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Movies & TV

And the nominees are?

At this point in the awards season, we’ve got a good sense of the major Oscar contenders the real fun is had in imagining what the surprises will be when the nominees are announced on Tuesday. So I’ve put together a few ideas of my own.

By the way, all that talk about the expanded Best Picture competition means nothing there may be ten slots at the top, but there are only five nominations for the other categories. Thus, the favourites will distinguish themselves pretty quickly if a given title didn’t score a Director nomination, it doesn’t have a chance at the top prize.

  • Avatar will be nominated for Picture, Director and a slew of technical awards, but James Cameron’s script – and all of his actors – will go unacknowledged. Which is sort of what the movie’s all about.
  • The Hurt Locker will fail to score a Best Director nomination, depriving the media of its Battle of the Exes (Kathryn Bigelow used to be married to James Cameron) and sparking a brief debate over Academy sexism until someone reminds us that Oscar has never had much patience for unconventional, cerebral war movies, as great as they may be. Remember, this is the organization that embraced Platoon and ignored Full Metal Jacket.
  • Precious: Based On The Novel “Push” By Sapphire will probably not be nominated for Best Picture. Or Best Director. Or much of anything else, beyond nods for Best Adapted Screenplay and Mo’Nique’s stranglehold on Best Supporting Actress. The buzz just isn’t there anymore, having petered out over the long release campaign. An Education and Bright Star face the same challenge: they exploded out of Cannes, but lost momentum almost as soon as they went into commercial release.
  • Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air will be showered with major nominations – it’ll be up for Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and acting nominations for George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick. And given the Oscar tradition of awarding Best Supporting Actress to the youngest or oldest contender, Kendrick’s likely to be the only nominee with a chance of beating Mo’Nique for the prize.
  • Pixar’s Up will be the second animated film to score a Best Picture nomination. But the existence of the Best Animated Feature category means no one actually has to support it any further for the top prize.
  • Meryl Streep will be nominated for Best Actress for Julie & Julia, which will make Sony very happy. Universal, which was chasing a Streep nomination for It’s Complicated, will not be happy.
  • Jeff Bridges will be nominated for his lead performance in Crazy Heart. In a perfect world, so would Nicolas Cage, for his balls-out turn in The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans. But it’s not a perfect world.
  • No one will remember Where The Wild Things Are, either. Or Michael Fassbender in Hunger. Or Arta Dobroschi in Lorna’s Silence.
  • Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds will land the expected noms – Best Supporting Actor for Christoph Waltz, Best Original Screenplay for QT himself and maybe some production-design prizes. It might even land one of those extra Best Picture slots. But it’s not a serious contender, and the Weinsteins know it … which is why they blew this year’s promotional budget on Nine. (Also: Ouch.)
  • Nine will score two nominations for Best Original Song, even though that means Kate Hudson will appear on the telecast performing the horrible “Cinema Italiano” in a production number even cheesier than the one in the film. The other song, Marion Cotillard’s striptease number “Take It All”, will look classy by comparison.
  • Composer Marvin Hamlisch will land his first Oscar nomination in 13 years for “The Informant!” And he will lose, because not enough voters will get the joke of his marvellously self-referential score.
  • Stanley Tucci is competing against himself for a Best Supporting Actor nomination … and his sweet, understated work in Julie & Julia will probably lose out to his eeeeeevil performance in The Lovely Bones, accomplished mostly through a comb-over and wolf-eye contact lenses. Which is a shame Christoph Waltz seems like a lock to win for Inglourious Basterds, but goodwill for Streep’s performance in Julie & Julia might have spread over to Tucci, were he up for that role instead.
  • Remember when Paramount was dangling Star Trek as a possible Best Picture contender? Yeah, me too. Now, I’m thinking District 9 has an outside chance at a nomination, and possibly a Cinematography nod as well – if enough voters could stand the squicky aliens and graphic battle sequences, that is.
  • The Coen brothers will be all but ignored for A Serious Man, their best movie in a very long time. Best Original Screenplay, but that’ll be it. (Go on, voters, prove me wrong, I dare you!)
  • That ought to get the conversation started. Meet me back here Tuesday morning to discuss the fallout from the actual nominations. Personally, I’m rooting for A Perfect Getaway to make a dark-horse sweep of the acting categories. Viva Steve Zahn![rssbreak]

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