Nyad, one of 15 films to receive multiple nominations at the 96th Academy Awards, came home empty-handed at the star-studded affair in Los Angeles on Sunday.
The biopic about Diana Nyad‘s infamous swim from Cuba to Florida received nominations in the Best Actress category, where Anette Bening was nominated for playing Diana Nyad; and Best Supporting Actress for Jodie Foster, who played Nyad’s business partner Bonnie Stoll.
In the Best Actress category, Emma Stone won for portraying Bella Baxter, a character who was resurrected via a brain transplant in Victorian London.
That was Bening’s 5th Oscar nomination.
In the Best Supporting Actress category, Da’Vine Joy Randolph won for her role as Mary Lamb in the movie The Holdovers. Mary Lamb is a cafeteria worker at Barton Academy whose son was killed in the Vietnam War.
That was Foster’s fifth nomination as well; she won twice for Best Actress in 1989 (The Accused) and 1992 (The Silence of the Lambs).
Nyad is a controversial figure in the open water swimming community, both over the validity of the details of her famous swim from Cuba to Florida and for her self-aggrandizing nature.
Honestly, all you OW swimmers should be celebrating that Open Water Swimming is going to have more people take it seriously…some people commenting here are self proclaimed “experts”…
At least NYAD is actually making you relevant.
Perhaps it might’ve done better if they’d modified the script so that the Nyad character did to the Rhys Ifans boat captain character what the Emma Stone character did multiple times with the Mark Ruffalo character in “Poor Things.” The Academy voters seemed to have enjoyed that immensely!
Oh no! Anyway…
From Nyad’s Facebook page on March 4, 2021, the day she announced her biopic:
Thankfully, many people saw through this classic attempt to chum for Oscars. My hope is that someday someone will make a genuinely awards-worthy film about the real Diana Nyad.
I can’t believe it got as close as it did!! Someone got bribed like crazy for it to even get two nominations.
Netflix is well known to have spent tens of millions of dollars on Oscar campaign each year. And yet they never won best Picture.
Apple TV+ did it on their first foray (Coda).
I detect schadenfreude
Hmm, that’s not how Diana Nyad remembers the night going.
I think I read her saying she actually won both best actress and best supporting actress. And I don’t mean Annette and Jodie, I mean Diana herself for both. 😂
Give it a few years, and “Nyad” will have won for best picture also…
C’mon. You know she won the 2020 election. It was stolen!
She was unavailable to collect the award in person because she was on a boat at the time.
That’s classic. About spit up my coffee on that one.