Lady Gaga Snubbed for Oscar Nomination Despite Iconic Campaign Tour

The Oscar nominees for 2022 have been announced! Much of the unveiling went as expected, with The Power of the Dog, Licorice Pizza, and Dune pulling out a number of nods throughout multiple categories.

But there were, as always snubs, and one perhaps more noticeable than the others considering how hard she campaigned.

Lady Gaga’s turn as Patrizia Reggiani was expected to at least get her a nomination, if not the award itself, but she didn’t make the cut, losing out to Nicole Kidman, Jessica Chastain, Olivia Colman, Penélope Cruz, and Kristen Stewart. In fact House of Gucci only saw a single nomination, for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

Actors frequently make headlines anytime they’re doing press for big movies, but Oscar season is the most likely time to see them pull out all the stops, and nobody did that quite like Gaga did this year. Let’s revisit!

She said she wrote a whole biography of Patrizia Reggiani.

There’s method acting, and then there’s whatever it is that Gaga does, or at least says she does. In addition to claiming she stayed in character for a year and a half and spoke with an Italian accent for 9 months, she claimed she wrote a whole biography of Patrizia to prepare for the role.

“I wrote like an 80-page biography about her myself,” she said. “And it was something that I worked off of and I read all the time to just get the story, her backstory, inside of me.”

She told everyone she made out with Salma Hayek.

Gaga originally insinuated that she and Salma had filmed a sex scene, claiming “there’s a whole side of this film that you did not see where Pina and I developed a sexual relationship.” She later seemed to clarify that it was a make out scene that she asked to throw into the film while on set, although it didn’t make the final cut.

Still, Gaga did her best to amp fans up about it, temporarily breaking the internet with the thought of her and Salma making out “surrounded by cats” for no real reason whatsoever.

“I made out with Salma Hayek,” she told Jimmy Kimmel. “I’m like that really annoying kid at school that’s bragging that they made out with the popular girl but has no proof.”

She claimed the film crew feared for her safety.

There’s one scene in House of Gucci where Gaga had to hold her breath underwater in the bathtub. She says it didn’t bother her — “I’m a singer,” she said during Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series — but she was under for so long that they yelled “cut” and pulled her out.

The real campaign moment here is that the anecdote resulted in this quote from the “Born This Way” singer — “The way that I feel safe is just that I feel safe being in pain. I feel safe in art. I almost think I feel safer with art than I do in life.”

She seems to think Patrizia cursed her.

The real Patrizia Reggiani is, of course, a convicted murderer who allegedly isn’t thrilled with the existence of House of Gucci as a film, and specifically with Gaga’s casting and decision not to meet with her while, well, playing her.

Gaga undoubtedly knows that, and thinks she may have done something to show her annoyance with the assistance of the universe itself.

“On the last day of filming, I was on the balcony of my apartment in Rome, and I was blasting Dean Martin singing ‘Mambo Italiano,’ and I had a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. I was Patrizia,” she said. “But I knew i had to say goodbye to her: Large swarms of flies kept following me around and I truly began to believe that she had sent them. I was ready to let her go.”

All this to say, Gaga’s contribution to culture may be getting overlooked by the Academy, but her wild campaign for Best Actress will not soon be forgotten by fans. And we all know full well this means that next time, she’s going to find a way to go even bigger.