(See the complete list of nominees.)
“Avatar” showed off its muscle at the Oscar nominations, but “The Hurt Locker” stood toe-to-toe with its biggest competitor and held its own.
As expected, James Cameron’s sci-fi blockbuster landed the most nominations, with nine – but in a slightly unexpected show of strength, Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq drama landed the same number of nods from Academy voters, cementing the fact that this year’s Oscar race has come down to a two-film competition between former spouses.
The two films received nominations in seven of the same categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Cinematographer, Film Editing, Original Score, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing.
“Avatar” also received nominations in Art Direction and Visual Effects, while “The Hurt Locker” picked up nods in two arguably more crucial categories, Best Actor (Jeremy Renner) and Original Screenplay.
If you just go by the numbers, the membership in the two Academy branches that went for Bigelow’s film is more than double the size of the membership in the two that went for Cameron’s.
Overall, the surprises sprinkled among the nominations were modest. It’s mildly surprising that Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus” didn’t make the expanded Best Picture lineup, although the film did receive acting nods for Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is something of a surprise in the Supporting Actress category, and proof that support for “Crazy Heart” goes beyond Jeff Bridges’ performance. (The film also received a nomination for the song “The Weary Kind.”)
And the writers branch, as usual, found room for a couple of dark-horse candidates, the profane British comedy “In the Loop” in the Adapted Screenplay category, and the tough wartime drama “The Messenger” on the Original Screenplay side.
Who was snubbed? Eastwood, perhaps, though his film’s status as sure-fire Oscar bait began to recede as soon as it started screening. Tom Ford’s “A Single Man” took a nomination for Colin Firth’s lead performance, but it didn’t show up in any other categories, including a notable snub for Julianne Moore in the Supporting Actress category.
"(500) Days of Summer," considered a dark-horse Best Picture candidate and a likely screenplay nominee, was shut out; so was the raucous comedy "The Hangover," which won Best Movie - Comedy or Musical at the Golden Globes.
And on the tech side, Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” fared far better at Monday’s Razzie nominations. It did pick up one nomination for Sound Mixing, but failed to land one of the three nods for Visual Effects, losing out to the lower-tech (and significantly lower-budget) effects of “District 9.”
Foreign-language film voters proved that World War II is no longer an automatic ticket to the Oscars, overlooking the Netherlands’ resistance drama “Winter in Wartime” for the moodier Peruvian entry, “The Milk of Sorrow.”
The other nominees in the category – France’s “Un Prophete,” Argentina’s “El Secreto de Sus Ojos,” Germany’s “The White Ribbon” and Israell’s “Ajami” – are all critically-acclaimed films, giving the category a strong, solid lineup that should avoid any of the controversies that often plague the Oscar foreign-language race.
