It’s not a very gracious reaction to have, but as I look over this year’s list of Oscar nominees, I’m less thrilled by the names on the list than I am by the snubs. Perhaps with Miramax officially shutting its doors, the Academy felt empowered to largely ignore... well, not Miramax titles, exactly, but Miramax-style titles, middlebrow, quasi-literary fare like Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, The English Patient, and The Hours pushed into the winner’s circle more by shrewd, aggressive campaigning than artistic merit. This year, we have only a couple of minor nominations for Nine, only one nomination for The Lovely Bones. (Then again, The Last Station managed to score a couple of acting nominations — Oscar pundits always complain how hard it is to get the Academy members to watch smaller movies like, say, Julia or Two Lovers... but almost every year there are dull, “worthy” pictures like The Last Station that seemingly come out of nowhere to collect a bunch of nominations, thanks, I assume, to well-attended stealth screenings. What do these little movies know that Hunger doesn’t?)Other stray observations:
• It strikes me that, aside from Morgan Freeman’s fine but essentially unsurprising turn as Nelson Mandela in Invictus, the Best Actor nominees are the kind of roles that traditionally populate the Best Actress list — smaller, more intimate character studies (Crazy Heart, A Single Man, even Up in the Air) as opposed to epic biopics. It’s the Best Actress list that is dominated by performers playing real-life figures: Sandra Bullock, Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep... although only Streep is playing someone whose voice and appearance were well-known before the movie came out.
• Didn’t expect District 9 or A Serious Man to make the final cut — I had reservations about both films, but I’m happy to see them on the list. They’re both imaginative, unusual, stimulating pictures, and much more deserving nominees than Invictus, The Lovely Bones, or Nine would have been.
• There was speculation that mass-appeal comedies like It’s Complicated or The Hangover might have benefitted from the expanded Best Picture category, but both were shut out. I think It’s Complicated is kind of underrated, but it’s not an Oscar-calibre picture. It’s too bad the Academy couldn’t have found room for just one comedy, though — maybe In the Loop? Or Fantastic Mr. Fox?
• The Blind Side. In its way, it’s as much of a cultural phenomenon as Avatar, and I guess one of the virtues of the 10-nomination system is that it has the room to acknowledge movies like this one. But it’s a mediocre movie, and as much as I like her, a Best Actress win for Sandra Bullock would be a worse Oscar travesty than Marisa Tomei winning for My Cousin Vinny.
• Nice to see the nominations for The Messenger (Woody Harrelson for Best Supporting Actor and Oren Moverman and Alessandro Camon for Original Screenplay) — congratulations to whoever managed its Oscar campaign. Between The Messenger and The Hurt Locker, the Academy recognized the two best films so far on the Iraq conflict. It’s also nice to see the way Oren Moverman has gone out of his way in interviews to acknowledge Camon’s contributions to the film — a stark contrast to the credit-hogging habits of Jason Reitman, who never mentions his Up in the Air co-writer Sheldon Turner in any of his interviews.
• Does anyone genuinely think Matt Damon gave a better performance in Invictus than he did in The Informant!?
• Time again for my perennial complaint about the Costume Design category’s inability to recognize that “costume design” involves anything but period attire. A picture like (500) Days of Summer comes to mind as a nice example of a film with a contemporary setting that did a good job of defining its characters through their wardrobe — Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s hip, slim-fitting vests and Zooey Deschanel’s girlish, cap-sleeved blouses. I doubt that the Academy would want to increase the length of ceremony with this kind of move, but short of splitting this award into “Period” and “Contemporary” categories, I don’t see this trend changing.
• Another perennial complaint: when is the Best Original Song category going to stop filling up the list of nominees with nothing but show tunes, Randy Newman ditties, and ballads from animated cartoons? (Even “Loin de Paname,” one of this year’s nominated songs, from an obscure French picture called Paris 36, turns out to be an old-fashioned cabaret-style number.) Unless the song is from a name-brand Grammy-friendly pop star like Bruce Springsteen or Eminem, it’s unlikely to penetrate the Academy’s ear. Hooray for the nomination for “Weary Kind” from Crazy Heart, though — especially if it kept that Leona Lewis song from Avatar from getting nominated. Surprised that the closing song from Precious got snubbed, though.
• On the other hand, I am disappointed that Zoe Saldana didn’t get a nomination for her work in Avatar. That’s a much more innovative performance than, say, Penélope Cruz in Nine.
• A Serious Man got the same number of nominations as The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and Sherlock Holmes.
• During the ceremony, will the presenters simply call it Precious, or will the producers force them to be pedantic and say, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire?
• The Secret of Kells, huh? Anybody seen that one?
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