Woody Allen made his first Oscar appearance in the Best Director race since 1994 and Martin Scorsese made it four of his last five feature films this morning.
I only have to add one director to my all-time Oscar Best Director ranking list, since the other four have all been nominated before, and conveniently, Michel Hazanavicus’ last two films, his French spy farces, are available on Watch Instantly on Netflix.
As usual, I jotted down quick predictions for the major categories (except Picture, since we didn’t know how many nominees there would be) and generally went 4 for 4. Surprisingly, I went 5 for 5 on Best Director, correctly getting the inclusion of Terrence Malick.
So here are the various notes from today’s nominations:
- There are an incredible 41 feature films nominated this year. That’s the most since 1996 and the second most since 1956.
- This is the third year since they expanded Best Picture. This year, with the new fluctuating number, they went with 9 films. But, just like the last two years, we still don’t have 5 films nominated for Picture, Director and Screenplay. The first year, it was Avatar that didn’t get a Screenplay nom, last year it was Black Swan and this year it’s Tree of Life.
- Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese are tied for third all-time in nominations, with seven. William Wyler has 12, Billy Wilder has 8 and David Lean and Fred Zinnemann have 7 each. They are tied for 7th in points (with Spielberg, who wasn’t nominated) and if one of them wins, they will move into a tie for 3rd with Lean, Zinnemann, Frank Capra and John Ford.
- Director, Screenplay, Actor and Actress all have former winners among the nominees. But of the five Supporting Actor nominees, none have an Oscar and only Nick Nolte has more than one previous acting nomination. In Supporting Actress, only Janet McTeer has been nominated before.
- But Glenn Close, after earning five nominations in seven years in the 80’s, has her first nomination in 23 years.
- Many prognosticators will point out that Hugo has the most nominations and that puts it in the best spot to win. But, five times previously, Martin Scorsese had a film nominated for Best Picture. Two of those times – 2002 with Gangs of New York (1o noms) and 2004 with The Aviator (11 noms), his film had the most nominations. Once, in 1980 with Raging Bull (8 noms), his film was tied with the most. Those all lost. But, in 2006, when two other Best Picture nominees had more nominees, his The Departed won Best Picture and Director.
- Hugo also marks the fourth year in a row that a film has been nominated for the big five technical awards (Editing, Cinematography, Score, Sound, Art Direction) after a five year gap with no film doing it. It’s the first time Scorsese has done it (Gangs of New York and Aviator both had ineligible Scores). But, of the previous three only King’s Speech won Best Picture, while Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Avatar both lost.
- The Artist is already in the pole position for the Oscars. It has won the Broadcast Film Critics and the Producers Guild. Of the previous 9 films to win both, only Saving Private Ryan and Brokeback Mountain failed to go on to win the Oscar.
- George Clooney is the Bret Saberhagen of actors – saves his best stuff for odd years. This is the fourth time Clooney has received Oscar nominations (and the second he has received multiple Oscar nominations, but for different films) – all of them in the last four odd numbered years.
- After only twice in the first 29 years of its existence, this is the third time in the last eight years that the winner of the LA Film Critics Best Actor award (in this case, Michael Fassbender for Shame and three other performances) is not nominated for an Oscar.
- Albert Brooks had already become the only person to win four critics award for Best Supporting Actor and not earn a SAG nomination (for Drive). But he also just became the only one not to get an Oscar nomination either.
- Interesting mix with Screenplay. In the previous two years combined, with 10 Picture nominees each, only three Picture nominees didn’t get Screenplay nomination. This year, with only 9 nominees, there were four: The Help, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Tree of Life and War Horse. Since, of those four, only Tree of Life got a Director nomination, we have three Best Picture nominees with no directing or writing nomination – or, as many as the rest of the century combined (the only other three so far since 2000 are Moulin Rogue, Two Towers and Blind Side).
- War Horse was nominated but Spielberg wasn’t – making him now the only director since the Studio Era to have that happen to him three times (Jaws, The Color Purple).
- The power in Best Foreign Film has shifted. Prior to 1993, there had never been back-to-back years with no nominee from either France or Italy (hell, there had never been back-to-back years without a nominee from France). But after happening for the first time in 93-94, it has now happened in 06-07 and 10-11. On the other hand, while we have three fairly newcomers (Belgium’s first nominee in 11 years, Iran’s first in 13, Poland’s second in the last 30 years), we have two new powerhouses. After only two nominations prior to 2003, Canada has its fourth nominee in 9 years, and after a 23 year gap between nominations, Israel has its fourth in 5 years.
- A Separation is by far the front-runner to win Best Foreign Film, but be prepared for an upset. Since Foreign Film was made a competitive category in 1956, 33 previous films have received a nomination in Foreign Film and a nomination in another category. Of the first 9 (up through 1972), the only film that didn’t win Best Foreign Film was up against another film with multiple nominations. But of the 24 films since then, only 9 have won the Best Foreign Film Oscar and none since 2004. The list of films to lose Best Foreign Film while having multiple nominations include Amelie, Pan’s Labyrinth, White Ribbon and Biutiful.
- Rango was the front-runner for Best Animated Film until Tintin won at both the Globes and PGA. With no nomination for Tintin, it’s safe to say the animators hate motion-capture films.
- The Best Picture race seems to indicate that the BFCA is still the best pre-cursor. While Tree of Life and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close both got ignored by the guilds and Globes, they both had BFCA nominations.
- With its one piddly nomination for Sound Editing, Drive just barely avoided becoming, by far, the biggest film in awards points history to get blanked at the Oscars.
- Only two nominations for Original Song? We knew that they couldn’t agree with the Globes, yet again (7th time in 8 years the Globe winner gets no Oscar nom) because Madonna’s song wasn’t eligible. But only two? It’s a slap in the face to all the eligible songs.
- It might have happened, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a film like Tree of Life, where both stars were nominated for Oscars, but for other films.
- History says Sandy Powell won’t win Best Costume Design for Hugo. Why? Both she and Colleen Atwood have 9 previous nominations. In six different years (98, 02, 04, 05, 09, 10), they competed against each other. In all six of those years, one of the two won. Neither has won an Oscar when not competing against the other and Atwood isn’t nominated this year. But this nomination does make Powell the most nominated costume designer who wasn’t part of the Studio Era.
- Stuart Craig gets another Art Direction nomination for Harry Potter. This ties him for 21st all-time in points. All 20 of the art directors above him are from the Studio Era and he is the only person that high on the list to have a nomination since 1974.
- After a five year gap, John Williams is back with two nominations for Original Score (Tintin and War Horse). How strange was the five year gap? The last time Williams went five years without a nomination was before his first nomination in 1967, when he was primarily a television composer. These also mark his 15th and 16th nominations as Spielberg’s composer. This also makes the sixth decade in which Williams has earned a nomination.
- Thelma Schoonmaker has just tied Michael Kahn for all-time points for Editing and tied William H. Reynolds for first all-time with her 7th nomination, six of them with Martin Scorsese (including this one for Hugo).
- Woody Allen already owned the all-time records for nominations (15 now) for Screenplay and points (680 now). This just extends those records.
- Pixar is shut out. For the first time, they have no film in the Best Animated Film race (twice before they had no film competing) and Cars 2 is their first film since the first Cars not to get a Screenplay nomination.
- It’s the Academy’s last chance to reward the amazing visual effects from the Harry Potter films. They better do it.
- The Descendents, Hugo and The Artist are in it for Picture. All of them have Director, Screenplay and Editing nominations. Only one film since 1932 has won Best Picture without a Director nomination (Driving Miss Daisy in 1989), only three films have won since 1933 without a Screenplay nomination (Hamlet in 1948, Sound of Music in 1965, Titanic in 1997) and no film has won it without Editing since 1980.
- It’s the first nomination for Gary Rydstrom since 2003 and the first for Richard Hymns since 2002, but the two War Horse sound editors move up to second place all-time in the category with 220 points each.
- On the other hand, Rydstrom is also nominated for Best Sound for the first time since 1999. Also nominated this year for Sound are Andy Nelson (War Horse), Michael Semanick (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and Greg P. Russell (Transformers: Dark of the Moon). Since Rydstrom’s last nomination, the three of them have earned a collective 27 Oscar nominations. The Sound Mixers like their same people. There are fewer first-time nominees (4) then nominees who were nominated last year (7).
- Woody Allen has 14 previous writing nominations. The other 17 writing nominees have 10 previous nominations between them. Ironically, though, they have more writing Oscars than Allen. Allen has 2 (Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters), while Steven Zaillian won for Schindler’s List, Alexander Payne for Sideways and Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network.
- Even though it got a Best Picture nomination, Tree of Life has still earned almost 80% of its points from the critics, a percentage unheard of for a film with that many awards points.
- On the flip side, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has 206 total awards points and had only 135 going into the Oscars – the lowest amounts for a Best Picture nominee since Three Coins in the Fountain had nothing going into the Oscar nominations back in 1954.
24 January, 2012 at 4:52 pm
I think Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the only film to get a “Rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes AND a BP nomination since the inception of RT. Holy hell.
I just did a Top 10 for BP predictions, but in the future, I think I will do something like:
“If there’s 6, then x will be nominated. If 7, add x. If 8…” and so on and so forth. I got 8 of the 9…I replaced ELAIC with Dragon Tattoo and Drive, although Drive was a filler pick anyway.
Director: 5/5
Actor: I missed Bichir. Fassbender was not the most intelligent pick, though.
Actress: 5/5
S. Actor: Didn’t think von Sydow would be nominated, and I went with Albert Brooks. This was a tough one to predict, so 4/5 is really good.
S. Actress: 5/5, this category is my specialty anyway
O. Screenplay: 4/5. I guessed Beginners over Margin Call.
A. Screenplay: Ides of March over The Help? Wow. You got me, Academy.
Animation: Ugh, this was such a bad year for Animation…I went with Tintin and Cars 2 over A Cat in Paris and Chico and Rica.
24 January, 2012 at 4:58 pm
how long is the stretch from Max von Sydow’s first screen appearance to his second oscar nom, is it a record? I’m guessing it’s no record from his first oscar nom to his second (I actually thought he’d never been nominated before but checked just before posting).
24 January, 2012 at 6:41 pm
I’m not certain, but it would be hard to beat the 70 years before Gloria Stuart was nominated the first time.
24 January, 2012 at 11:03 pm
It’s not that mo-cap is hated by animators, it’s that it isn’t truly genuine animation.
Mo-cap involves a bunch of FX sensors on the actors and are filmed with said apparatus like a normal live-action film. The bodies and backgrounds are animated post-production.
Genuine animation – regardless of the tool (hand-drawn, CGI, stop-motion models) – must be done in a frame-by-frame manner nearly totally (the one aspect not in control of the animator is, of course, the score and the voiceover), which mo-cap is not. That’s why mo-cap isn’t really animation.
It’s strange that “… TINTIN” was shortlisted months earlier despite the Academy’s recently revised rules on the Best Animated Oscar category that mo-cap is ineligible. I guess the Animation branch caught themselves with its (still deserving) inclusion prior to the nominations.
25 January, 2012 at 10:51 am
In terms of the nominations lead, I suspect that “Hugo” only has it because “The Artist” isn’t eligible in the sound categories (for obvious reasons).
I’ve seen seven of the nine nominated movies so far (“The Artist” and “The Descendants” haven’t opened here yet, though the latter arrives on Friday), and provisionally I’ll say that this year doesn’t feel nearly as strong as last year’s crop. 2010’s A-team (“The King’s Speech”, “Toy Story 3”, “The Social Network”, “The Fighter”, “True Grit”) would all place ahead of my favourite of this year’s nominees (“Hugo”; though I would that and “Moneyball” ahead of the rest of last year’s nominees, with the rest interspersed).
The acting categories threw some interesting curveballs. I’m glad that Rooney Mara got in, for instance. And my fellow countryman Christopher Plummer looks set to cruise to a deserved win for “Beginner” (what an amazing performance that was; admittedly, my own father passed away from cancer earlier this year, so it spoke to me especially, but all the same, world-class acting).
25 January, 2012 at 10:54 am
Oh, and no category feels more disappointing than Animated Feature, particularly since they omitted “The Adventures of Tintin” due to prejudice against motion-capture; that was one of my favourite movies of the year, and easily the best animated film. It feels bizarre that this year, of all years, ended up having five nominees, where last year they had only three and far more deserving films like “Tangled” couldn’t make the cut (not that “Toy Story 3” could ever have been denied its deserved win; this year, though, even Pixar sputtered).
25 January, 2012 at 4:59 pm
there was a rule change in animation this year that allows for 3, 4 or 5 nominees depending upon the total number of films that qualify. more than 16 animated films qualify this year so there were 5 nominees.
25 January, 2012 at 6:47 pm
Yeah, I know that. I just meant that of all the years to have five nominees, this hardly feels like it’s worthwhile.
25 January, 2012 at 7:48 pm
Take Shelter was excellent, and it received no nominations. Damnit.
As nice as it would be to have the truly excellent visual effects of the Harry Potter series finally win an Oscar, I think that the effects from Rise of the Planet of the Apes were better. Maybe they’ll win sound editing. They did at the BFCA, after all (though I would prefer Drive win).
Well, since Cave of Forgotten Dreams has, up until now, won the most awards in the documentary feature category, I suppose Pina has the best chance of winning. Or maybe Paradise Lost 3. Can’t be sure about that one.
Best Editing? Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which I predict will be its only win of the night.
25 January, 2012 at 7:53 pm
Harry Potter isn’t up for Sound Editing. And I prefer its Visual Effects to Rise.
25 January, 2012 at 8:19 pm
in your list of those tied for 3rd for Director nominations, you mention Lean twice. Did you mean someone else in one of those places?
25 January, 2012 at 9:21 pm
The second one was supposed to be John Ford. It’s been corrected.
30 January, 2012 at 12:20 pm
Do I have this right? The max amount of nominees for BP is ten? What is the minimum?
30 January, 2012 at 12:22 pm
The minimum is 5.