There may or may not be an Oscars show, but there will be blood. Paul Thomas Anderson?s not-that-bloody, critically adored film about the self-destruction of a California oil magnate and ?No Country for Old Men,? Joel and Ethan Coen?s grisly chase thriller, led this morning?s Academy Award nominations with eight apiece, including one each for best picture.
Their fellow nominees are equally swept up in bad news or tragedy. ?Michael Clayton,? Tony Gilroy?s story of a serious corruption involving a New York law firm, was right behind ?There Will Be Blood? and ?No Country? with seven nominations. ?Atonement,? a romantic wartime epic about nosiness, gossip, and remorse, had six. And ?Juno,? America?s favorite teen-pregnancy comedy, got four, including a surprising nod for its director, Jason Reitman.
Reitman joins Anderson, the Coens, Gilroy, and Julian Schnabel, for ?The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,? which along with ?Ratatouille,? ?Into the Wild,? and ?American Gangster,? didn?t make the best-picture cut. Joe Wright, who made ?Atonement,? was left off the directing list (maybe that five-minute tracking shot bugged the Academy?s directors branch, too). So was Sean Penn for ?Into the Wild,? which got just two nominations, one for Hal Holbrook?s performance and another for editing.
Before a foxy Kathy Bates and a tired-looking Sid Ganis made the televised announcements today, ?Atonement? was considered a front-runner. But with no directing nomination, the picture race is slightly more open. Neither of the movie?s leads, James McAvoy and Keira Knightley, was nominated.
That?s too bad. McAvoy?s miserable soldier would have fit right in with the five actual best-actor nominees since none one of the men they played had much to smile about. George Clooney was a stressed-out lawyer in ?Michael Clayton.? Daniel Day-Lewis was a mad oil baron in ?There Will Be Blood.? Johnny Depp played an undead, heart-sick, throat-slashing serial killer in ?Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.? Viggo Mortensen was a sour Russian mobster in ?Eastern Promises.? And Tommy Lee Jones, the morning?s happiest surprise, was the stoic military dad looking for his AWOL son in ?In the Valley of Elah.? The Academy?s acting branch clearly didn?t know what to do with either of Philip Seymour Hoffman?s blazing performances in ?The Savages? and ?Before the Devil Knows You?re Dead,? nominating him instead in the supporting actor category for ?Charlie Wilson?s War.?
In the best actress category, it?s a bunch of indomitable women ? Cate Blanchett as the Virgin Queen in ?Elizabeth: the Golden Age,? Julie Christie living with Alzheimer?s in ?Away from Her,? Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in ?La Vie en Rose,? and Laura Linney playing a slacking intellectual narcissist in ?The Savages? ? squaring off against one sardonic 19-year-old. That would be Ellen Page as a teen mother-to-be in ?Juno.? Notably absent are Angelina Jolie for playing Marianne Pearl in ?A Mighty Heart? and Amy Adams for playing a fairy-tale princess stranded in Manhattan in ?Enchanted.?
Joining Hoffman?s porcine CIA agent and Holbrook?s teary codger in the supporting-actor category are Casey Affleck as a proto-celebrity stalker in ?The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,? Javier Bardem as the killer with the kooky haircut in ?No Country for Old Men,? and Tom Wilkinson as a high-powered who believes himself Shiva the Goddess of Death in ?Michael Clayton.?
Blanchett appears again, more expectedly, in the supporting actress category for playing a pseudo-Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes?s ?I?m Not There.? Her fellow nominees are 13-year-old Saorsie Ronan, the budding playwright with the destructive imagination in ?Atonement,? Amy Ryan as the mother of the year in ?Gone Baby Gone, Tilda Swinton as a high-strung attorney in ?Michael Clayton,? and, holy of holies, Ruby Dee as Denzel Washington?s momma (and the only person with any common sense) in ?American Gangster.?
The two screenwriting categories are remarkable because they include four women (it shouldn?t have to be noteworthy, but it is). For adapted screenplay, the nominees include actress-director Sarah Polley for ?Away from Her." She joins Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen brothers, Christopher Hampton for ?Atonement,? and Ronald Harwood for ?The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.? For original screenplay, Diablo Cody (?Juno?), Tamara Jenkins (?The Savages?), and Nancy Oliver (?Lars and the Real Girl?) are up against Brad Bird (?Ratatouille?) and Tony Gilroy.
The documentary feature category continues to remain credible after a few adjustments in the nominating process. This five films on this year?s slate include: Charles Ferguson?s unhappy Iraq-invasion assessment, ?No End in Sight?; Richard E. Robbins?s ?Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience,? recollections of soldiers who?ve fought in Afghanistan and Iraq; Michael Moore?s moving health-care farce, ?Sicko?; ?Taxi to the Dark Side,? Alex Gibney?s look at the murder of a cab driver at Bagram Air Force Base; and ?War/Dance,? Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine?s film about children in a Ugandan dance competition.
Now that the documentary category seems OK, maybe the Academy can work on straightening out the foreign-language-film nomination process, which some years is fine and other years is mysterious. With all due respect to the actual nominees, this year is a mysterious one, mostly for the superb submitted films that were snubbed: ?4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days? (Romania), ?Silent Light? (Mexico), ?Secret Sunshine? (Korea), ?The Edge of Heaven? (Germany), and, from France, ?Persepolis,? which, miraculously, did make the animation cut, along with ?Ratatouille? and ?Surf?s Up.?
In any case, this year?s foreign-language-film nominees are: ?Beaufort? (Israel); ? The Counterfeiters? (Austria); ?Katyn? (Poland); ?Mongol? (Kazakhstan); and Nikita Mikhalkov?s Chechnya-bound ?12 Angry Men?-remake, ?12? (Russia).
This year?s most flagrant omission was by the music by Radiohead?s Jonny Greenwood for ?There Will Be Blood,? which probably wasn't orchestral enough for voters in the best score category. The nominees for original score are Dario Marianelli for ?Atonement,? Alberto Iglesias for ?The Kite Runner,? James Newton Howard for ?Michael Clayton,? Michael Giacchino for ?Ratatouille,? and Marco Beltrami for ?3:10 to Yuma.?
This a good year for fun Oscar history: Cate Blanchett is the first woman to be nominated for playing a man who isn?t a cross-dresser or transsexual. She?s also the second actor to be nominated two different times for the same character. (Her first-ever nomination was for 1998?s ?Elizabeth.?) Paul Newman was twice nominated for his work as Eddie Felson in ?The Hustler? and ?The Color of Money,? for which he won an Oscar. And ?No Country for Old Men? marks only the second time two people have been nominated for directing the same movie. (Warren Beatty and Buck Henry shared a nomination for 1978?s ?Heaven Can Wait.?) And at 83, first-time nominee Ruby Dee is the second-oldest nominee, after 87-year-old Gloria Stuart of ?Titanic.?
Of course, the only Academy Awards history that really matters right now is whether this will be the first year the telecast won?t go on. Will the Writers Guild of America?s strike and the actors? refusal to cross the picket line result in a canceled event? Will negotiations heat up at the last minute, meaning a postponed broadcast? Or will there just be a sad little Golden Globes-style press conference presided over by, say, Ryan Seacrest and Star Jones? Stay tuned. This could be the first year Oscar is a loser at his very own show.
