Nominees for the Best Picture award faced stiff competition this year, but The Academy can only crown Chloé Zhao's 'Nomadland.'
The acclaimed road-trip tale Nomadland was able to captivate The Academy’s heart this year as it bagged the Best Picture award, one of Hollywood’s top trophies. The film competed with Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal, David Fincher’s Mank, Lee Chung’s Minari, Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, Florian Zeller’s The Father, Shaka King’s Judas and The Black Messiah, and Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of Chicago 7.
Directed by Chloé Zhao, the movie stars Frances McDormand as a woman who lives in a van and leaves her hometown of Empire, Nevada to travel across the American West.
The strikingly poignant and poetic film shed light on the plight of a woman who lost everything during the Great Recession. It was inspired by Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, but Zhao has completely taken over the movie by writing its screenplay.
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“We put our heads together in this little bubble and didn’t really think about the outside world,” Zhao said in an interview last year. "I am not the kind of filmmaker who just makes films. I have to be in love with my subject matter and want to learn more about it. Someone once said to me that passion doesn’t sustain, but curiosity does. I have to be excited by little things I discover along the way."
Nomadland has garnered several awards including the Best Motion Picture in the 2021 Golden Globes, Best Film in the 2021 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards, and Best Film in the 2021 Atlanta Film Critics Circle.
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