The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — 13 nominations??
Angelina Jolie up for Best Actress in “Changeling??”
It’s a very bad day to be a movie junkie.
Good for Richard Jenkins, the stalwart character actor who earned a Best Actor nod for his moving performance in “The Visitor.”
But “The Dark Knight’s” glaring omission, and the delirious love-fest for the highly uninvolving “Button” means the 2009 Oscar ceremony is already a bust.
Update: Moviefone’s flash poll echoes my pain:
What Was The Biggest Snub?
* No Clint Eastwood Love- 34%
* No nod for Leo DiCaprio- 28%
* Dark Knight not nominated for picture or director- 27%
* Only one nod for Kate Winslet- 7%
* Other- 4%
What was the biggest surprise?
* Robert Downey Jr’s nod- 35%
* “The Reader” for best picture- 26%
* Other- 16%
* Michael Shannon’s nod- 13%
Are you happy with the nominations?
* Sort Of- 50%
* Not At All- 27%
* Yes- 23%
Are you going to watch the Oscars this year?
* Yes- 57%
* Maybe- 23%
* No- 20%
Total Votes- 2,994
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
These nominations are such a joke. I only hope the Academy is embarrassed and ridiculed as they rightly should be for such poor nominations
I never really thought The Dark Knight should be nominated but THE READER??? Ridiculous
The Reader totally came out of the blue. I liked the film … but never would have dreamed it would rank so high here. The Oscars continue to alienate both John Q. Public and even movie devotees.
Yesterday, I was thinking that the Academy would find a lot more viewers and generate quite a bit of good will with the public with some nominations for Gran Torino, a movie being universally praised with critics and the public and actually making some money. What did it get? Bupkis. But I guess if you are a Brad Pitt fan you are loving life this morning. Yet another year where I will not be watching it.
By the way, you totally freaked me out this morning with that Friday the 13th picture – don’t need coffee to keep me going today.
Loved Gran Torino …
I think Pitt and Jolie are officially Hollywood royalty. Politics may be ruled by the Bushes, Clintons and Kennedys, but Tinsel Town is obsessed over these two.
No Gran Torino love..what a joke. Those 13 nom for Benjamin Button is why the Oscars are one big EPIC FAIL. It’s the year of politicial films anyway so you know there will be a lot of crap coming out of the mouths of these celebs.
Oh and those ratings will keep falling too.
I need to amend my above comment:
I never really thought The Dark Knight WOULD be nominated. I totally thought it SHOULD be nominated.
Ratings are gonna plummet — I guar-an-tee it. And right on, Jo. BB’s 13 nominations are the clearest example of what’s wrong with the Oscars today.
Maybe someday the academy will get it right. I was hoping that ‘The dark knight’ would get a nom for best picture but i was pretty sure it wouldn’t. i was really shocked by ‘The Reader’ i don’t think it is good enough to be listed with the other 4 even though it does have some great performances. i was surpised that downey got a nod for tropic thunder since comedies get overlooked usually. i have a feeling that slumdog millionaire will win best picture it is a good film and the academy likes to award films that are foreign and arthouse material who knows maybe the academy will get it right but then again look how long it took Scorsese to get an oscar. i will never forgive the academy for giving it to redford for ordinary people over raging bull i mean c’mon. well i guess i’m just a little bitter
The Reader totally came out of the blue.
That depends on your selection criteria, doesn’t it? Certainly it’s one of best pictures this year depicting sex with an underaged pardner, probably narrowing beating out “Towelhead” to the nomination.
=Priorites.
People complain about the glut of awards shows but each one of them reflects a different perspective and constituency. It is a mistake to think of any of them as reflecting some sort of absolute “best” or to take any of them very seriously.
I always think of the Oscars as the high school yearbook-style awards because the Academy voters (generally over 40) tend to be very sentimental. They don’t like what they think of as comic book movies and they do like comebacks, actors showing us a new side of themselves, and Holocaust and other war-related movies (because they are inherently serious and important and history-oriented). Big, technology-heavy movies like “Benjamin Button” always get a lot of nominations because so many of the Academy voters either worked on them or are friends with people who worked on them.
The most important contribution the Oscars make is to give us something to second-guess as this post and the comments show!
Nell, good points, all, but I think the Oscars have such cultural cache that they do us a disservice by not being more inclusive.
The awards do shed light on films, and performances, that would otherwise go unseen, but the Oscar’s clout as the definitive movie award gets chipped away each year by their uninformed choices.
Slumdog Millionaire is a big upset in the best picture nomination field. This moive is a time pass, Slumdog deserve no award.