History repeats itself!

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"At the 94th Academy Awards, the film received seven nominations, including Best Picture. It became the second adaptation of the same source material for a previous Best Picture winner to be nominated for the same award after 1962's Mutiny on the Bounty."
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Interesting. This remake of West Side Story IS just like the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, in more ways that just Oscar nominations.

The lavish 1962 REMAKE of Mutiny on the Bounty was directed by an A-list, Academy Award-winning Hollywood director (who had previously directed All Quiet on the Western Front, The Front Page, Of Mice & Men, Les Misérables, Ocean's 11, etc.) Nevertheless, it ended up as a notorious box office flop (it cost $19 million and only grossed $13 million) and Marlon Brando's over-the-top performance was widely ridiculed -- the film became a dumpster fire known for its on set problems, and was contrasted unfavorably to the beloved classic 1935 original, which was the highest-grossing film of 1935 and one of MGM's biggest hits of the 1930s.

Despite the public's scorn for the Mutiny remake and is complete failure to find an audience, the media and Hollywood insiders PRETENDED like audiences loved it anyway, and inexplicably nominated that turkey for a slew of Academy Awards, including "Best Picture" (of course, it failed to actually win, unlike the original version that was the runaway winner for "Best Picture" in the 1936 awards show). Pretty much all the "buzz" for the garbage remake was entirely due to fond memories of the original film, not because of anything it did on its own merits.

Interesting trivia, Brando's career took a nosedive after that crapfest but he recovered nicely a decade later with "The Godfather", and Hollywood managed to undo the damage of the pitiful 1960s remake by later doing a GOOD version of the story with 1984's "The Bounty", which was much more down-to-earth and accurate to the true story, and had a much more muted and multi-faceted performance from Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins.

So, if West Side Story follows the same pattern, we can expect Ansel Elgort or Rachel Zegler to redeem themselves in a decade by having the starring role in an excellent original film, and West Side Story itself to recover in about 20 years, when someone does a new interpretation of the source material that's actually thoughtful and engaging, instead of a "woke" pandering clown show.

:-)