The Academy Award nominations are up.
It's amazing to me how quickly this went from being "ho-hum, this will be an exceptionally boring Oscar race" to "Jesus Almighty, what happened?" First, the Dreamgirls snub for Picture and Director is both startling and extremely gratifying, particularly because it lets Letters from Iwo Jima nestle in.
There is obviously very little love for The Departed - no Leo, and no Jack! Again, this is startling and gratifying. It's kind of awesome: there are five front-runners for the Best Picture award right now.
Other things that shock and delight me:
-Volver snubbed for Foreign Language film (shock).
-Borat and Children of Men in Adapted Screenplay (delight).
-No match-up between Best Picture and Best Cinematography (shock, but not a bad one, except for Prieto, who should have been here).
-Pan's Labyrinth in Original Screenplay (delight).
-Poseidon for Visual Effects (shock).
-Very little overlap in general between what the techs liked and the Big 8 (delight).
Nominations leaders:
Dreamgirls - 8
*Babel - 7
Pan's Labyrinth - 6
*The Queen - 6
Blood Diamond - 5
*The Departed - 5
*Letters from Iwo Jima - 4
*Little Miss Sunshine - 4
Notes on a Scandal - 4
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest - 4
How I did in my predictions: 25/30 on the top six, just like last year (I did get the actor line-up 5/5, but I picked the wrong DiCaprio film). A humiliating 6/10 in the screenplay categories, but in every case I'm happier that way. Let us not consider my record for cinematography.
Total number of films nominated for an Oscar (outside of foreign language, documentary or the shorts) that I haven't seen: 1 (Click, up for Best Makeup).
Updated: More fun. This is the first time since 1927/'28 - the very first Oscar ceremony ever - in which there was no overlap at all between the Best Picture and Best Actor nominees.
23 January 2007
4 comments:
Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.
Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.
Worth noting... Dreamgirls has 8 nominations, but if you count the three song nominations (of which zero are for the one solid song in the musical) as one, it becomes considerably less impressive.
ReplyDeleteIf it is any comfort, I did just as poorly as you did with picking the Cinematography nominations. We each nailed Lubezki, and each had a half-success with our dark horse picks. Didja swoon for Wally, as promised? I sure did. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, nor for a nicer-looking, wholly-underappreciated film.
ReplyDeleteObviously Prieto was my biggest disappointment this year, but I'd like as well to make a special shout out to Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland, who were simply robbed out of a nomination for their production design on Children of Men.
Now, following two weeks of nominations that I personally value, I realize that I've got some movies to watch... between Oscar and the ASC's seven nominees, I've only seen two. And it looks like I really need to prioritize The Black Dahlia and The Illusionist, desite my absolute lack of interest in either film. I'm more likely to finally get around to seeing Pan's Labyrinth.
Tim, I think we'd all like to hear your thoughts on the Razzie nominations as well.
ReplyDeleteI'm annoyed! I posted a nice long (almost Will-length) comment about the Oscar nominations, and it never showed up. So here are the essenential ideas:
ReplyDelete1. Cinematography nominations are great, except that The Illusionist is a bad film even if it was kind of pretty, and while I haven't seen The Black Dahlia, Vilmos Zsigmond is rather boring compared to the other nominees. Plus, yes, Prieto got absolutely robbed.
2. It's pretty awesome that save for Cate Blanchet, all the Supporting Actress nominees were pretty much unheard of before 2006... unless you count people who watch American Idol, and I don't.
3. This is the first time I can remember that one of the Best Original Song nominees came from a documentary.
4. There is no way Click will win for Best Makeup in the face of Pan's Labyrinth.
Oh, now it's kind of a long comment anyway.