At the end of the day, or more precisely on the morning of Thursday, January 15, Selma might squeak by with a Best Picture nomination. Perhaps a last-minute sympathy surge will manifest from Academy members who were shocked it didn’t make the PGA’s Zanuck nominee list. But after this morning’s stunning PGA exclusion, I think the game is pretty much over. Selma screeners were slow in arriving when they arrived at all, the “disparagement of LBJ’s role” meme stuck to the wall, and some people apparently decided that they didn’t want to do the African-American suffering thing two years in a row after 12 Years A Slave. The current situation, in the wake of the PGA snub, is that Selma has no chance to win the Best Picture Oscar, and is apparently in some kind of struggle to even be nominated. But it might slip in. Who knows?
How long does it take a DVD duplication facility to crank out thousands of discs and pop them into jackets, and how time-consuming is the mailing process after that? It shouldn’t take that long, should it? I’m hearing it was pretty much DuVernay’s fault for taking a long while to finish post-production despite a nearly complete version (sans closing credits) showing at AFI Fest on November 11th. (On 12.5 Paramount’s Lea Yardum told BFCA members that Selma “has just recently been finalized…therefore we are unable to send you screeners.”) And I don’t know whose responsibility it would be except Paramount’s for taking as long as it did to send out Selma screeners, and for sending them only to Academy members when they were finally ready.
Balloting for Academy nominations closes on Thursday at 5 pm so DuVernay snagging (or not snagging) a DGA nomination on Tuesday, 1.13, won’t mean a thing in terms of Oscar noms. What matters, as In Contention‘s Kris Tapley pointed out this morning, is that four industry groups have announced nominations so far this year: SAG, ACE, ADG (i.e., Art Directors Guild) and the PGA. And only five films have been recognized by all four — Birdman, Gone Girl, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game and Nightcrawler. Selma has been hyped to heaven by its Oscar-blogging friends, but when push has come to shove it has not been cutting the mustard.