Time is a flat circle. And so are Oscar nominations. Is this anything? Jodie Foster received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for “Nyad” on Tuesday, which not only marks her first nomination in 29 years but continues a wild but true streak: A star of every installment of “True Detective” has been nominated for an Academy Award while starring on the show or in the subsequent Oscar season.
Foster currently headlines “True Detective: Night Country,” the fourth season of the HBO anthology series that premiered on Jan. 14. That was right in the middle of nomination voting. Nine days later, the two-time Oscar winner received her fifth career nomination. She follows in the footsteps “True Detective” stars-turned-Oscar nominees Matthew McConaughey (Season 1), Rachel McAdams (Season 2) and Mahershala Ali (Season 3).
Created by Nic Pizzolatto, “True Detective” premiered on Jan. 12, 2014, the same night as the Golden Globe Awards. While viewers were meeting Rust Cohle (McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson), McConaughey won the Best Drama Actor Globe for “Dallas Buyers Club.” This was peak McConaissance and started his run toward his Best Actor Oscar win, which occurred on March 2, opposite the penultimate episode of Season 1.
A critical and ratings hit, “True Detective” was quickly renewed and Season 2 premiered on June 21, 2015. This is the only season that did not launch in January. Perhaps that was an omen because Season 2, starring McAdams, Colin Farrell, Taylor Kitsch and Vince Vaughn, received very mixed reviews, to put it charitably — by far the weakest of the four seasons — with critics and fans alike finding it overly complicated at best and self-indulgent at worst. A month after the season’s August finale, “Spotlight,” starring McAdams, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, and four months after that, she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her performance as investigative journalist Sacha Pfeiffer in the eventual Best Picture winner.
Development on Season 3 took a few years, but the series returned on Jan. 13, 2019, with Ali, already an Oscar winner for 2016’s “Moonlight,” in the lead role. The season, which was better received than the sophomore installment, debuted a week after Ali won the Golden Globe for “Green Book.” He’d steamroll the season, culminating with his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar statuette on Feb. 24, the same night as the Season 3 finale.
Five years later, “True Detective” is back with Foster in her first major TV role as an adult, a new showrunner in Issa López and a subtitle for the first time. Foster plays Liz Danvers, the chief of police in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, who, along with trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), investigates the disappearance of eight research scientists (if you’ve seen the first two episodes, you know all about the corpsicle). “True Detective: Night Country,” which premiered a week after the Globes, at which Foster was nominated for “Nyad,” is the best reviewed season since the first. Season 4 has six episodes, compared to eight each for the first three seasons, and will conclude on Feb. 18, four days before final Oscar voting begins and three weeks before the Oscar ceremony.
This is not to say that “True Detective” necessarily boosted any of these actors’ chances at a nomination — or a win in two of their cases — especially since nomination voting had closed in McConaughey’s year before the show premiered. McConaughey and Ali were early frontrunners in their respective seasons and widely expected to prevail at the Oscars. McAdams’ and Foster’s situations were slightly more wobbly and neither were/are favorites to win. The former was snubbed by the Globes but secured Critics Choice and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations en route to her Oscar bid. “Spotlight” also won the SAG ensemble honor. In addition to her Globe bid for “Nyad,” Foster received Critics Choice and SAG nominations. (McAdams was also a Best Supporting Actress hopeful this season for “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”)
Incidentally, McConaughey, McAdams, Ali and Foster all played real people in their Oscar-nominated roles. “Nyad” is the weakest of these four films, however, as it’s the only one that did not get nominated for Best Picture, which “Green Book,” of course, also won. The Diana Nyad biopic has one other Oscar nomination, Best Actress for Annette Bening.
Is this all just a coincidence? Sure, but that doesn’t make the “True Detective”-to-Oscar nomination pipeline any less real. The series has not been renewed for a fifth season yet, but we may just be able to pencil in an Oscar slot for whoever the lead will be.
