The Great and Terrible News About the Oscar Nominations

While everyone is “upset” about Christopher Nolan not being nominated for best director for Inception, there’s way more fascinating news in today’s Oscars nominations announcement.

The good news:

• Waiting for Superman? Straight-up SNUBBED in the best documentary race. Hooray! The propaganda vehicle for the privatization of education can now slink off to die.

• Exit Through the Gift Shop, which is in some ways at least a documentary, though who knows which ways, nominated for best documentary, which, yay.

• Jacki Weaver, who is maybe possibly the last remaining delightfully aging camp diva of our time, nominated for best supporting actress to duke it out with the marvelous Melissa Leo. Thank God: this gives the gays something to fret about on Oscar night!

The hard choices:

• Jeremy Renner (The Town) v. Christian Bale (The Fighter) for Best Supporting Actor? This choice is unpossible. (Also more fretting amongst the gays.)

The bad news:

• The Best Actress race seems not that interesting, right? (That’s hard on the gays!)

• The Pat Tillman Story? SNUBBED for documentary. That’s total bullshit.

• Daft Punk’s soundtrack for Tron? Snubbed! Sad. (Though it picked up a nomination for sound editing, which seems fair!)

• Poor Ryan Reynolds put himself inside a box for a whole film in Buried and Hollywood didn’t care. 🙁

• Hey, you know what didn’t pick up any traction (AKA marketing) for awards? Please Give. Hmmph.

• The thing about the Academy is that it’s always like they don’t see so many movies. For instance, this year, four films took 38 of the nominations. This seems statistically pretty par for the course each year, and it’s boring. The only thing that suggests they saw more films than were mass-nominated were the costume design nominations for I Am Love and the screenplay nomination for Mike Leigh’s Another Year (which made $714,387 in the U.S.). Other than that, pretty much anyone in America could have picked this list with 85% accuracy. Except everyone lost a few points, because everyone had Nolan on their best director list. Surprise!