan c.2022 The New York Times Company