Oscar nominations: The expected and the unexpected

Read interviews with the nominees, and follow our Oscar coverage at timeoutchicago.com/oscars.

The Oscar nominations are out, and despite the live Hollywood audience's propensity for gasping (and cheering: the Milk contingent was out in force), most of the picks were as expected—but each major category provided a surprise.

Per the conventional wisdom, in Best Picture Slumdog Millionaire, Milk and Frost/Nixon were a lock for nominations, and Curious Case of Benjamin Button made it in as expected, but Dark Knight, Doubt and Revolutionary Road were blocked for the fifth slot, with The Reader jumping the queue. It's a two-horse race between Milk and Slumdog Millionaire, both reflectors of the zeitgeist (upbeat Third World version of the American dream of winning big and getting the girl vs. an elegy to the power of one man to make political change).

For Best Actress, Kate Winslet, Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway and Melissa Leo all made it as predicted. But Sally Hawkins, hyped by many Oscar gurus for her perky turn in Happy-Go-Lucky, got shut out in favor of Angelina Jolie's work in The Changeling, which seemed to have lost steam in the buzz race. So much for the conventional wisdom of the buzz. My money is on Anne Hathaway for the win. Streep doesn't need it, Winslet will have other chances, and her solid but slightly clinical work is not as deeply felt as Hathaway's in Rachel Getting Married. Leo and Jolie are also-rans, though I love Leo's performance in Frozen River.

In Best Actor, the pleasant surprise is that the Academy skipped over Clint Eastwood's cartoonish, overblown work in Gran Torino in favor of the subtle, quiet work of Richard Jenkins in The Visitor. The other four noms were straighforward: Sean Penn for Milk, Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler, Frank Langella for Frost/Nixon, and Brad Pitt for Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Supporting Actress: Saner heads prevailed and refused to nominate Kate Winslet as supporting for The Reader, a film in which she is obviously the lead actress. (The studio was pushing her for supporting to avoid having her compete against herself for her Revolutionary Road role.) Instead, the Academy put Winslet up as Best Actress for Reader, and she eliminated her competing perf in Revolutionary Road. That freed up the fifth slot (the four noms for Penelope Cruz, Viola Davis, Taraji P. Henson and Marisa Tomei were almost a foregone conclusion) for Amy Adams's fine work in Doubt.

Supporting Actor has been a lock for the win since this summer, and sure enough, there's Heath Ledger's name. As expected, he's joined by Philip Seymour Hoffman for Doubt and Josh Brolin for Milk. Two slight surprises here: Many had been saying Robert Downey Jr. would get a nod for his Tropic Thunder turn as an Australian who gets a skin-pigment augmentation to play black, but it still feels like a surprise. The other, bigger surprise is the resurgence of former Chicagoan Michael Shannon for Revolutionary Road. That took a chance away from James Franco for Milk (loved him, wanted to date his character) and Dev Patel for Slumdog (who shouldn't have been pushed by the studio for Supporting anyway, since his was a lead role). Ledger's still a lock.

The Best Director field was mostly predictable (Danny Boyle for Slumdog, David Fincher for Benjamin Button, Ron Howard for Frost/Nixon, and Gus Van Sant for Milk). The shocker was the absence of Christopher Nolan for The Dark Knight and the presence of Stephen Daldry for The Reader.

So, all of the big six categories had a little twist. Now the campaigning begins in earnest.

The Oscar awards ceremony airs Feb 22. Watch timeoutchicago.com/oscars for our ongoing coverage. A full list of the nominees can be found at Oscar.com.