Grownups Seize the Spotlight in 2024 Oscar Nominations

Young moviegoers may flock to see superheroes in spandex, but the kinds of films that last, and tend to win Oscars, are often the favorites of viewers over 50. The 2024 Oscar nominations also proved the clout of grownup talents in the industry’s most prestigious competition. Eight out of 20 nominations in the acting categories went to actors over 50 (compared to nine last year). There were some appalling snubs, too, including worthy grownup candidates.

Here’s a look at how grownups did in the Oscar nominations:

The best pictures were the grownup pictures

Every one of the 10 contenders for best picture was substantially driven by older audiences and their good taste — yes, even Barbie, the year’s biggest hit, which appealed to every generation. The most-honored movies were arguably the smartest: the brainy, talky Oppenheimer, with 13 nominations, the bizarre, oddly innocently sexually explicit, highly original feminist fable Poor Things (11 noms) and Killers of the Flower Moon (10 noms). And all the rest are worth a grownup’s time: American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, The Holdovers, Maestro, Past Lives and The Zone of Interest. This is a banner year for quality cinema.

Four of the five nominees for best director were grownups

Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese, 81, Oppenheimer’s Christopher Nolan, 53, Poor Things’ Yorgos Lanthimos, 50, and The Zone of Interest’s Jonathan Glazer, 58, were recognized for the kind of art-house movies that could not survive without the 50-plus audience.

A film about a 60-plus veteran was a win for two 60-plus veterans

Both Annette Bening, 65, and Jodie Foster, 61, earned kudos for the biopic Nyad, Bening as the celebrated athlete Diana Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Key West, Florida, at 64, and Foster as the coach who cheered her on. Foster won two Oscars before turning 30, but it’s as perilous for an actress to be in her 60s as it is for an athlete. They were the only grownup nominees this year in female acting categories. Their honor is a win for everyone who isn’t 30 anymore. (And of course both won AARP Movies for Grownups Awards this year, too.)

Most contenders for best actor were in their AARP years

As usual, male actors faced less age discrimination in the Oscar race than women did. The Holdovers’ Paul Giamatti, 56, in his second movie for director Alexander Payne, 62, got the nomination he deserved but did not get for their first, 2004’s Sideways. Payne thinks Giamatti lost then because he made it look too easy — he was so believable as a neurotic wine snob, voters assumed he was playing himself. This time, nobody could deny the hilarity and poignancy of his prep-school teacher performance.

Jeffrey Wright, 58, aced the role of an embittered author in American Fiction, a high-IQ satire shot in 26 days. And the most surprising and gratifying nomination was Colman Domingo, 54, as Martin Luther King Jr. adviser Bayard Rustin in Rustin. Civil rights leader Rustin was long forgotten because he was gay, Domingo is only the second openly gay actor ever nominated for playing a gay character (after Ian McKellen in 1999’s Gods and Monsters), and Domingo was no shoo-in for a nomination this year. But he made it, a win for the 50-plus and others. (Domingo also won this year’s AARP Movies for Grownups Award for best actor.)