About those Oscar nominations…

I held off on commenting on the Oscar nominations yesterday because I'd just spent 23 hours in transit, and jet lag made it impossible for me to sound like anything other than a dyspeptic asshole. Even today—zzzzzzz. It's hard to get worked up about a Best Picture slate with ten nominees, a system that simultaneously guarantees spots for genuinely deserving films (Inglourious Basterds, The Hurt Locker, A Serious Man) and yet diminishes them by placing them alongside obvious crap (insert obligatory Blind Side reference here).

There were oversights that came as surprises (no Christian McKay? Did they use those Me and Orson Welles screeners as coasters?) and oversights that were probably inevitable (raise your hands, Academy members who saw Julia and Antichrist, which featured two of the best performances of the year, from Tilda Swinton and Charlotte Gainsbourg, respectively). On the other hand, major props to Team Makeup for nominating the barely released Il Divo, even though I kind of hated it. At least one branch of the Academy is paying attention to the margins.

Then there are, as always, the nods that are simply inexplicable. Penélope Cruz in Nine? Marion Cotillard was by far the standout—which is to say, the only person on-screen who wasn't nerve-shreddingly miscast—and she was better in Public Enemies (another overlooked film). And I'm still not sure that what Mauro Fiore did for Avatar is, however accomplished, cinematography; his task seems so fundamentally different from that of his fellow nominees that lumping him in the same category seems strange. On the plus side, Avatar's song didn't get a nomination, and Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park's new movie is called "A Matter of Loaf and Death." That's just funny. I'll end on that nondyspeptic note.