Nominated for Nothing: Come on, Academy, no love for the humble beauty of C'mon C'mon ?
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They're destined to score zero Academy Awards, but they won our attention throughout a year (and awards season) like no other. Ahead of the 94th Oscars ceremony on March 27, EW is breaking down the year's best movies, performances, and directorial achievements that were nominated for nothing.
The film: The latest from writer-director and autobiographical docudramatist Mike Mills (Beginners, 20th Century Women), C'mon C'mon is a typically heartfelt look at the agony and ecstasy of parenting. Joaquin Phoenix stars as Johnny, a radio journalist who agrees to look after his 9-year-old nephew, Jesse (Woody Norman), while his semi-estranged sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) deals with a crisis. Uncle and nephew end up traveling from Jesse's L.A. home to New York City and New Orleans, forming and deepening a bond as Johnny struggles to navigate the everyday challenges of caring for a small, mostly helpless human being — and the particular challenges of dealing with Jesse's eccentric, precocious personality.
There's not much of a plot to speak of, but Mills fills out the movie by including interviews with real kids about their fears, frustrations, and feelings. It adds up to a sensitive portrait of children and adults just trying to make their way through life, with all the challenges, heartbreak, and clashes with other human beings that go with it.
A24 Woody Norman and Joaquin Phoenix in 'C'mon C'mon'
Why it wasn't nominated: Mills' films have won Oscar voters' hearts before: Christopher Plummer won Best Supporting Actor for 2011's Beginners, while 20th Century Women nabbed a Best Original Screenplay nom in 2017. Why no love, then, for C'mon C'mon?
There are a few possible reasons. Maybe there was only room for one black-and-white movie with a precocious kid in the race. Perhaps C'mon C'mon's fall release, amid a deluge of potential awards contenders, doomed it to slip through the cracks. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that its performances, scale, and ambition were quite simply too small.
C'mon C'mon is exactly the opposite of everything the Oscars usually recognize — low-key, understated, and gentle, a human-sized movie about everyday people living unextraordinary lives. Phoenix's performance is his most subtle work since, well, maybe ever; he's rarely been allowed to look like himself on screen, to perform without the dressings-up of a physical transformation (the emaciation of The Master and Joker; the intimidating bulk of You Were Never Really Here) or showy affectation. As great as (most of) those performances were, playing a regular person, for lack of a better term, with no affectations to speak of, is a major acting challenge of its own, one that's harder for casual observers to easily appreciate, and one that the Academy rarely, if ever, rewards. The qualities that make C'mon C'mon so special are likely the same qualities that quashed its Oscar chances.
A24 Gaby Hoffmann and Joaquin Phoenix in 'C'mon C'mon'
Why history will remember it better than the Academy did: Mills' films are the kind of movies that endure: humane works that deal with timeless subjects like love, empathy, the bonds of family, and parent-child relationships in thoughtful, multifaceted ways. Decades hence, when the comic book movie craze has at last receded, publications like this one will ponder why Phoenix won his Oscar for playing the Joker and not for his graceful performance in C'mon C'mon.
They'll ponder, too, why Hoffmann's nuanced portrayal of a struggling mom didn't get more attention at the time. Like the Oscar-nominated The Lost Daughter, C'mon C'mon deals with the frustrations of motherhood in a realistic, empathetic fashion that still feels unusual for mainstream entertainment. "Mothers cannot help but be in touch with the most difficult aspects of any fully lived life," Phoenix's Johnny intones at one point, quoting Jacqueline Rose's Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. "Along with the passion and pleasure, it is the secret knowledge they share. Why on earth should it fall to them to paint things bright and innocent and safe?" As our ideas and biases about parenting continue to evolve, C'mon C'mon will stand as a profoundly human treatment of that elemental topic, ready and waiting for rediscovery.
EW's countdown to the 2022 Oscars has everything you're looking for, from our expert predictions and in-depth Awardist interviews with this year's nominees to nostalgia and our takes on the movies and actors we wish had gotten more Oscars love. You can check it all out at The Awardist.
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