This year’s Oscar nominations, announced on Tuesday morning, are all over the place, offering honors equally to the good, the bad, and the ugly. It only occasionally happens that the year’s best movie is among the nominees for Best Picture, and this is one of those years, with “Get Out” on the list of nine. Also included, however, are three stodgy history-hits, plus the airless romance-slash-real-estate prospectus “Call Me by Your Name,” the garishly vain and ludicrous “The Shape of Water,” and the obliviously repugnant “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” along with two other movies that are in fact among the year’s best, “Lady Bird” and “Phantom Thread.”

The list distributes widely among low-budget films and high-budget ones, independent films and studio productions, and it’s noteworthy that, among the nine Best Picture nominees, only two were in the top fifty domestic box-office earners for 2017 (“Dunkirk,” at fourteen, and “Get Out,” at sixteen). When, starting in 2010, the Academy expanded its Best Picture roster from five films to a maximum of ten, the move was said to be related to a desire to get beyond limited-release movies seen mostly by critics and Academy members and to include wide-release, popular, commercially successful movies. I suspect that there’s an extra reason besides sheer enthusiasm for distinctive movies, which pushes the nominations further away from the box office: social media has redefined the very notion of popularity, and Academy voters, no less than anyone else, find amplified enthusiasm to be a virtual sort of currency.

Frances McDormand in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” Photograph by Merrick Morton / Fox Searchlight Pictures / Everett

That’s why the tenacity of “Three Billboards” on the list (along with Best Picture, it got two Supporting Actor nominations, as well as Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Score, and Editing) is both shocking and unsurprising. The film was quickly seen, at the time of its release, to present a repellently indifferent and instrumentalizing view of race relations and the politics surrounding them. Yet its salt-of-the-earth sentimentality about small-town white people nonetheless (or perhaps therefore) found the same echo among Academy voters that it did among the electorate at large.

Earnestness is, as ever, a mark of the Academy’s self-image. My heart sank when I heard that Tiffany Haddish would be hosting the nominations broadcast, along with Andy Serkis, because her presence there suggested that she wouldn’t be getting a nomination—which she so greatly deserved—for her performance in “Girls Trip.” There’s humor in many of the nominees’ performances, but there are no outright comedic ones; Haddish’s work in “Girls Trip” is among the most exhilarating, exciting, inventive turns in any film all year, but the Academy never does right by comedy, especially outrageous comedy, which, for Haddish, is inseparable from substantial experience and depth of insight. (If anyone doubts that, see or read her speech from the New York Film Critics Circle dinner, when she accepted the award for Best Supporting Actress.) Even the jokes that she made of her mispronunciations on the nominations broadcast—referring to the town in the title of “Three Billboards” as “Ebony, Missouri,” or calling the star of “Get Out,” Daniel Kaluuya, “Kahlúa” and “Kallelujah”—are marks of improvisational genius.

One of the oddest nominations ever is Christopher Plummer’s, for Best Supporting Actor, for his role in “All the Money in the World,” which could also be called a nomination for All-Time Best Hail Mary Pass. Plummer, of course, was brought in for reshoots after the film was completed, after Kevin Spacey, the original actor in the role, was accused of sexual harassment. Unlike Spacey, whose default mode of performance inclines to duplicity, sarcasm, and villainy, Plummer, with his hearty and worldly tone, brings an immensely empathetic twist to the monstrous character of J. Paul Getty. The movie’s not very good, but Plummer is.

Jason Mitchell (left) and Garrett Hedlund in “Mudbound.” Photograph by Steve Dietl / Netflix / Everett

In acting and in technical awards, there’s an inclination to reward virtuosity rather than originality. That’s why the nomination of Mary J. Blige, for her role in “Mudbound,” is welcome. The movie itself rises to the power of its premise only occasionally, but Blige’s performance, though obviously skillful work, is, above all, a matter of character and presence; she commands the cinematic stage merely by being there, and she invests a small role with enormous power that’s not showy at all. (Allison Janney’s impressive performance in “I, Tonya” is exactly the opposite.) For the same film, Rachel Morrison received a nomination for Best Cinematography, and she is the first woman ever to be nominated in this category. Another unsurprising shock: this is a category in which the boldest work rarely shows up, because the boldest work is often rawer, rougher, and less elaborate than the most conspicuous work. There have long been great female cinematographers (including Maryse Alberti, Caroline Champetier, Agnès Godard, and Ellen Kuras), and Ashley Connor is one of the most original cinematographers in the world. It’s great that the Academy is aware of the existence of excellent female cinematographers, but it will be even greater when the Academy expands its scope regarding the art itself.

That’s where Andy Serkis comes in. He has received awards from critics’ groups for his motion-capture performances as Caesar in the “Planet of the Apes” series, and his work in that unusual mode is worthy of recognition. But in 2017 I saw a performance by Sylvio Bernardi, in the independent film “Sylvio,” that tops Serkis’s work in this year’s installment of the “Planet of the Apes” franchise: Bernardi plays the title role as a gorilla who lives like a person in Baltimore. He plays the entire role in a gorilla suit; his face is never seen, and he never speaks. The entire role is pantomime, and it’s one of the most moving, tender, imaginative performances I saw all year.

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 Academy Awards.

As the realm of movies expands, artistically, through the prevalence of independent productions, the Oscars are rushing to catch up. Yet, as the world of movies rushes further ahead, as micro-budget and fiercely radical independent films push the boundaries of the possible ever further, the Academy creates new divisions based on old hierarchies. In keeping up, it nonetheless also finds new ways to fall behind.