Oscar Nominations: Silver Playbook FTW

For no useful reason I dragged myself out of bed at 5:20 AM this morning in order to hear the Oscar nominations announced live. Well, there is a reason, but it isn’t useful: I like to hear the gasps when surprises emerge. Or the lack of gasps, like today, when Spielberg got his best director nom and not a sound came from the crowd, no murmurs, no polite applause, nothing at all. Which is kind of like my response to Lincoln, except I liked Tommy Lee Jones.

But what’s up with the Kathryn Bigelow snub? A vast, anti-woman conspiracy? Or maybe all those old white dudes in the Directors’ Branch are mad because she makes combat films that don’t feature muddy, carefully lit infantrymen slogging through Europe or Southeast Asia. Or it could be the torture thing but, c’mon, people, this is a movie! Y’all shouldn’t be letting a bunch of testy senators influence your Oscar vote.

Otherwise, good for Beasts of the Southern Wild, always a great thing when newcomers get recognized; makes you believe that the Academy can be shaken out of its torpor. And the Silver Linings Playbook sweep through all the big categories is satisfying – it’s a film that deserves attention: clever, well plotted, with actors who brought those characters to complicated life and deserve recognition for it. I am still surprised that Bradley Cooper pulled that off.

One more thing: the Academy shook up its schedule a little this time around, trying to get a jump on the Awards season momentum. They also changed to electronic voting, which had a few bugs and left some members angry and perplexed as they found the system difficult to manage. It’s possible that these changes have had an impact: the DGA nominees barely overlap with Oscar’s directors; there are also a lot of misses between the acting categories and SAG. Could be that voters were less influenced by Guild nominees, or that fewer voted because of the complications with the electronic voting switch, although Academy president Hawk Koch stated today that the new system actually encouraged more members to cast their ballots.

In any case, this is an interesting year for Oscar, and in the next six weeks prognosticators will be eagerly looking for signs of momentum among the nominees. My opinion? Free for all. None of the old rules apply.