To paraphrase Sally Field, “They don’t like him. They really don’t like him.”
That is the only possible conclusion to be drawn from the snub of Ben Affleck from the Best Director nominations, announced early this morning in Hollywood. Affleck was assumed to have a lock on one of the five slots in the category for his audience-friendly, fact-based thriller Argo, but it simply didn’t happen. Very odd, considering the Academy’s bias towards actors-turned-directors (see past nominations for Robert Redford, Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, etc.).
Even more deserving of a Best Director nod ― and equally snubbed ― was Kathryn Bigelow, whose Zero Dark Thirty powerfully chronicles the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Bigelow is the only woman to win an Oscar for Best Director (The Hurt Locker) and another nomination seemed assured. Could she have been swift-boated by the recent controversy over government assistance on the film and its implied credit to waterboarding torture leading to tracking down the Taliban leader?
In any event, those two omissions point to the elevation of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln as the front-runner for Best Picture at this year’s 85th annual Academy Awards ceremony, to be televised live on Feb. 24. Lincoln led the field with 12 nominations, including mentions for director Spielberg, adapted screenwriter Tony Kushner, supporting actors Sally Field (yeah, they still like her) and Tommy Lee Jones, as well as Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role.
Yes, Day-Lewis has already won Best Actor statuettes twice, but he must be considered the prohibitive favorite for his uncanny evocation of our 16th president. (Note to myself: If Day-Lewis does not win, consider resigning from the Academy in protest.) (Second note to myself: You have to be in the Academy before you can resign from it.)
The Best Picture field includes nine films this year, based on a convoluted formula that requires a movie to get five percent of the top votes to gain a nomination. Among the probable also-rans in the category are Silver Linings Playbook, Les Misérables, Life of Pi and Django Unchained. Also in the pack are a couple of smaller films that have to be counted as surprise inclusions.
The very imaginative Beasts of the Southern Wild should gain wider viewership ― though probably not Oscars ― for the picture, and a career boost for writer-director Benh Zeitlin. And if an Oscar nomination gets you more popularity in fifth grade, expect little Quvenzhané Wallis (not a stage name!) to be the hit of the playground. She would be the youngest winner ever in the category, being 6 when she made the film and 9 now.
At the opposite end of the age spectrum is 85-year-old Emmanuelle Riva, who plays a woman who suffers a stroke and then drifts into dementia in Amour. The film is Austria’s entry in the foreign-language category, which it should win, since it also pulled in nominations for Best Picture and for its director, Michael Haneke.
Still, the front-runner for Best Actress has to be Jessica Chastain as the obsessive CIA analyst in Zero Dark Thirty, an emotional and physical tour de force. There is support for Jennifer Lawrence, as the unstable widow of Silver Linings Playbook, but her performance seems lightweight next to Chastain’s.
Silver Linings Playbook earned nominations in all four acting categories, including Best Actor hopeful Bradley Cooper, doing his best work ever on screen as the divorced guy with anger issues who returns home from a mental hospital. His chances for winning the Oscar are less than slim, though, since he has the bad luck of running into the buzz saw of Day-Lewis.
An egregious omission from the Best Actor category is John Hawkes, who gives a powerful performance as a polio sufferer who wants to lose his virginity in The Sessions. Hard to fathom why he got no love from the Academy. Longer shots in the Best Actress field were Marion Cotillard in Rust and Bone and Helen Mirren in Hitchcock, both past winners that could have been in the running this year.
Perhaps the hardest category to handicap is Best Supporting Actor, which includes five men who have each won Oscars previously. Tommy Lee Jones could sweep in on the coattails of Lincoln, but he’ll get tough competition from Robert DeNiro (Silver Linings Playbook), Alan Arkin (Argo), Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Master).
Les Misérables was a disappointment on screen and it failed to get a nomination for its director, Tom Hooper. Still, it seems likely that Anne Hathaway will own an Oscar soon for playing the tragic prostitute Fantine, warbling I Dreamed a Dream just before she ― spoiler alert! ― dies. Sorry, Sally Field, no third Oscar for you.
The nominations announcement was handled by Seth McFarlane (Oscar nominee for his lyrics to a song from Ted). He will emcee the ceremony and, judging from his pre-written ad-libs at the nominations, the show should have a high snark factor.