Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk didn’t receive a Best Picture or Best Director Oscar nomination Tuesday morning, leaving many people feeling like the film was snubbed.
Regina King earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role as Sharon Rivers in If Beale Street Could Talk, and the film was also nominated for Best Original Score and Best Adapted Screenplay. But the movie, adapted from James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, was expected to be recognized in the more coveted categories.
“They did #BealeStreet so dirty. I prepared for this, still very disappointing,” film critic Rebecca Theodore-Vachon tweeted.
“GREEN BOOK getting a Best Picture nom & BEALE STREET not getting one tells you all you need to know about narratives people are comfortable with these days,” Twitter user David Chen wrote. “Ones in which the oppressor & the oppressed can both be heroes, & where the extent of the suffering need not be confronted.”
"If Beale Street Could Talk" didn't get nominated for "Best Picture" and no "Best Director" nom for Barry Jenkins... #Oscars
“One silver lining to global warming is that our children will probably be too busy scrambling for high ground to ask us how we could possibly have given a Best Picture nomination to VICE but not IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK,” David Ehrlich joked on Twitter.
Jenkins, meanwhile, congratulated King and Beale Street’s composer Nicholas Britell on Twitter.
“I’m always overseas when noms come out and I don’t watch. Instead my publicist slips notes under my door and I find them when I return,” he said.
“MUCH love from the @BealeStreet family to QUEEN @ReginaKing and my right hand @NicholasBritell on their Oscar Noms!!!”
It takes a village 💙♥️🖤🙌🏿
If Beale Street Could Talk is Jenkins’ latest film following Moonlight (2016), which won the Oscar for Best Picture after a controversial moment when La La Land was originally announced as the winner.
“I do recognize that there’s something almost radical about how vibrant and ecstatic the love between these two people is,” Jenkins told BuzzFeed News about the portrayal of love in If Beale Street Could Talk. “I think that with both this film and the previous film [Moonlight], there are just some very simple, everyday things that I’ve seen in my life, you’ve seen in your life, but we haven’t seen maybe presented in a certain way, we haven’t really seen it on a screen that’s 40 feet tall.”