+ Young(ish) actors doing good: Casey Affleck for Best Supporting Actor, Sarah Polley for Best Adapted Screenplay, Saoirse Ronan for Atonement - I would’ve nommed the dyspeptic Romola Garai, myself, but Ronan does a pretty terrific job in the good half of the movie.
+ Surf’s Up getting a Best Animated Feature nomination - I don’t love this movie, but expecting Paprika or Tekkon Kinkreet to get a nomination is laughable, and at least it’s better than the other potential nominees (Bee Movie, Shrek the Third).
+++ to There Will Be Blood and No Country leading the pack.
- - - to Juno. Just, in general. But also to its unexpected nomination for Best Director for Jason Reitman. Is this supposed to be an apology for the Academy’s ignoring his father’s (awesome, underrated) Dave, surely one of the great mainstream American comedies of the 1990s? Are we really to believe the director’s wing of the Academy thinks Reitman’s direction in Juno is better than Joe Wright’s in the admittedly ho-hum Atonement? On the other hand, overzealous Academy nominators are what led to the major Little Miss Sunshine backlash last year, so here’s hoping…
- I know no one was expecting it, and the studio wasn’t pushing it, but I would’ve loved to see a nomination for one of There Will Be Blood’s underrated supporting actors - Paul Dano’s Eli, Kevin J. O’Connor’s Henry, Dillon Freasier’s H.W., as confident and sure-footed a child performance as I’ve seen in a while.
- Best Animated Short: sigh to another Aleksandr Petrov turdlet, My Love; puke to Madame Tutli-Putli, which is technically extraordinary but boring as shit. Where’s The Pearce Sisters? Or Jeu (how did this film, which is pretty much the most radical experimental animation I’ve seen in a long time, even make the shortlist?) On the other hand, that Peter and the Wolf movie looks really damn good. I need to see that.
++++ Best Cinematography: that’s the best slate of cinematography nominees in some time. Even the weakest nominee (Atonement) would be the strongest in any other year. My favorite is Robert Elswit’s extraordinarily beautiful lighting for There Will Be Blood, but sentiment is high to give the prize to the deserving double-nominee Roger Deakins.
- - - Best Editing nominations for The Bourne Expectoration and Into the Wild. Blecch! Does the editor’s wing of the Academy really have this insane of taste? Into the Wild is one of the worst-edited movies of the past year, and Bourne is simply every annoying gimmick of intensified continuity editing. Stop the insanity!
+++++++ to Jack Fisk finally getting the Production Design nomination that’s eluded him for so long. This man has been responsible in part for the look of some of the best movies of the last 40 years (all the Malicks, Mulholland Drive and The Straight Story, some 70s De Palmas).
- - To Foreign Language Film: I’m still annoyed, though not surprised, that 4-3-2 didn’t even make the shortlist. On the other hand, my prognosticating skills remain on-point: I called The Counterfeiters as the winner in this category in September, and given the slate it’s up against, I don’t doubt I’ll prove right.

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