‘Nickel Boys’ Deserves Best Picture

While Emilia Perez star Karla Sofía Gascón’s racist tweets, and blackface allegations related to I’m Still Here lead actress Fernanda Torres have been grabbing headlines, the more overlooked 2025 Oscars scandal continues to be egregious nomination snubs for Black-led performances. The most notable omissions were Marianne Jean-Baptiste for Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Danielle Deadwyler for Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson, Clarence Maclin for Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor for RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys. And while Nickel Boys did receive Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay nominations, the most baffling Oscar oversights were in the technical categories: Jomo Fray for Nickel Boys' cinematography and RaMell Ross for directing and film editing. Nickel Boys is a masterpiece, and it’s here where the film is the most experimental, inventive, and alive to the possibilities of cinema. 

Ross's 2018 debut feature, the unconventional, Oscar-nominated documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, follows the life of two Black high school students from Hale County, Ala., where the documentarian and visual artist spent five years immersed in the rural Black communities as a photography teacher, capturing footage. The film bends time and linearity to craft a communal tapestry of the banality and nuance of life in the Black Belt region, as well as early Black cinema (e.g., Lime Kiln Club Field Day). Ultimately, what emerges is what Ross names his “source code” for the recordkeeping of Black southern life liberated from the dominant ways of seeing. Ross’s second feature builds upon the “empowered black data” laid forth in the contemporary through Hale County to attend to the forgotten Black boys of the Jim Crow South and its afterlives.