Carey Mulligan fesses up: Awards matter (and Greta Gerwig wasn’t the only one snubbed)

Carey Mulligan, who is nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars for her performance as Felicia Montealegre Bernstein in Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro,” did her part to wave away any suggestion that performers don’t care about awards. An actor who claims not to care is “100% lying,” Mulligan said in an interview with The Times of London.

An Oscar nomination “is just the coolest thing,” the 38-year-old said. And she ought to know, as “Maestro” is her third such recognition. Mulligan was nominated in 2020 for “Promising Young Woman,” one of five nominations for the film, which won writer-director Emerald Fennell a Best Original Screenplay trophy, and 2009’s “An Education,” one of three nominations for the romantic drama co-starring Peter Sarsgaard. 

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The Oscars are special, Mulligan continued, “because it’s from your peers. It’s wicked.” As far as her colleagues who are “100% lying,” she says she doesn’t believe those who say “it’s just the work that counts.”

With that, she counts herself as one who is perturbed that Greta Gerwig was not one of this year’s five nominated directors for Gerwig’s work on the wildly popular film “Barbie.”

“I’m gutted for Greta because I don’t know what else you can do as a director to get nominated,” she said. “You make a critically acclaimed film that’s also an incredible global success, and yet you don’t get nominated?” Gerwig was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay with Noah Baumbach and, of course, the film itself was nominated for Best Picture. Gerwig (and Baumbach) are listed as executive producers on the film, not “producer” producers, so even if the Mattel toy drops a bomb on “Oppenheimer” or locks “The Holdovers” inside their snowbound school, they won’t be ones holding a Best Picture statue on stage. (That’ll be the film’s star Margot Robbie.)

Mulligan also grumbled a bit about “Saltburn,” written and directed by Fennell, getting blanked by the Oscars. She recalled attending the premiere with “1,700 people having just the greatest f–king experience” and how the lewd storyline has such a lingering social footprint, but “people didn’t know how to respond.”

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