2017 Oscar Nominations: La La Land Ties All-Time Record with 14

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Well, it happened. La La Land defied some odds and hit 14 nominations today, tying it with the all-time Oscar record. That total puts it in alongside Titanic and All About Eve as the most-nominated films ever. The modern-day musical hit Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Original Screenplay, Film Editing, Cinematography, Production Design, Costume Design, Original Score, Original Song (x2), Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. The film was already the frontrunner to lead the nominations today as well as to win Best Picture (and more) next month.

Arrival was the next with eight but with one big shock; its star, Amy Adams, was not on the list. After getting every major precursor nominations leading up to today (Critics Choice, Golden Globe, SAG, BAFTA), Adams became the only actor to hit all of those and miss out. The sci-fi drama landed nominations in Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay and more. Its cinematography nomination for Bradford Young marks the first time in Oscar history an African-American has been nominated in that category.

The best-reviewed film of the year, Moonlight, also received eight nominations, including Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali), Supporting Actress and Adapted Screenplay. The sleeper indie hit, about the life of a gay black man from youth to adulthood, broke Oscar boundaries when one of its film editors, Joi McMillon, became the first black female ever nominated for an Oscar for Film Editing. She shares the nomination with Nat Sanders.

In the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy of all white acting nominees for the previous two years in a row, scrutiny this year was on high and to its credit, the Academy did not disappoint – there were seven non-white acting nominees today, tying 2007 (the year Forest Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson won) for the all-time record. With Ruth Negga’s nomination in Best Actress (which some had predicted), every acting category has at least one non-white performer. This obviously doesn’t fix the industry but it’s a move in the right direction as films about the lives and experiences of non-white people made up four of the nine Best Picture nominees. Viola Davis (Fences) became the most-nominated black woman nominated in any category with three. Her supporting actress nomination, where she is the clear frontrunner to win, is her third overall.  The Documentary Feature category also features three of five nominees detailing everything from civil rights in the south in the 1960’s, the prison system that favors imprisoning black men and an 8-hour epic on O.J. Simpson.

First-time nominees heavily populated today’s list and in some cases dominated it. In Best Director, all nominees, save Mel Gibson, are first-time nominees in that category. Three of the five also wrote the films they directed. Gibson’s addition to this list kept Lion‘s Garth Davis from getting in (he got DGA) and gives the category its sole ‘veteran.’ Some thought Martin Scorsese was going to sneak in here but Silence managed just a single nomination, Cinematography. Isabelle Huppert (Elle) defied conventional Best Actress nominee expectations and earned her first nomination today. Her film’s very darkly comic and satirical take on a post-rape revenge scenario gave many predictors pause. But her strength with the critics (she won New York, Los Angeles, National Society of Film Critics and a dozen more) plus her Golden Globe win secured her place in Oscar history.

The Original Score category is teeming with fresh blood, a rarity from a branch that doesn’t always welcome new talent. Four of the five nominees are first-timers: Jackie‘s Mica Levi, La La Land‘s Justin Hurwitz, Lion‘s Dustin O’Halloran and Hauschka and Moonlight‘s Nicholas Britell. Only Passengers‘s Thomas Newman is a previous nominee (13, at that).

Amy Adams wasn’t the only snub today, the Golden Globe-winning and 9-time BAFTA-nominee Nocturnal Animals wound up with just a single mention – and not even for the person that won the Globe. Michael Shannon, who scooped up a couple of critics wins but didn’t manage a single major precursor nomination other than Critics Choice, replaced his co-star Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Supporting Actor. This is Shannon’s second nomination and the second time he’s pulled it off with little to no mentions leading up to Oscar nom morning. Annette Bening (20th Century Women) was left on the outside looking in today but her film did earn an Original Screenplay nomination for director Mike Mills.

Stay tuned for more facts, trivia and stats throughout the day. For now, here are the 2017 Oscar nominations for the 89th Academy Awards.

BEST PICTURE
Arrival
Fences
Hacksaw Ridge
Hell Or High Water
Hidden Figures
La La Land
Lion
Manchester By The Sea
Moonlight

BEST DIRECTOR
Denis Villeneuve – Arrival
Mel Gibson – Hacksaw Ridge
Damien Chazelle – La La Land
Kenneth Lonergan – Manchester By The Sea
Barry Jenkins – Moonlight

BEST ACTOR
Casey Affleck – Manchester By The Sea
Andrew Garfield – Hacksaw Ridge
Ryan Gosling – La La Land
Viggo Mortensen – Captain Fantastic
Denzel Washington – Fences

BEST ACTRESS
Isabelle Huppert – Elle
Ruth Negga – Loving
Natalie Portman – Jackie
Emma Stone – La La Land
Meryl Streep – Florence Foster Jenkins

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Mahershala Ali – Moonlight
Jeff Bridges – Hell Or High Water
Lucas Hedges – Manchester By The Sea
Dev Patel – Lion
Michael Shannon – Nocturnal Animals

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Viola Davis – Fences
Naomie Harris – Moonlight
Nicole Kidman – Lion
Octavia Spencer – Hidden Figures
Michelle Williams – Manchester By The Sea

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Arrival
Fences
Hidden Figures
Lion
Moonlight

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Hell Or High Water
La La Land
The Lobster
Manchester By The Sea
20th Century Women

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Kubo and The Two Strings
Moana
My Life As A Zucchini
The Red Turtle
Zootopia

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Fire At Sea
I Am Not Your Negro
Life, Animated
OJ: Made In America
13TH

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Land Of Mine – Denmark
A Man Called Ove – Sweden
The Salesman – Iran
Tanna – Australia
Toni Erdmann – Germany

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Arrival
La La Land
Lion
Moonlight
Silence

BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Allied
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them
Florence Foster Jenkins
Jackie
La La Land

BEST FILM EDITING
Arrival
Hacksaw Ridge
Hell Or High Water
La La Land
Moonlight

BEST MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLING
A Man Called Ove
Star Trek Beyond
Suicide Squad

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Arrival
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them
Hail, Caesar!
La La Land
Passengers

BEST SOUND EDITING
Arrival
Deepwater Horizon
Hacksaw Ridge
La La Land
Sully

BEST SOUND MIXING
Arrival
Hacksaw Ridge
La La Land
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Deepwater Horizon
Doctor Strange
The Jungle Book
Kubo and The Two Strings
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Jackie
La La Land
Lion
Moonlight
Passengers

BEST ORIGINAL SONG
Audition – La La Land
Can’t Stop The Feeling – Trolls
City Of Stars – La La Land
The Empty Chair – Jim: The James Foley Story
How Far I’ll Go – Moana

BEST ANIMATED SHORT
Blind Vaysha
Borrowed Time
Pear Cider & Cigarettes
Pearl
Piper

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT
Extremis
4.1 Miles
Joe’s Violin
Watani: My Homeland
The White Helmets

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT
Ennemis Interiors
La Femme et le TGV
Silent Nights
Sing
Timecode

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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