Deborah Davis with Tony McAll PostsNamara (Photo credit: David Fisher/Shutterstock)
Screenwriter Tony McNamara and production designer Fiona Crombie have scored their first Academy Award nominations for director Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite.
McNamara and co-writer Deborah Davis are in contention for best original screenplay while Crombie is nominated for best production design, shared with her colleague Alice Felton for set decoration.
Fox Searchlight’s The Favorite and Netflix’s Roma lead the field with 10 nominations apiece, followed by Warner Bros’ A Star Is Born and Annapurna Pictures’ Vice with eight.
Disney/Marvel’s Black Panther scored seven, although not for director Ryan Coogler, and Focus Features’ BlacKkKlansman got six.
The contenders for best picture are Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Favourite, Green Book, Roma, A Star is Born and Vice.
Advocates for gender equality will be incensed about the total absence of nominations for female directors, cinematographers, film editors, composers and visual effects artists.
In the acting categories there are triple nods for The Favourite‘s cast – Olivia Colman in lead and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz in supporting; A Star is Born’s Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga as well as Sam Elliott for supporting; and Vice‘s Christian Bale in lead and Sam Rockwell and Amy Adams for supporting.
The other nominees for original screenplay are First Reformed (Paul Schrader), Green Book (Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly), Roma (Alfonso Cuarón) and Vice (Adam McKay).
When Davis set out 20 years ago to write an original script, then titled Balance of Power, she was interested in the vital shift in Britain from a despotic monarchy to a constitutional monarch, she told Deadline.com.
McNamara said: “Yorgos had Deborah’s script and basically was looking for a writer to come in and re-engineer it, to make it a very complex story, but make it feel fresh and contemporary at the same time. He’d read stuff that made him think I could do that, I watched Dogtooth and Alps and really loved them and felt like our sensibilities were very similar.
“So, we just talked about it for a while and then started working on it. I was in Australia and he was in London, so we’d work by Skype and meet in various places over the five or six years it took us to do it.”
The London-based Crombie, whose credits include Mary Magdalene, Macbeth, Truth and Una, told Deadline: “It was a low budget film and we basically had to create a world of privilege and luxury so the challenge for us was how to do that economically and make choices of where to spend our money.
“We had to try to give a richness to the film so we had to make smart choices about where to put our efforts. We had a tight color palette. We used gold fabric.”
Also in the running for best production design are Black Panther (production design Hannah Beachler; set decoration Jay Hart), First Man (Nathan Crowley; Kathy Lucas), Mary Poppins Returns (John Myhre; Gordon Sim) and Roma (Eugenio Caballero; Bárbara Enríquez).
The 91st Academy Awards will be presented on Sunday February 24 US time at the Dolby Theatre in LA.
Go here for the full list of nominations.