No big surprises with the Oscar nominations this year. The only real mess is in the Best Director category, where a year after Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Director, two women who made pictures even better than Kathryn's (Debra Granik with Winter's Bone and Lisa Cholodenko with The Kids Are All Right; they both got screenplay noms, but still) got passed over in favor of David O. Russell and Tom Hooper (the Coens took Chris Nolan's spot).
This is more a reflection of 2010 secretly being a really strong year for movies. Even though the summer really pushed the boundary of retardation (for more, see the Razzie nominations), there were a lot of really wonderful and interesting pictures this past year, certainly way the fuck more than 2009, where they had to stretch to find five nominees for most categories, and most of the ten nominees for Best Picture were laughable.
It's nice to see, even if Debra Granik got snubbed, to see both Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes nominated for their performances. Jennifer Lawrence is less a surprise (she's been getting oodles of press lately and looks like she's on the cusp of superstardom) than John Hawkes, who's been puttin in work for decades, and finally graduates from “oh, that guy, he's good” status to that rarefied “shit yeah, John Hawkes is in this” territory. (Ed. Note: to the truly anointed, such as the author and legendary all-caps raconteur ZODIAC MOTHERFUCKER, this has been the case for some time, but Olympus is an exclusive address).
Also, no Best Costume design for Inception? Excuse me, I have to go cut myself and listen to Peter Murphy records.
Because I actually care about being right (not about the stupid Oscars, just in general) I'm going to hold off on making predictions about winners for a few weeks, but we can be certain of a couple things right now: Best Foreign Film is not going to be Biutiful, because people have actually heard of it, in accordance with the unwritten bylaws of that category.
If Banksy wins for Best Documentary I'm going to fucking plotz. The Oscars will turn in on themselves and rupture the space-time continuum if something that awesome happens.
Anyway, woo hoo Oscar nominations. Looks like Justin Timberlake's got longer to wait for his EGOT than I thought, but he'll still have it before he's 40. YOU CAN TAKE THAT SHIT TO THE BANK(SY). Okay, I'm going now. Here's the full list of nominees. Peace.
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