A word (or a few) on the oscar nominations

Posted by Jason Ihle | No Comments

It’s now a week and a half since the Oscar nominations were announced and I’ve had a chance to let it sink in, settle, think about the nominees, reflect on them a bit more.

You can see the full list of nominees here, so I will just make my comments without listing all of them.

First, the Best Picture list came out more or less as expected, although the inclusion of The Blind Side was a bit surprising. But with ten nominees you had to expect a few head-scratching nominees. I think if it had been only 5, the nominees would almost certainly have been Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Precious, Inglourious Basterds and Up in the Air. The rest are just filler. And you have to ask yourself, if the Academy is willing to expand the list to 10 in order to make sure the “right” films get nominated, what happens if next year one “right” film is left off? Do they expand to 15? Why not just nominate every eligible film? An Education is a worthy, if flawed, film as is A Serious Man. But District 9? Up?

At any rate, the race is clearly between Avatar and The Hurt Locker. I’ll make more definite predictions closer to March 7, but at the moment I’m predicting the latter.

In the Director race it’s between Bigelow and Cameron. I’m pretty sure Bigelow will become the first woman to win this award.

The Best Actor race is Jeff Bridges’ to lose, for sure.

For Best Actress all prognosticators point to Sandra Bullock, rather unfortunately. She simply has no right to be on this list. I’m sure she’s going to win, but I would love, love, love for Gabourey Sidibe to pull an upset. I just saw Precious for a second time and it’s by far the superior performance. Even Carey Mulligan in An Education is far more deserving of this award.

In the supporting categories, Christoph Waltz and Mo’Nique will win unless one of them rapes and murders a child before Oscar ballots are mailed in.

Isn’t it time for the Academy to expand the Best Visual Effects list to 5 nominees? Seriously, when 2012, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen don’t make the cut and Watchmen wasn’t even a semi-finalist it’s an indication that the 3 nominee list is outdated.

In the Animated Short category, I’d have to say the likely winner is Nick Park for his new Wallace and Gromit short A Matter of Loaf and Death. Park has won 5 Oscars from 6 nominations, only losing against himself when he was double-nominated one year. I’ve not seen his film, but I’ve seen the other 4 nominees. Three of them won’t win. They are Logorama, a too clever by half story of a police chase in a Los Angeles comprised entirely of corporate logos. The 15 minute film incorporates about 2500 different logos. You can watch it on YouTube in two parts. Another is a pretty decent Spanish cartoon called La Dama y la Muerte (The Lady and the Reaper). And there’s French Roast, about a man in a café who has left his wallet at home. But the crown jewel is the Irish Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty – simply hilarious!

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