Oscar Nominations

If you haven't seen the list, it's here.

Generally it's all pretty expected. A few random thoughts:

BEST PICTURE: Expanding it to ten nominations was meant to get more films nominated, to draw more of a TV audience (with the hopeful side effect of bringing attention -- and box office -- to some underseen films).

If there were five nominees, it probably would have matched up with the directing nominees: Avatar, Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, Up In The Air. Which means the extra nominations went to some popular films (Up, Blind Side, District 9) and a couple of artsy ones in An Education and A Serious Man. I guess the big surprise is that Star Trek, which a lot of people thought might sneak in, didn't.

ACTING. No real surprises in the top acting categories, other than Carey Mulligan (An Education) and Gabourey Sidibe (Precious) getting nominated for their first major roles. In supporting, it's nice to see Woody Harrelson back, while interestingly The Messenger was by far the least seen of his three movie roles last year (Zombieland, 2012).

SCREENWRITING. Six of the 10 nominated films had multiple writers, though there were probably a few instances (like Up in the Air) where the writers didn't actually work together.

And of the 19 nominated writers, 18 were men, the lone exception being Terri Tatchell, who co-wrote District 9 (and who I'm assuming is a women just because of the spelling of her name). It's an issue.

Also a mild shocker is that Avatar was not nominated for Best Screenplay - not that it deserved to be, at all. It is pretty impressive that it got 9 nominations despite having none for acting or writing.

ORIGINAL SONG. This has become such an obscure grab bag of songs in recent years. This year we get two Randy Newman songs from The Princess and the Frog, a song from Nine, a song from something called "Paris 36" (which must be a great song if it comes out of obscurity like that) and the song from "Crazy Heart". In the Oscar pool, pick that one.

MAKEUP. The only nominees are Il Divo, Star Trek and Young Victoria. Apparently there wasn't much going on in makeup this year.

DIRECTING. It's nice that the DGA gave Kathryn Bigelow Best Director over her ex-husband. It'll be interesting to see if the Oscars follow suit...