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.
Ross’s 2024 film is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys, which fictionalizes the horrific acts of state-sanctioned violence and torture that occurred at the Dozier School for Boys, a Florida juvenile reformatory, where forensic anthropologists only recently uncovered nearly 50 unmarked graves. As in Whitehead’s tale, Nickel Boys is initially set in the 1960s. Ross and Fray employ the concept of “sentient perspective” to grant the lead characters, Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) and Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson), a literal point of view, inviting the audience to “live life concurrently…in their same present moment, to be inside their body,” as Fray details in the New York Times. Ultimately, establishing a first-person vantage point that alternates between the two lead Black male characters as they become the camera, creating a hauntingly immersive experience as the spectators watch through their eyes.
The beginning unfolds from the perspective of Elwood, rendered faceless by Ross’s lens, but ominous reflections and black-and-white photos of Elwood's development from a young boy into his teen years provide glimpses of what he looks like. In the opening shot, a close-up of a delicate orange hanging from a branch fills the screen. The camera then pans to an arm stretched out under the sun, picking through fallen leaves. Immediately, the film invokes both visual and aural registers to situate the audience in Elwood’s point of view. Ross and Fray stitch together a hypnotic montage of Elwood's childhood filled with quotidian, tender portraits of home, family, laughter, and affection shaped by Elwood’s grandmother, Hattie (Ellis-Taylor). While the montage doesn’t relay a cohesive narrative story around Elwood’s younger self, Ross leans into images that capture the subtle ways perception and memory are closely intertwined. Quick cutting between fleeting memories—a shot looking upward from the bottom of a Christmas tree as Hattie rains tinsel from up above, prolonged glances into a shop window as a speech of Martin Luther King Jr. is broadcast on several TV screens, studying the suave movements of women—these ephemeral snapshots allow the viewer to know Elwood through his own attention to the world.
This approach to first-person POV filmmaking masterfully captures a sense of the human eye. The shorter shots and extreme close-ups early on in the film, such as the short-lived scenes of Elwood’s parents, mirror the transience of memory. However, as Elwood grows older, the more extended scenes imply that the memories are becoming more vivid and emotional in nature. Moreover, as Ross starts to build out the social, cultural, and political world of the Jim Crow South, the first-person approach visualizes a twist on Du Boisian double consciousness to attend to the history of abject representations of Black humanity. In a disturbing scene where a young Elwood stands shirtless beside other young Black boys, while being prodded by the cane of an older white man as a cop supervises, this everyday racist encounter internalized by Elwood is aptly anti-voyeuristic. Such scenes are a testament to how Ross builds a radical cinematic language from scratch to articulate a singular human experience amidst Black dispossession. In this film, the camera doesn’t capture so much as move and live and breathe.
Elwood comes of age, growing into an idealistic and studious boy who enjoys reading comic books, has a girlfriend, and works a part-time job. Then, in a devastating turn of events, he is arrested while unknowingly hitching a ride in a stolen car to attend a free college program for gifted Black students. Ross doesn’t visualize the arrest. Instead, the opening of Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones plays. The 1958 film centers on two convicts, one white (Tony Curtis) and another Black (Sidney Poitier), who escape a chain gang but remain chained to each other. James Baldwin famously wrote about how the film was resented by Black audiences but applauded by white ones, who welcomed its “well-meaning” liberal racial myopia. In the possession of Ross, interposing The Defiant Ones at this juncture (and others) like archival material, what’s most clear is how Hollywood depictions of racial progress shrink against the backdrop of Nickel Boys' visual language.
When Elwood is sent to Nickel, a juvenile carceral institution, Ross leans into aural experiences as effectively as visual ones. When Elwood and the other boys are sent to a shed in the middle of the night to face Nickel Academy’s white superintendent, Spencer (Hamish Linklater), we hear the sounds of the whip and subsequent cries being drowned by the intense sounds of a fan. Through Elwood’s eyes, we see a single Bible, and the boy trembling next to him as they wait to be beaten. While we never see the abuse occurring, instead there are shots of Spencer’s bloody shirt and historical images of the Black boys who attended the Dozier school. And it is between boys that we become attuned to possibilities of Black life through the budding friendship of Elwood and Turner.
Positioned as polar opposites, Elwood is a starry-eyed crusader for systemic change, and Turner a cynic burned by the system more than once. They first meet at the cafeteria table, and it's here that Ross begins incorporating both their points of view. The cinematography changes, and time slows as the visual storytelling becomes increasingly non-linear. With a switch to Turner’s point of view and replaying certain scenes through his eyes, we finally see Elwood because Turner sees him, and covertly admires his idealistic nature, largely informed by his thoughtful relationship with his grandmother Hattie, who works relentlessly to get Elwood released. The film’s introduction of split perspectives (which forecasts the tragic ending) also coincides with the interspersed scenes of an adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs) largely pictured from behind in years spanning from the 1980s to 2018. His identity remains a mystery until the end, as Ross weaves in the imagery of news reporting about the abuses that occurred at the reformatory and forensic photographs of unmarked graves circulating on the internet narrating how the past and present are interwoven.
This non-linear storytelling style is reminiscent of Raven Jackson’s 2023 film All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, a poetic coming-of-age that captures Black Southern life in Mississippi as it recounts the culled memories of Mack, a Black girl wrestling with grief, love, and family. It’s important to note that Fray also helped construct the visual language of this story that spans decades, but this type of free-flowing storytelling unencumbered by time and linearity has a history in the works of audacious Black filmmakers who have long pushed the boundaries of Hollywood’s structural racial and gendered barriers. Specifically in the independent filmmaking space: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978), Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), and Zeinabu irene Davis’s recently restored Compensation (1999).
In the United States, the earliest record of Black visualization can be traced back to the South: Black abolitionists used photography to document antebellum life, eventually taking studio portraits of Black soldiers during the Civil War, while others produced landscapes that sought to challenge “the frontier myth” of unoccupied Indigenous land. Decades later, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation would, according to scholar Cedric J. Robinson, “perfect the plantation genre, which would dominate Hollywood’s representation of the Old South of the antebellum, American slavery and its ending, and Blacks for generations.” Ross very consciously avoided portraying slave plantation imagery despite shooting Nickel Boys in Louisiana. Hollywood’s representations of captivity and freedom are put under a microscope in the film. Ross and Fray’s technical ingenuity never indulges in aestheticized navel-gazing, but intentionally uses the landscapes and nature to craft a dreamlike meditation of the Deep South and silenced histories. Nowhere is this more evident than in the prison break scene. When Elwood’s vengeful crusade against Nickel Academy endangers his life, sending him to a sweatbox, Turner plans an impromptu escape that leads to a bleak climax.
What this all adds up to is a singular achievement in American film: one that both lovingly inherits and offers clear-eyed critiques of our cinematic past, while pointing toward a truly imaginative future. Nickel Boys should win the Oscar for Best Picture, but it’s a shame the Academy didn’t recognize exactly how this film allows us to see something new.
