I am also glad that District 9 got a BP nod. I doubt it would be on the list with only 5 nominees. I also doubt it will win, but I think this is one case where being nominated is a honor.
Brian
That actor who played the lead should have been nominated too. I just watched the movie again recently, and realized how much of the movie’s watchability is carried by his performance.
Just my WAG, but I’d say that the 5 would’ve been: Avatar, Hurt Locker, Ing. Bast., Precious, and Up In The Air.
Since those were the 5 that got Director nods, you are almost certainly correct on that.
I want to have a lot more on this later…and I will, but right now I just wanna start a controversey.
Up does not deserve to be “Best Picture” nommed. Clearly a winner in Animated, but the movie did not move me enough for me to think it to be in the “Best Picture” category.
If there’d only been 5 nominees and Up had knocked one of the frontrunners off I would have been upset simply because it was a lock to be nominated for Animated, and will probably win. No other movie has a 2nd chance to win a Best * but Animated films do. But since there’s 10 spots, I don’t mind.
You weren’t moved at all by the couple’s montage at the beginning? The rest of the picture didn’t quite live up to that, for me, but that alone was worth the whole movie.
For those who like to read Nomination reactions, here are a couple of links. I haven’t seen any video yet.
Here’s a good question that MSN brought up: why wasn’t *Avatar *nominated in the Animated category? Arguably it could easily go there.
A studio needs to submit it for eligibility in that specific race, so if Cameron & co. had wanted it considered for that category, there’s a good chance it may have qualified.
Actually, Best Foreign Language film nominees are (sometimes) eligible for Best Picture, too and there have been a few cases in the past (Life is Beautiful, Crouching Tiger) where a film won the former but lost the latter. But technically, they could have win both.
And though it’s never happened (yet), Feature Documentaries are also eligible for Best Picture consideration.
Sharlto Copley. I though it was a great performance and quite amazing given that it is his first significant film role. Incidentally he will also be playing Murdoch in the A-Team movie.
As for the rest of the Oscars, I would imagine Bigelow is a lock for Best Director. Oscar voters love making history and it isn’t every year that you get a very strong contender directed by a woman. Hurt Locker will probably win BP as well.
I am not a fan of the 10 BP nominations. Too unwieldy and it devalues the BP nomination. Probably raises the value of the Best Director nomination which now becomes a proxy for what the top 5 would have been.
Perhaps you should investigate whether you’ve misplaced your soul recently 
And Equipoise’s comment is perfectly illustrative of why I’m not a fan of the Best Animated Feature ghetto: its existence will be used to justify denying Best Picture to whichever animated movie eventually comes along and deserves it (NB: I thought Up was great, but wasn’t necessarily the best movie of the year).
My 2 cents, as someone who hasn’t been paying really close attention to the buzz: The biggest surprise to me on the BP list is District 9. I remember it getting pretty good reviews, and then didn’t hear much more about it until now. (What if Nine, 9, and District 9 had all been nominated, along with Up and Up in the Air? But I digress.)
A Serious Man also surprised me. I never doubt the Coens, but this one seemed to come and go with relatively little notice.
And even without paying attention, I couldn’t miss all the buzz around Julie & Julia, so its omission was a surprise to me.
A Serious Man surprised everybody, even people who were paying attention to the buzz. It came out of nowhere and I’m so happy for it!
District 9 wasn’t too much of a surprise to those who’d been following precursors. It had traction, though not the loud buzz of The Hurt Locker.
Julie & Julie never received too many raves as a whole movie. The buzz surrounding Meryl Streep’s Julia was tremendous, but the movie itself never had a chance at a nomination for Best Picture or anything else. Many if not most people agree that, as cute as Amy Adams is, it would have been a better movie if it had just been about Julia Child.
Here’s an interesting chart showing the box office of all the major nominees. It only shows Domestic, which can be misleading. Some movies did poorly here but fine or even great overseas. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, for instance, has only made $6million in the US, but $48million worldwide. That’s not great, but it made back its budget which was $30million. It only played in 607 theaters in the US. It’s still playing in some theaters too (Chicago alert! It’s playing at Pipers Alley and The Music Box) and I hope the Oscar noms will give it a bit of a boost.
Here’s another chart(ish-type thing) from Rotten Tomatoes, showing the Tomatometer for each nominated film.
ArchiveGuy, yes, I forgot about the Documentary and Foreign-Language films having a 2nd chance at a Picture win.
If the Animated category had not been created, lots of good films would have been completely ignored. Better to have an Animated category and let some films get some glory than not, and not.
It’s fokken great! That and *Invictus *getting acting noms is good news for South Africa this awards season.
It’s also an amazing performance considering he was improvising his dialogue. The script had no written lines of dialogue for him.
And yet he came up with lines of inspired beauty like this one:
“I did not have sex with these…CREATURES. I would never have any sort of pornographic activity with a fokken CREATURE.”
Tarantino couldn’t have written that.
He was such a specific character, and such a non-traditional protagonist, and so much of the momentum of the story is carried by his narrative, his reactions and his dialogue. I think it was really a tour de force, esepcially when you realize that all his interactions with the prawns were basically solo performances on green screens. Chrstopher Johnson was never really there, but it never feels like Copley isn’t really seeing and talking to him.
I read that while he was doing the movie, the studio got a little worried that his accent would be a little too thick for American audiences. Copley convinced the director that he felt he would “lose the character” if he had to lighten up the accent. I’m glad he didn’t.
He pretty much was the movie.
Copley did a hell of a job; not only did he create a very believable character (he could not have improvised ALL the dialogue, though; watch it and you can see there are things he must have been told to say, such as all his lines in dialogue with Christopher; how could he have improvised anything that made sense?) but he carried the movie more than is usual even for a protagonist. The film is focused on him almost all the time.
I would love to see The Fantastic Mr. Fox win for Best Animated feature, but it will certainly lose out to Up, which I was not impressd with at all.
Holy Crap I did not know this.
Amazing for a so-called amateur.
Best film on that list by a country mile is The Prophet, unfortunately it wasn’t made for $100+ for the brain dead mid west muliplex market. This Oscar nonsense gets sillier and more preposterous every year, as does the domination of vacuous Sillywood.