The Academy Awards are not fair. They never have been. A current example demonstrates that truth.
Over the past few months I have, on more than a few occasions, had it suggested to me that “another Oscar for Cillian” is on the way. No?
Off in the olden days we got overexcited about the Oscar prospects of Irish films that were never likely to land spectacularly with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Disappointed voices on the radio bemoaned The Field and Angela’s Ashes receiving just one nomination apiece (for actor and score, respectively).
With the brute-force tool that is the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator, we can now go back and confirm that neither film got great notices. “What we might accept on the stage now looks contrived and artificial,” Roger Ebert wrote of The Field in a one-star review. Critics may well have been talking through their back channels, but those titles got pretty much what contemporaneous commentators would have guessed.
The current case is different. In many respects, Murphy’s performance in Small Things Like These, Tim Mielants’s searing screen version of a Claire Keegan story, is perfectly positioned for an Oscar nomination. The film premiered as the opening title of the Berlinale, one of the big three European film festivals, where Emily Watson, who plays a sinister mother superior, won best supporting performance. It took a while to get US distribution, but reviews have been uniformly excellent across the world.
And nobody can suggest Murphy is not on the Oscar radar. He is, for Pete’s sake, the current holder of, as it were, the best-actor championship. When the next turn by such a winner receives raves after opening a major festival, he is usually in the race. “A marvel of a performance,” Sheila O’Malley wrote on rogerebert.com. (The late critic still has a presence.) “Murphy’s quiet, almost small and yet grand performance [carries] the story every step of the way,” Richard Roeper agreed in the Chicago Sun-Times (where Ebert once wrote).
So it’s not crazy for domestic punters to wonder about “another Oscar for Cillian”. And the nominations are not until January 17th. So there is still hope. Right? Well, it’s hard to express what a cold station the ongoing awards season currently feels for Murphy and for Small Things Like These. Wins from critics’ groups have been few and far between. Opening awards such as the Golden Globes have failed to notice film or actor. Gold Derby, the busiest awards site, rates him as 20th in its list of likely best-actor winners. He is behind the likes of Keith Kupferer in the barely seen Ghostlight and Dev Patel in the brutal, all-action Monkey Man.
What the heck is going on here? There’s a lot of media guff in gong season, but Gold Derby’s excellent Awards Magnet podcast, hosted by Joyce Eng and Christopher Rosen, offers at least one amusingly self-deprecating strain of good sense. “As we know from years of history, the quality of the performance is only one metric when it comes to the Oscars,” Rosen tells me. “And sometimes not even the major one. Murphy has that, and there is the afterglow possibility that was in play for him maybe six months ago.”
That all sounds good. People like the film. They know who he is. All good?
“But Small Things Like These is an apt title for the movie,” Rosen continues. “It seems, unfortunately, almost invisible.”
The awards campaign matters. Colm Bairéad and the team behind An Cailín Ciúin shook hands up and down southern California as they made their way to a best-international-feature nomination two years ago. The Kneecap posse, currently shortlisted in the same race for 2025, caught Hollywood’s attention early by driving a defaced PSNI Land Rover to the premiere at Sundance.
But international feature is a tighter, less starry category. Voting regulations are complex. The performance nominations are, in contrast, determined by the largest branch of the academy – the actors – and so, for less prominent titles, require a bit more politicking and a bit more gladhanding. It’s not fair. It’s not right.
As Rosen notes, the performance itself is just one element in a matrix of influences. It helps if your film makes money, and, though a hit here and in the UK, Small Things Like These has taken only modest sums in the US. It helps if you can gather flash and glamour about you. Unfortunately, Small Things Like These is a quiet story set in a dark place.
But Keegan’s tale allows the possibility of pocket miracles. Just two years ago, after a celebrity-heavy campaign, Andrea Riseborough came from nowhere to secure a best-actress nomination. Stranger things than Cillian Redux have occurred. Just not very often.
