As actors, directors and other professionals frequently say, to even get a nomination for an Academy Award is to be a winner. On the other hand, missing the nomination makes you an indisputable loser. History offers some consolation: Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock never won Oscars for directing. Ingrid Bergman wasn't even nominated for Casablanca. With this week's Academy Award nomination announcements, here are some of the people who got robbed, snubbed or given the cold shoulder by the voters this year.
Best picture and director:
Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight earned eight nominations, with only one people really care about, for Heath Ledger's posthumous best-supporting-actor nomination. Everyone understands that the typical member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is older, more conservative than the average moviegoer, but even so, overlooking a serious film that made a billion dollars at the box office is strange. Titanic had a few flaws too and the academy loved it.
Wall-E: Once again, a genre prejudice put mediocre literary adaptations over a children's film that received critical raves, substantial popularity and featured daring story-telling. Wall-E has the quality of an instant classic; that can't be said for any of the other film nominated.
Revolutionary Road: Maybe academy voters just don't like being told their society is a soul-destroying pit of emotional evasions and lies. This was a movie designed to win Oscars, with strong source material in Richard Yates's novel, an Oscar-winning director, Sam Mendes, and the Titanic duo of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet fighting and suffering with the best of them. And the film ends up earning just a supporting-actor nomination for Michael Shannon, as the couple's mentally ill neighbour, along with art direction and costume design.
Best actor:
Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino: A lot of people feel Clint Eastwood got burned by missing out an award for his performance in Gran Torino, as an emotionally wounded Korean War vet who discovers his inner dignity by coming to the aid of a harassed Asian family. Eastwood also missed out on directing nominations for both of the films he directed this year, The Changeling or Gran Torino.
Leonardo DiCaprio in Revolutionary Road: Audiences just didn't embrace the English director Mendes's adaptation of Yates's darkly bitter novel about the American dream running into a suburban cul-de-sac. Nonetheless, this is the best performance of DiCaprio's grown-up career, where he plays Frank, a man so self-conscious you can see him planning on how to set his face before he opens his mouth to talk.
Best Actress:
Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky: Sally Hawkins created one of those once-in-a-lifetime characters as a kindergarten teacher with a courageous, hopeful life philosophy. She won a Golden Globe for it. When it came to the Oscar nominations though, she was beaten out by Angelina Jolie's overwrought performance in The Changeling. Happy-Go-Lucky was overlooked, managing only a nomination for original screenplay.
Kate Winslet: Okay, she got a nomination but for the wrong film. Though the thick eyebrows and German accent were effective in The Reader, most people expected her to get the nod here for Revolutionary Road. The academy has really sent a message about its lack of enthusiasm for this film.
2. Kristin Scott Thomas in I've Loved You So Long gave a painfully believable performance as a woman recently released from jail, hiding a secret from her past. Unfortunately, it was in French and the academy remains reluctant to give out acting prizes that come with subtitles.
3. Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy. True, Wendy and Lucy is a modest, subtle film that most people haven't yet seen, but Williams's performance as a young woman falling over the social precipice into poverty is one of the year's best. In many ways, Williams's transparent, unmannered performance is the exact opposite of Meryl Streep's performance in Doubt, which was choreographed down to the nose twitch. This would have been an Oscar contest worth watching.
Best-Supporting Actor:
Dev Patel and Anil Kapoor in Slumdog Millionaire: Though it has 10 Academy Award nominations, Slumdog Millionaire was, apparently, a movie without actors. To be fair, major characters were played by different actors who represented them at different ages. Yet it seems strange to ignore Dev Patel's quiet, watchful performance as Jamal, the slum boy who goes on television and wins a fortune, or Indian star Anil Kapoor as a preening television game-show host.
Best song:
Bruce Springsteen's The Wrestler. The songs by British pop star M.I.A. and her collaboration with A.R. Rahman are great but it was startling to see Slumdog get two best song nominations while Bruce Springsteen's custom-made song for The Wrestler, a tune that perfectly matched Mickey Rourke's wounded machismo character at the centre of the film, was ignored.