When it comes to Oscar nominations, the Academy he is often wrong. I'm not going to waste too much time regurgitating all the ways the awards show messed things up, because I think it's common knowledge at this point that more often than not, the Oscars aren't really about rewarding the most deserving art of the year. Instead, films that get nominated (and win) often do so thanks to hard campaign work by studios and PR people. Recency bias is also a huge problem—films shown to voters at the end of the year tend to get all the glory, while films released earlier are overlooked. Moreover, anonymous voters will repeatedly admit that more often than not, they tend to vote for movies that their friends have worked on, rather than things that actually deserve credit. With all that in mind, I try not to let the Oscars get me down.

"Nickel Boys," Ramel Ross' adaptation of Colson Whitehead's novel, has been filmed one of the best movies of 2024. And yet, I was fully prepared for the Academy to overlook him, primarily because of that indeed The folks at Amazon MGM Studios seem to have done a poor job of promoting the film. So it was a pleasant surprise to see the film get a well-deserved Best Picture nomination on its own when the nominees were announced (you can find the full list of nominations here). And yet, "The Nickelodeon Boys" still suffered an incredible transgression: it was snubbed for a Best Cinematography nomination. Again, I try not to get too upset about the Oscars. But I have to ask: how the hell could this happen? If any movie from 2024 deserves a Best Cinematography award, it's Nickelodeon. What cinematographer Jomo Frey does with the film is nothing short of stunning, and the cinematography voting arm of the Academy should be frankly ashamed for not giving Frey a nomination.

When it came time to adapt Whitehead's novel, which is about two young black teenagers imprisoned in a brutal Florida reform school in the 1960s, director Ramel Ross decided to shoot the entire film in POV, similar to the technique he used for his documentary. . County Hale this morning, this evening." While some people might consider this approach gimmicky, it works elegantly in The Nickel Boys. Like Ross said EW"That challenge raised the images and the concept to be even more humanistic." The end result also feels completely unique and unlike any film you've seen before. To be clear, The Nickelodeon Boys is not the first film to use the POV style. The 1947 film noir The Lady in the Lake was shot in POV style, as was the 2015 goofy action flick Hard Henry. And yet Ross, working with cinematographer Jomo Frey, often feels like he's inventing something new here.

The film gets us used to his style from the jump, showing us the early years of the main character Ellwood growing up in the Jim Crow South. We see Elwood reflected in windows and other objects, but it will be a while before we finally see his face in full. This happens when the film suddenly switches perspective from Ellwood to Turner, another student at Nickel Academy. Once this happens, Nickel Boys frequently cuts back and forth between the two perspectives (while occasionally cutting forward in time and also integrating other types of media, such as film clips and web pages). All of this works to put us squarely in the headspace of the characters and experience the world of the film as they experience it. It never feels gimmicky, it just feels genuine.

To achieve the look of the film, the actors often had cameras strapped to their bodies. But there was more to creating the POV style of the film than simply pointing and shooting. Talking to Film independentFrey said that when he and Ross talked about the visual style of the film, "it wasn't a POV as much as it was what we call a 'sensitive image.' Frey continued:

"It was an image that felt connected to a real body, a real body that had real stakes and a body moving through a community in a system that is inherently hostile to their existence." We wanted the image to be immersive, to be inside the scene and even try to break even the layer of dissociation that the audience is traditionally allowed to have with more traditional third-person cinema We wanted to invite the audience into the body of the young black boy moving through the Jim Crow South."

All this raised questions about how to pull this off. As Frey said, “(I)f we record a sensitive perspective, what is an establishment? What is an intersection? What is a transition? How do you move through space? How do you move through time? Is this a memory? Or is this real life happening to a character and we're just going between the moments that matter most to him?" In addition to all of this, Frey added that “View could never precede action. He always responded to action."

All of this could have gone horribly wrong, resulting in a film that felt, well, gimmicky. And yet, Nickel Boys soars to incredible heights through the power of its imagery. To not get attention for it through an Oscar nomination is a huge disappointment. But no matter: despite this oversight, I firmly believe that Nickel Boys will remain something important—and groundbreaking. Time will be kind to the film, even if the Academy wasn't.