The complete list of nominees for the 84th Academy Awards, which were announced via the Oscar site’s live stream about an hour ago, can be found after the jump. I’ll update this post later today — probably sometime in the evening — with analysis, reflection, etc. Until then, try figuring out why there are only two Original Song nominees.
Updated:
It goes without saying that the main question mark going into this year’s Oscar season was how the new voting rules would impact the Best Picture race. And while predicting the nominees yesterday, I thought for sure that today’s announcement would shed a ton of light on that subject. But in reality, I’m now even more confused regarding the effect of the reformed guidelines. If this year, for example, churned out a total of nine nominees — including such modestly received efforts as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Help — then I have no idea how any recent year, as the Academy claims, could’ve birthed as little as six or seven Best Picture nominees.
I think the ultimate takeaway, perhaps, is that the necessary chunk of first-place voting has less impact than I assumed. While my hunch that the support of The Help had been overblown by many was proven accurate in some respects — the film’s adapted screenplay was shunned, after all, for a lone Ides of March mention — it did, nonetheless, end up securing one of the top nine spots. So did Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, despite being panned by a number of critics. And so, too, did War Horse, but for my money, that’s hardly a legitimate surprise, even in response to the film’s meager recognition from the various guilds.
Elsewhere in my predictions — where I went 73/104 overall, and 84/104 including alternates — I took a number of gambles in the acting categories. Unfortunately, they amounted to no avail. Both of Shame‘s remarkable performances were ousted, as was Brad Pitt’s shot at a double nomination. (Though the latter was, by no small margin, a longshot to begin with.) Meanwhile, I thought that Michael Shannon (Take Shelter) would receive the good-guy Best Actor nomination, but Demian Bichir (A Better Life) was able to overcome his film’s mid-year release date and snag the fifth spot. And honestly, I have no problem with that — it feels good to know that the Academy’s mindset isn’t exclusively centered on the year’s final few months.
Speaking of early-year releases, though, where was Super 8 in the sound categories? Or Rise of the Planet of the Apes, for that matter? Both were well-liked, well-received blockbusters with noteworthy achievement in the field. In the end, however, they were overtaken by two late-year prestige pics in Hugo, which led the field with 11 nominations, and War Horse, which tallied up six of its own. (The Artist placed second with 10.) I figured there’d be more outside recognition in the category. They did, however, nominate Drive‘s mix, so that’s worth noting.
The Albert Brooks snub is also a crucial point of interest, because I can’t recall a recent contender with the same amount of precursor notoriety getting outright shunned by the Academy — forget mere nominations, Brooks essentially won just as many pre-Oscar awards as frontrunner Christopher Plummer (Beginners) did. Strange. The question now is whether or not Max von Sydow — an 80-plus vet who deserves some career-type recognition — can ride the organization’s core of support for Stephen Daldry’s film and actually challenge Plummer for the crown. I doubt it, but his presence at least makes us rethink the category a bit.
I’ll cut off my thoughts there, with the maybe-maybe-not intention of delving in further over the next couple of days. We’ll see. A couple of final notes on my predictions: Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Foreign Language Film were the three categories in which I went 5-for-5. Some other noteworthy guesses I pulled off include A Separation in Best Original Screenplay and The Tree of Life in Best Picture. Most of the hiccups in my forecasting centered around Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — I felt a nudging of widespread support springing up for the film, but it didn’t materialize. Gary Oldman’s first-ever nomination makes up for that, though.
And just one last thing: the below-the-line love for Moneyball, including Christopher Tellefsen’s fantastic editing and the film’s equally accomplished sound mixing, put a smile on my face.
BEST PICTURE
BEST DIRECTOR
BEST ACTOR
BEST ACTRESS
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
BEST ART DIRECTION
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
BEST COSTUME DESIGN
BEST FILM EDITING
BEST MAKEUP
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
BEST ORIGINAL SONG
BEST SOUND EDITING
BEST SOUND MIXING
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
BEST DOCUMENTARY — SHORT SUBJECT
BEST SHORT FILM — ANIMATED
BEST SHORT FILM — LIVE ACTION