Reactions
The following was written over the course of the past two hours, the first half of which was my immediate reaction to the individual categories (in the order that they were presented on Oscar.com) and the rest a follow-up analysis to the whole thing.
See the full list in the order that I saw them below and in a more basic, organized way on http://www.imdb.com/features/rto/2008/oscars.
Admittedly, I wasn't up for the live announcement, but I was able to get them really soon after, so I'm okay with that. And it was more fun/suspenseful to get them one category at a time and to be able to have time to write my reactions down. And the following are my reactions in the following order (click on the links to see the actual nominees from Oscar.com):
Actor in a Leading Role
Actor in a Supporting Role
Actress in a Leading Role
Actress in a Supporting Role
Animated Feature Film
Art Direction
Cinematography
Costume Design
Directing
Documentary Feature
Documentary Short
Film Editing
Foreign Language Film
Makeup
Music (Score)
Music (Song)
Best Picture
Short Film (Animated)
Short Film (Live Action)
Sound Editing
Sound Mixing
Visual Effects
Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
Writing (Original Screenplay)
To see my own predictions, either scroll down or go here. Soon I'll do a literal side-by-side comparison of the projected nominees and the actual nominees.
Have at it.
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TOMMY LEE JONES! That came out of nowhere, did it not?
Woo, Best Supporting Actor list I had down pat!
Cate Blanchett made it into the Leading Actress category? With Laura Linney? Good for the latter, but I was kinda hoping for Angelina Jolie or Keira Knightley instead of the former. Will Blanchett score Supporting Actress too?
Yep! Along with Ruby Dee in place of my wild card Vanessa Redgrave. I’m okay with that! Mainly because Catherine Keener didn’t make it, and I hate her, and all my other four did! Next.
Animated Feature: Persepolis, Ratatouille, and...Surf’s Up? That was a surprise, but a welcome one! I liked that last movie. It was a lot better than The Simpsons Movie. Next.
Cinematography I am 5/5.
Directing...no. That has to be a typo. No WAY Juno could have been nominated for Directing over Atonement! That COMPLETELY ruins its chances to make it to the Best Picture category, even though it had that beautiful Dunkirk shot and everything else! GAH. Okay, I’m amending that list right now — instead of Atonement (which should have been there, and maybe won) Juno is going to be there. Wow, I can’t believe the Academy gave Juno a Directing nom.
And Michael Clayton gets a directing nom in place of Tim Burton for Sweeney Todd! That’s just depressing. That movie is now in the Best Pic race instead of Sweeney Todd, officially. LJADFLJf
Uh...wow. Norbit got an Academy Award nomination. After just getting nominated for all those Razzies yesterday. “Best Achievement in Makeup.” Sickening.
Woo! For Best Original Score, Atonement (of course), Ratatouille (yay!), Michael Clayton (James Newton Howard doesn’t really deserve it, methinks), The Kite Runner (which is AMPAS’s standard ethnic music nom), and...3:10 to Yuma! Like I was hoping somewhat irrationally! They have some sense after all!
Wow! For Best Picture, I was wrong! Atonement is STILL in, but Diving Bell got the boot! Michael Clayton and Juno are both in, in place of Sweeney Todd and Diving Bell and the Butterfly! That’s somewhat disappointing to me, because I was really hoping for Diving Bell to do well, as it’s apparently extremely uplifting and emotional, which is exactly what I like! So those three, as well as No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.
Away From Her got an Adapted Screenplay nomination in place of Charlie Wilson’s War...that’s kind of disappointing, but I’m okay with it. Original Screenplay is where it’s all going to rest now...
Exactly the list I had: Juno, Lars and the Real Girl, Michael Clayton, Ratatouille, and The Savages.
Okay, aftermath, now...I looked up Best Director nom Jason Reitman (for “Juno”) and apparently he did an episode of The Office? And it was one of my favorites from Season 4, so I’m really quite okay with that nomination, even if I hated the movie overall and hope it dies in a fire.
Michael Clayton...eh...I’ve watched a little over half of it now and I can’t say I’m impressed by either the directing or George Clooney’s acting...I really like Tom Wilkinson though!
(By the way, I’m writing this a half hour after they were announced, as I’m reading them off of both oscar.com and imdb.com...I fell asleep while watching Michael Clayton [legal thriller indeed] and woke up at exactly 6:00 AM)
My most happy thing ever about these awards (besides being right on most of my choices, including Supporting Actor, most of Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, and Cinematography) is that Into the Wild got a total of THREE nominations, unlike the 5+ it was supposed to, and those were Best Supporting Actor (Hal Holbrook), Best Original Score (wait, what? I thought Eddie Vedder was disqualified? Maybe not, apparently), and Best Editing (a category which I do not claim to know much about, except I can tell when a film is badly edited). So that makes me really happy! Because I pretty much hate Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch (at least in this movie) and I hated hated hated the book it was based on.
I also really like that they decided to give Viggo Mortensen his much-deserved nomination for Eastern Promises.
Biggest surprises were Joe Wright not getting a Directing nod (which he whole-heartedly deserved more than Jason Rietman), Tommy Lee Jones getting a nomination for Best Leading Actor in place of James MacAvoy (which I’m somewhat okay with, as I really liked Jones’s performance in No Country for Old Men, but I would have liked to see Atonement earn its Best Picture nomination a little bit more awards-wise), and Norbit scoring a nomination, however inconsequential it may be (and probably was the only aspect of the movie Eddie Murphy was not a part of).
Disappointments include the above, as well as Tim Burton not getting the Best Director nod he might have deserved (I haven’t seen the film yet, but many have said it’s his best, and he’s never actually been nominated before), and Sweeney Todd and Diving Bell not getting Best Pic noms.
I’m going to dig through and see which awards exactly Atonement has been nominated for, to see if it does even warrant a Best Picture nomination solely on its nominations:
Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Saoirse Ronan)
Best Adapted Screenplay (Christopher Hampton)
Best Cinematography (Seamus McGarvey)
Art Direction (Sarah Greenwood)
Costume Design (Jacqueline Durran)
Original Score (Dario Marianelli)
and Best Picture, making 7 nominations total, the same as it got at the Golden Globes, except in different categories.
Hmm. Maybe. I think it would have earned it more so with the Directing nod for Joe Wright, and even more so with Actress Keira Knightley in place of Cate Blanchett (who is already nominated) and Actor James MacAvoy in place of Tommy Lee Jones (who might deserve it, but who knows; haven’t seen the film).
I think I’ll go through each Best Picture nomination and look at each of its other Oscar nominations to see how well each one deserves to be up there.
Juno:
Best Picture
Best Director (bleh)
Best Original Screenplay
Best Actress in a Leading Role
4 total
Michael Clayton:
Best Picture
Best Director (bleh, I don’t think he deserved it; the film was too boring/non-intense/undramatic)
Best Original Screenplay
Best Actor in a Leading Role
Best Original Score (odd, because I haven’t really noticed the score so far except to notice that it was really really ordinary/boring, and most definitely not James Newton Howard’s best work)
5 total
No Country for Old Men:
Best Picture
Best Directors
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Cinematography
Editing
Sound
Sound Editing
8 total
There Will Be Blood:
Best Picture
Best Director
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Actor in a Leading Role (and will prolly win it)
Cinematography
Editing
Art Direction
Sound Editing
8 total
Hmm. How many did Diving Bell get?
Best Director
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Cinematography
Best Editing
Okay, I guess that makes a certain amount of sense...it wasn’t ever really up for any acting awards (except for potentially Best Supporting Actor for Max von Sydow) so really, Juno beat Diving Bell by just a hair. Bah.
So in conclusion, doing a little research, I discovered, just from iTunes’s music samples, that not only does The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford have absolutely mind-blowing beautiful cinematography (which one can tell just from the trailer, look it up on Youtube), but it has a stunningly-beautiful and haunting score. So check that out if you like movie scores, which I’m pretty sure nobody reading this blog does. So it probably should have gotten an Original Score nomination, at least in place of Michael Clayton. Yes, very much so.
In the REAL conclusion, No Country and There Will Be Blood both got the most, with 8 nominations, Atonement with 7, and the rest following in their wake. Those three, it appears, are the best three movies of the year? Cool. I’m down for that. I really enjoyed all of them and fully support them being nominated for best movie types of awards. Projections for actual wins are forthcoming.
-SALVARE
See the full list in the order that I saw them below and in a more basic, organized way on http://www.imdb.com/features/rto/2008/oscars.
Admittedly, I wasn't up for the live announcement, but I was able to get them really soon after, so I'm okay with that. And it was more fun/suspenseful to get them one category at a time and to be able to have time to write my reactions down. And the following are my reactions in the following order (click on the links to see the actual nominees from Oscar.com):
Actor in a Leading Role
Actor in a Supporting Role
Actress in a Leading Role
Actress in a Supporting Role
Animated Feature Film
Art Direction
Cinematography
Costume Design
Directing
Documentary Feature
Documentary Short
Film Editing
Foreign Language Film
Makeup
Music (Score)
Music (Song)
Best Picture
Short Film (Animated)
Short Film (Live Action)
Sound Editing
Sound Mixing
Visual Effects
Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
Writing (Original Screenplay)
To see my own predictions, either scroll down or go here. Soon I'll do a literal side-by-side comparison of the projected nominees and the actual nominees.
Have at it.
**************************************************
__________________________________________________
TOMMY LEE JONES! That came out of nowhere, did it not?
Woo, Best Supporting Actor list I had down pat!
Cate Blanchett made it into the Leading Actress category? With Laura Linney? Good for the latter, but I was kinda hoping for Angelina Jolie or Keira Knightley instead of the former. Will Blanchett score Supporting Actress too?
Yep! Along with Ruby Dee in place of my wild card Vanessa Redgrave. I’m okay with that! Mainly because Catherine Keener didn’t make it, and I hate her, and all my other four did! Next.
Animated Feature: Persepolis, Ratatouille, and...Surf’s Up? That was a surprise, but a welcome one! I liked that last movie. It was a lot better than The Simpsons Movie. Next.
Cinematography I am 5/5.
Directing...no. That has to be a typo. No WAY Juno could have been nominated for Directing over Atonement! That COMPLETELY ruins its chances to make it to the Best Picture category, even though it had that beautiful Dunkirk shot and everything else! GAH. Okay, I’m amending that list right now — instead of Atonement (which should have been there, and maybe won) Juno is going to be there. Wow, I can’t believe the Academy gave Juno a Directing nom.
And Michael Clayton gets a directing nom in place of Tim Burton for Sweeney Todd! That’s just depressing. That movie is now in the Best Pic race instead of Sweeney Todd, officially. LJADFLJf
Uh...wow. Norbit got an Academy Award nomination. After just getting nominated for all those Razzies yesterday. “Best Achievement in Makeup.” Sickening.
Woo! For Best Original Score, Atonement (of course), Ratatouille (yay!), Michael Clayton (James Newton Howard doesn’t really deserve it, methinks), The Kite Runner (which is AMPAS’s standard ethnic music nom), and...3:10 to Yuma! Like I was hoping somewhat irrationally! They have some sense after all!
Wow! For Best Picture, I was wrong! Atonement is STILL in, but Diving Bell got the boot! Michael Clayton and Juno are both in, in place of Sweeney Todd and Diving Bell and the Butterfly! That’s somewhat disappointing to me, because I was really hoping for Diving Bell to do well, as it’s apparently extremely uplifting and emotional, which is exactly what I like! So those three, as well as No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.
Away From Her got an Adapted Screenplay nomination in place of Charlie Wilson’s War...that’s kind of disappointing, but I’m okay with it. Original Screenplay is where it’s all going to rest now...
Exactly the list I had: Juno, Lars and the Real Girl, Michael Clayton, Ratatouille, and The Savages.
Okay, aftermath, now...I looked up Best Director nom Jason Reitman (for “Juno”) and apparently he did an episode of The Office? And it was one of my favorites from Season 4, so I’m really quite okay with that nomination, even if I hated the movie overall and hope it dies in a fire.
Michael Clayton...eh...I’ve watched a little over half of it now and I can’t say I’m impressed by either the directing or George Clooney’s acting...I really like Tom Wilkinson though!
(By the way, I’m writing this a half hour after they were announced, as I’m reading them off of both oscar.com and imdb.com...I fell asleep while watching Michael Clayton [legal thriller indeed] and woke up at exactly 6:00 AM)
My most happy thing ever about these awards (besides being right on most of my choices, including Supporting Actor, most of Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, and Cinematography) is that Into the Wild got a total of THREE nominations, unlike the 5+ it was supposed to, and those were Best Supporting Actor (Hal Holbrook), Best Original Score (wait, what? I thought Eddie Vedder was disqualified? Maybe not, apparently), and Best Editing (a category which I do not claim to know much about, except I can tell when a film is badly edited). So that makes me really happy! Because I pretty much hate Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch (at least in this movie) and I hated hated hated the book it was based on.
I also really like that they decided to give Viggo Mortensen his much-deserved nomination for Eastern Promises.
Biggest surprises were Joe Wright not getting a Directing nod (which he whole-heartedly deserved more than Jason Rietman), Tommy Lee Jones getting a nomination for Best Leading Actor in place of James MacAvoy (which I’m somewhat okay with, as I really liked Jones’s performance in No Country for Old Men, but I would have liked to see Atonement earn its Best Picture nomination a little bit more awards-wise), and Norbit scoring a nomination, however inconsequential it may be (and probably was the only aspect of the movie Eddie Murphy was not a part of).
Disappointments include the above, as well as Tim Burton not getting the Best Director nod he might have deserved (I haven’t seen the film yet, but many have said it’s his best, and he’s never actually been nominated before), and Sweeney Todd and Diving Bell not getting Best Pic noms.
I’m going to dig through and see which awards exactly Atonement has been nominated for, to see if it does even warrant a Best Picture nomination solely on its nominations:
Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Saoirse Ronan)
Best Adapted Screenplay (Christopher Hampton)
Best Cinematography (Seamus McGarvey)
Art Direction (Sarah Greenwood)
Costume Design (Jacqueline Durran)
Original Score (Dario Marianelli)
and Best Picture, making 7 nominations total, the same as it got at the Golden Globes, except in different categories.
Hmm. Maybe. I think it would have earned it more so with the Directing nod for Joe Wright, and even more so with Actress Keira Knightley in place of Cate Blanchett (who is already nominated) and Actor James MacAvoy in place of Tommy Lee Jones (who might deserve it, but who knows; haven’t seen the film).
I think I’ll go through each Best Picture nomination and look at each of its other Oscar nominations to see how well each one deserves to be up there.
Juno:
Best Picture
Best Director (bleh)
Best Original Screenplay
Best Actress in a Leading Role
4 total
Michael Clayton:
Best Picture
Best Director (bleh, I don’t think he deserved it; the film was too boring/non-intense/undramatic)
Best Original Screenplay
Best Actor in a Leading Role
Best Original Score (odd, because I haven’t really noticed the score so far except to notice that it was really really ordinary/boring, and most definitely not James Newton Howard’s best work)
5 total
No Country for Old Men:
Best Picture
Best Directors
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Cinematography
Editing
Sound
Sound Editing
8 total
There Will Be Blood:
Best Picture
Best Director
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Actor in a Leading Role (and will prolly win it)
Cinematography
Editing
Art Direction
Sound Editing
8 total
Hmm. How many did Diving Bell get?
Best Director
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Cinematography
Best Editing
Okay, I guess that makes a certain amount of sense...it wasn’t ever really up for any acting awards (except for potentially Best Supporting Actor for Max von Sydow) so really, Juno beat Diving Bell by just a hair. Bah.
So in conclusion, doing a little research, I discovered, just from iTunes’s music samples, that not only does The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford have absolutely mind-blowing beautiful cinematography (which one can tell just from the trailer, look it up on Youtube), but it has a stunningly-beautiful and haunting score. So check that out if you like movie scores, which I’m pretty sure nobody reading this blog does. So it probably should have gotten an Original Score nomination, at least in place of Michael Clayton. Yes, very much so.
In the REAL conclusion, No Country and There Will Be Blood both got the most, with 8 nominations, Atonement with 7, and the rest following in their wake. Those three, it appears, are the best three movies of the year? Cool. I’m down for that. I really enjoyed all of them and fully support them being nominated for best movie types of awards. Projections for actual wins are forthcoming.
-SALVARE
posted by Neal at
7:39 AM
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