Hustlers.

Monday’s announcements of the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards were unsurprising and kind of disappointing; the Academy’s one brief moment of acknowledging art outside of the mainstream, when Moonlight won Best Picture in absurd fashion, wasn’t a harbinger of a change in the electorate’s inclinations, but a blip on the timeline. The Academy remains as conservative and insular as ever, nominating five men for Best Director in a year with many deserving women, and snubbing many performances from films outside of the mainstream in favor of giving nods to bigger stars from more commercial films.

One of those snubs was Jennifer Lopez, who plays a supporting role that is absolutely critical to the success of Hustlers (available to rent on amazon and iTunes), a movie I liked more than I expected and in large part enjoyed because Lopez is so damn good. As Ramona Vega, the ringleader of the larceny scam that involves the lead character Dorothy/Destiny (Constance Wu) and a few of their colleagues at the strip club Moves (a fictional version of the NYC club Scores), she dominates the movie from the moment her character arrives, and the movie flags any time she’s off screen.

The film is loosely based on a true story, detailed by Jessica Pressler in a 2015 article in New York magazine, where multiple strippers at Scores concocted a scheme to rob some of their rich clients by drugging them and maxing out their credit cards, taking home a sort of commission for bringing in the clients that was well beyond what they’d ordinarily make through performing and private dances. The script tidies things up quite a bit, including making the women more sympathetic and glossing over the prostitution aspect of the scheme, but follows the original article’s story of the case that exposed them – a victim who wasn’t rich, and who had gone through some horrible personal times, but whom the girls scammed anyway, only to have him fight back and get the cops interested in the case.

The focus here is on these women, who feel demeaned and discarded by a society that values women for their physical appearance, and that only temporarily, more than it values them as people, and fought back against men they figured wouldn’t really miss the money and who were among the biggest offenders at denigrating the women in the first place. Wu’s portrayal of the woman to whom Pressler spoke is actually much softer than the way in which that woman comes across in the original article, but her character isn’t all that deep or interesting – it’s the Vega character that gets the depth and complexity, a woman of great generosity in emotion and material goods with her friends but who has a callous, even frigid side when it comes to the men who misuse her.

The script also makes sure to let the audience know that these women become a surrogate family for each other – Destiny, Vega, two women who dance with them (played by Keke Palmer and Lili Reinhart), the club’s ‘den mother’ (Mercedes Ruehl) – filling the emotional void where their biological families, who have either discarded them or died or otherwise vanished, would have been. It’s obvious, and a little manipulative, but it also was largely effective because of Lopez’s performance, with boosts from Ruehl and a brief turn from Wai Ching Ho as Destiny’s grandmother at the over-the-top but still moving Christmas party. (Cardi B and Lizzo also appear as strippers at Moves, and both are incredibly entertaining in their limited time on screen but aren’t on enough.)

The movie frames the story as Destiny telling the story of the scam to a fictionalized version of Pressler (played in sterile fashion by Julia Stiles) after they’ve been caught and have served their sentences, which works a little to give Wu more chance to show some range but flops when screenwriter and director Lorene Scafaria seems unable to figure out how to wrap things up. The conflict between Ramona and Destiny often feels contrived, never more so at the end – perhaps because the New York article stops before the real-life Destiny (named Rosie) had her day in court, and because the real story is a lot messier. The idea Scafaria conceived is sweet enough to rot your teeth, and in the end Hustlers can’t get above the level of high entertainment because the script works overtime to make these women more sympathetic.

Lopez didn’t get her Oscar nod, but I couldn’t tell you if she deserved one over Kathy Bates (Richard Jewell), Scarlett Johanssen (Jojo Rabbit), or Margot Robbie (Bombshell), not yet at least. I wouldn’t put Lopez over the two nominees whose films I did see, Florence Pugh (Little Women) and Laura Dern (nominated for Marriage Story, but just as good in Little Women). I will say Lopez’s performance was worthy of a nomination; perhaps she was just crowded out in a strong year. I don’t think any of the other omissions, such as Scafaria for directing, were actually snubs; Hustlers is good but only Lopez really rises above the material.