82nd Academy Awards Nominations

[Big Magilla]

My rankings:

1. The Hurt Locker
2. District 9
3. Inglourious Basterds
4. Up
5. Up in the Air
6. Avatar
7. Precious
8. An Education
9. A Serious Man
10. The Blind Side

[Mister Tee]

I've now seen all 9 movies nominated for Best Picture, and I would rank them thusly:

1. Up In The Air
2. Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire
3. District 9
4. Inglourious Basterdds
5. Avatar
6. An Education
7. The Hurt Locker
8. A Serious Man
9. The Blind Side

So, you're just pretending Up doesn't exist?

[Damien]

I've now seen all 9 movies nominated for Best Picture, and I would rank them thusly:

1. Up In The Air
2. Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire
3. District 9
4. Inglourious Basterdds
5. Avatar
6. An Education
7. The Hurt Locker
8. A Serious Man
9. The Blind Side



Edited By Damien on 1266517023

[Mike Kelly]

A sign of the times stat:

In the Loop (with one nomination, Best Adapted Screenplay) - the first instance that a film that premiered on VOD (video-on-demand) concurrent with its theatrical release was nominated for a major Oscar.

[OscarGuy]

Ivan and Jason Reitman are also the first father-son pair to earn a nomination together.

[anonymous1980]

A couple of statistics not often mentioned:

- Lee Daniels may be the 2nd African-American directing nominee but Precious is the first Best Picture nominee directed by an African-American.

- Correct me if I'm wrong but I do believe Jason Reitman is the youngest to receive TWO Best Director nominations in his career. He's only 32.



Edited By anonymous on 1265399236

[Big Magilla]

We've had several long discussions on this. I think one was even in this thread.

The weighted/preferential voting system has always been used for nominations and yet nominations generally do not result in a lot of surprises. If you at the winners from 1934-1945, the years the practice was last used to select the best picture winner, there were no real surprises, certainly no shocks.

It's an unnecessarily convoluted process. Either give the award to the film that gets the most first place votes or weight everyone's selections, giving ten points to their number one pick and so on down the line, but don't go through this nonsense of separating ballots in stacks and selecting the most popular choice from the lowest stack and re-shuffling until you come up with a winner on whatever rotation the odds say you have to go to. It gives me a headache just thinking about it.

[anonymous1980]

There's gonna be a somewhat different voting system called the "weighted/preferential" voting system on the Best Picture category (a system which one could theoretically vote AGAINST a film) which leads me to believe that the Best Picture race may truly be up in the, umm, SKY (no puns here, thank you very much!) and I could totally see a scenario in which something like, say, Up end up winning (But I sort of hope not because I sort of would like to meet Damien someday).

Any thoughts on that?

[jack]

I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this, but perhaps we'll have a (kind of) repeat of the 2001 Oscars where Washington and Berry won. What I mean by this is that the prevailing opinion that Jeff Bridges is due an Oscar may carry over to the Best Actress catagory and the Academy will allow Streep another.

Just a thought.

[Hollywood Z]

Julie Christie was in here 50's when she lost but Helen Mirren was in her 60s.

Actually, Julie Christie lost to Marion Cotillard in 07 and Christie had already won back in 65 for Darling. So the agism theory/analysis still applies.



Edited By Hollywood Z on 1265334537

[The Original BJ]

I'm not saying that Bullock WILL win - actually I still think that Meryl Streep will make it, but knowing myself, I can't deny that I think so partly because I hope so. Not just for that reason of course - the fact that Streep's third Oscar seems due at this point in her life and in her career could be an major factor, so major that it really could change for once the usual, unwritten rule of so many recent Best Actress verdicts.

This paragraph reflects my thinking to a T.

And also, it's not like it's SO uncommon for the Globe/SAG winner to lose the Best Actress Oscar to the OTHER Globe winner (Kidman over Zellweger, Cotillard over Christie).

In fact, Bullock reminds me a bit of Zellweger '02. (Though, of course, not qualitatively, in terms of either performance or film.) I didn't really think of Zellweger as seriously in that race until she won the SAG prize, at which point many suddenly started predicting her for the Oscar win. But in the end, the "it's-Kidman's-turn" sentiment ultimately prevailed on Oscar night, despite her loss with populist-skewing SAG and Chicago's Best Picture pull. I think a similar outcome could prevail this year, with the year-end "it's-Streep's-time" sentiment -- especially given her multiple triumphs this season -- trumping the sudden heat for Bullock and her film.

Or, I could just be holding on to hope that this Bullock nonsense goes no further.

(One other way this feels like Best Actress '02 for me: I remain utterly disheartened that my easy choice -- Mulligan, like Moore several years ago -- is hardly even in the running.)

[dws1982]

Wasn't there an unwritten rule that 60-something actresses can't win Oscars? Or was that 50-year-old actresses? Or is it the 50-60 age range? I can't remember. Julie Christie was in here 50's when she lost but Helen Mirren was in her 60s.

Shirley Booth was the only actress to win Best Actress between the ages of 50 and 60. But I believe that (as was usual for the time) the studios had shaved a few years off of her age, so that she was thought to be under 50. Shirley MacLaine and Susan Sarandon did turn fifty just a few weeks or months after they won though.

[OscarGuy]

Wasn't there an unwritten rule that 60-something actresses can't win Oscars? Or was that 50-year-old actresses? Or is it the 50-60 age range? I can't remember. Julie Christie was in here 50's when she lost but Helen Mirren was in her 60s.

Meryl turned 60 this past year, so does that fall into either category? I mean, you can't look back at this decade and not see a pattern of wins that favors younger actresses.

And, I think this Meryl Streep-should-get-a-third-Oscar hype may be a bit manufactured? Something like the Kevin O'Connell flap of man years' past. If she were really perceived as due, could they not have given it to her for Doubt, or The Devil Wears Prada or even Adaptation.? But every time she loses, she loses to some other juggernaut. I wonder if the prizes going out this year to her in Julie & Julia, a very minor Streep performance, IMO, were merely an attempt to try to cajole the Academy into giving her a third trophy?

We've seen these pushes year after year with countless "they're due" assaults on the voters and, as Martin Scorsese can tell you, it doesn't always work out the way people think it will.

[Mister Tee]

I'm not saying that Bullock WILL win - actually I still think that Meryl Streep will make it, but knowing myself, I can't deny that I think so partly because I hope so. Not just for that reason of course - the fact that Streep's third Oscar seems due at this point in her life and in her career could be an major factor, so major that it really could change for once the usual, unwritten rule of so many recent Best Actress verdicts.

This paragraph reflects my thinking to a T.

[OscarGuy]

Although the nominee isn't the same, I think Something's Gotta Give would be a better filmic analogy to The Blind Side. It was a success at the box office ($124 M domestic), but wasn't really considered much of a contender...

then again, maybe Something's Gotta Give is a better analogy to Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia than Sandra Bullock.

But it's really hard to equate anyone to Bullock in this situation. Julia Roberts may well be the best correlation. She's the only major nominee I can think of that had become a box office superstar and whose film she was nominated for was also a box office success. Of course, Brockovich had several other nominations to go along, so it's again not a 100% corollary.

And, in addition, Roberts was previously nominated for Steel Magnolias and Pretty Woman, though it's conceivable that Bullock might have gotten the nomination for Infamous had that film done better at the box office and come out before Capote, but then we might have also been talking about Oscar winner Toby Jones instead of undeserving winner Philip Seymour Hoffman.