As the award show season comes in full swing, the nominees for the 95th Academy Awards have been announced. The Oscars have hosted the best films and film creators since 1929, and the award show was first televised in 1953 when The Greatest Show on Earth won Best Picture. The ceremony has since continued to be televised for all Americans to watch and appreciate the wonders and successes of the cinema industry. Continuing this tradition, the 95th Academy Awards will be broadcast on March 12, 2023. The event will be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, the well-known host of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, for the third time, making him fifth in the rankings for the most times a single celebrity has hosted this program.

Although the official Oscars ceremony is not until March, the nominations for each award category were announced on January 24, 2023. The nominations and winners of the Oscars are chosen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Within the Academy, there are several thousand eligible voters who belong to one of the seventeen branches that nominate individuals and films for the various categories of the awards. The members of each branch specialize in the category for which they vote; for example, actors vote for the nominations for Best Actor and editors vote for Best Film Editing. Everyone also votes for the nominations for Best Picture as well as the winners of each category.

To be nominated for Best Picture, films must meet the standards of two of these categories: On-Screen Representation, Themes and Narratives; Creative Leadership and Project Team; Industry Access; and Opportunities and Audience Development. Everything Everywhere All At Once, Elvis, The Fabelmans, All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Banshees of Inisherin, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, Triangle of Sadness, and Women Talking were all nominated for Best Picture. A total of ten out of all the movies released this year have been put up for this award, but according to film critic Clayton Davis of Variety Magazine, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a frontrunner for this accolade.

Many films this year have been nominated for several different awards, most notably Everything Everywhere All At Once, which received 11 nominations for various categories, including Best Picture and nominations for several of the movie’s actors and actresses. Two of the actresses in this film, Jamie Lee Curtis and Stephanie Hsu, were both nominated for Best Supporting Actress, which has only occurred 28 times throughout the history of the Oscars. Most of the other nominees for Best Picture have also been put up for multiple other awards, as seen in The Banshees of Inisherin’s, All Quiet on the Western Front’s, and Avatar: The Way of Water’s nine nominations each.

Several films, actors, and directors have also made history with their nominations. For example, Angela Bassett became the first actor or actress to be nominated for their performance in a Marvel movie. She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her powerful acting performance in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In addition to this, for the first time in the history of the Oscars, two sequels, Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of the Water, have been nominated for Best Picture. Steven Spielberg has now tied William Wyler’s record for the most Best Picture nominations in Oscars history, with his movie The Fabelmans being his thirteenth nomination for the award. Spielberg is also the first director to be nominated for Best Director in six different decades, and he is now tied with Martin Scorsese for the second most Best Director nominations with this film being his ninth.

Be sure to tune into the 95th Academy Awards on Sunday, March 12, 2023, at 8 PM on ABC to see which films and individuals win these prestigious awards and make history!

Information retrieved from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Rolling Stone Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, AwardsWatch, The Collider, and Variety Magazine.