Oscars 2023: What Andrea Riseborough’s controversial nomination reveals - Vox.com

Bright and early on the morning of January 24, 2023, as Riz Ahmed and Alison Williams named the Oscar nominees for Best Actress, the results were, more or less, as expected.

Most people who’d heard of the movie knew of it because of a strange grassroots campaign that seemed to emerge out of nowhere a week or two prior, when everyone from Charlize Theron to Howard Stern seemed to start posting on Twitter about the film, a small indie that had opened in October in a few theaters to critical acclaim but relatively little fanfare.

Some observers complained, noting that previous favorites for the slot — Danielle Deadwyler in Till and Viola Davis in The Woman King — appeared to have been knocked out by the groundswell of support.

Andrea Riseborough doesn’t appear to have been knocking on doors personally, but To Leslie director Michael Morris’s wife, the actress Mary McCormack, reportedly beat the bushes on her behalf.

(Perhaps most ironically, the modern-day template for campaigns that cost millions of dollars and sometimes employ dirty tactics was created, more or less single-handedly, by none other than Harvey Weinstein.)

The hype-and-fear cycle begins years ahead of the actual election, as if it’s an epic live sports showdown and not a sober civic ritual designed to produce justice and fairness.