You Really Messed Up, Searchlight Pictures.

Every year, there is always at least one movie I adore from the prior year (usually more than one) that receives zero Academy Award nominations. Sometimes it’s because the movie is just too outré to ever realistically attain mainstream plaudits. Other times, I’m simply out-of-step with a critical and industry consensus that wasn’t as crazy about the film as I was. And then, I have to accept the fact that distributors don’t have unlimited money and need to make judgment calls on which of their releases to promote; I was disappointed to see Focus Features decline to commit to a serious awards campaign for Armageddon Time in 2022, but that’s because they decided to go all-in on a campaign for Tár and… as much as it pains me to admit… that probably was the smarter play. I completely understand why they did that.

But sometimes, a movie could have received multiple Academy Award nominations but for the incompetence-bordering-on-outright-malice of the distributor responsible for getting their releases seen and recognized. I became acutely aware of this back in 2014, when The Immigrant (oh look, another underappreciated movie directed by James Gray!) was ignored by virtually every awards organization despite the kind of performance from Marion Cotillard that would have cakewalked to an Oscar thirty years ago. Why? Because a certain serial rapist and best friend of Candace Owens was so incensed at the director refusing a cop-out happy ending for the movie that he intentionally dumped The Immigrant onto a limited release in the U.S. early in the year with virtually no marketing campaign as punishment. It failed to receive the awards recognition it deserved because a petty, mean little manbaby didn’t get his way and decided to make an example of that film. It was passed over for recognition due to negligence from the very people responsible for getting it recognition. And that’s the kind of awards snubbing that bothers me. I’m okay with just not being aligned with the tastes of the Academy. I can accept a studio with limited resources having to make a tough choice. But flat-out failing to even give your movie a chance? To decline to do your job as a distributor? That just pisses me off.

So I have to ask the people in charge at Searchlight Pictures: what did Mona Fastvold do to make you sabotage The Testament of Ann Lee’s awards chances? You can’t fall back on the “We had to make a choice and couldn’t afford a full awards campaign for both films!” excuse, since this was your only serious awards contender from 2025. The Roses, Rental Family, and Is This Thing On? did not enjoy anywhere near the same level of critical acclaim, and even the more muted reviews (including from Joey) singled out Amanda Seyfried’s performance for breathless praise. So why in the world would you acquire something like this from the same creative team that turned a four-hour-long period piece about an architect into an Oscar-winning box office hit and then wait until the tail-end of December to give it a limited release with hardly any marketing campaign ahead of its commercial theatrical debut? You couldn’t have moved up that release to November? Give it a little more time to reach an audience outside of New York City and Los Angeles? It takes place in the pre-revolution American colonies; seems like it wouldn’t have been hard to sell that as a Thanksgiving Event, no? I personally would have been more than happy to place it among the upper tier of my own top ten list and write articles advocating for it, had you made it available earlier for the public to actually see for themselves.

I checked your YouTube channel. You put out a grand total of three promotional clips for it in December; half of what you put out promoting Is This Thing On? in the same month. Then, in January, like a lazy college freshman rushing to cobble together a ten-page final term paper the night before it’s due, you pumped out a firehose of several dozen clips and promo materials. But by that point, it was already left out of the Academy shortlists, which should have been a five-alarm fire for your marketing department. At a minimum, The Testament of Ann Lee should have been a serious contender for Best Original Score, and it didn’t even make the shortlist. Speaking of music, whose idea was it to wait until January 16^th to release the soundtrack for this movie? This is a musical. The soundtrack should have been promoted just as heavily as the film. And you waited three weeks after the film hit theaters to put the soundtrack out for public consumption.

If Pathé Distribution could score thirteen nominations for a film as racist, transphobic, narratively incoherent, and musically gruesome as Emilia Pérez, your team failing to score a single nod for this far superior movie feels less like bad luck or corporate missteps and more like an act of intentional sabotage. So is that what happened? Did someone on the leadership team watch the movie after acquiring it and thought to themselves, “Oh I don’t actually like this and don’t want to invest in its success?” Did one of your executives get huffy and angry at Seyfried exercising her First Amendment rights and decided she needed to be punished for her outspokenness? Did you get intimidated by the success of Sinners (which is, first and foremost, a musical, and I will die on this hill) and Rose Byrne cleaning up at the critics awards and decided your own musical offering starring a Best Lead Actress contender was a lost cause before it even hit theaters? Please explain what you were thinking with your neglectful promotional campaign and acting like you needed to hide The Testament of Ann Lee from the public for as long as you did. What was your plan, here? Because, to be clear, I am assigning about 80% of the blame for its Oscar snubs to you. The other 20% of the blame goes to the Main Competition jury at last year’s Venice Film Festival.

Seriously, what kind of dunderheaded jury would convince themselves that a smug, stilted dramedy as boring as Father Mother Sister Brother was more worthy of the Golden Lion than… oh, what’s that? Alexander Payne was the president of the jury? Ah, that makes sense.