Nominated for Nothing: The good, the bad, and the ugly truth of The Harder They Fall

They're destined to score zero Academy Awards, but they won our attention throughout a year (and awards season) like no other. Ahead of the 94th Oscars ceremony on March 27, EW is breaking down the year's best movies, performances, and directorial achievements that were nominated for nothing

The film: Imagine a Sergio Leone Western but Black as hell and you've got singer-songwriter Jeymes Samuel's directorial debut, The Harder They Fall. A bloody tale of vengeance and redemption writ large against the American frontier, The Harder They Fall is typical Western fare, elevated by a stellar, predominately Black cast including Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Zazie Beetz, LaKeith Stanfield, Oscar-winner Regina King, and the great Delroy Lindo.

Of course, the predominate Blackness of the cast sets the film apart from other Westerns, which all but erase African Americans from that part of history. Before The Harder They Fall came out, I got into the podcast Black Cowboys and its profiles of forgotten heroes and villains, of the Wild West. And before that, HBO's Watchmen had a subplot involving the lawman Bass Reeves, the West's first Black deputy U.S. Marshall. The Harder They Fall brings to life Reeves (Lindo) and other real-life Black cowboys and girls — Nat Love (Majors), Rufus Buck (Elba), Stagecoach Mary (Beetz), Cherokee Bill (Stanfield) — while taking some creative liberties with dates and facts. It's an amazing cast, doing fantastic work, and yet nary a nomination, not even for King, by now an awards-show staple.

Immediately drawing comparisons to — but also unlike — Quentin Tarantino's Oscar-winning Django Unchained, The Harder They Fall is largely devoid of the white gaze. The characters are allowed to exist in relation to one another and not to a hierarchical structure; I kept waiting for the moment everyone would band together to stop the KKK or some other force of impending white supremacy, but that never happens. It's just the bad guys versus the not-so-bad guys. Or maybe the bad guys versus the worse guys. And I thrilled at it. There's the presence of moral ambiguity, borne of the West's very wildness, that defines the best Westerns, from High Noon to Johnny Guitar.

Why it wasn't nominated: The Academy has a fraught history with Westerns. Only four films in that genre have won Best Picture: 1931's Cimarron, 1990's Dances with Wolves, 1992's Unforgiven, and 2007's No Country for Old Men, though that last one's not truly a straightforward Western. Even 1956's The Searchers, arguably the greatest Western of all time, didn't get nominated for a single Oscar. If its awards track record is any indication, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog is poised to become the fifth Western to take the top prize at this year's Academy Awards.

If the Oscars don't necessarily take kindly to Westerns around these parts, they certainly don't to predominantly Black movies. And The Harder They Fall is just "too Black" for the Oscars. That is to say, it depicts complex, even villainous Black characters that don't fit the traditional mold for Oscar-worthy films about Black people — they aren't slaves or historical figures contending with or (briefly) triumphing over racism. If it's a surprise no one from the cast was nominated (Jennifer Jason Leigh snagged a nomination for Tarantino's last Western The Hateful Eight and Christoph Waltz won his second trophy for Django), it's disappointing that Samuel's direction wasn't recognized either. And the Academy loves a first-time director. Just ask Martin Scorsese, who lost to two of them (Robert Redford for Ordinary People and Kevin Costner for Dances with Wolves).

Why history will remember it better than the Academy did: One may not peg me as a lover of Westerns: I'm Black, gay, and can rattle off five Bette Davis quotes at the drop of a hat. Any hat. But Westerns have always intrigued me — they contain some of the finest cinematography in film, often have something interesting to say about the American experiment, and are just plain fun. But save for Blazing Saddles and Django, I rarely got to see Black cowboys on screen. The Harder They Fall offers up a dozen or so to cheer for or against. What a gift that is for future generations. Most Westerns are also based on real people who lived at a time when the U.S. was still defining itself — and they managed to play a role, no matter how small, in it. That alone makes The Harder They Fall a touchstone in the history of Black cinema, regardless of the Oscars.

EW's countdown to the 2022 Oscars has everything you're looking for, from our expert predictions and in-depth Awardist interviews with this year's nominees to nostalgia and our takes on the movies and actors we wish had gotten more Oscars love. You can check it all out at The Awardist.

Related content:

• The Harder They Fall star Jonathan Majors on how the twist ending represents 'the circle of life'
• The Harder They Fall review: Netflix's starry, bare-knuckled Black Western doesn't stint on style
• Jonathan Majors takes the reins of The Harder They Fall