A few thoughts about the Oscar Noms

Firstly big ups to Mike Hopkins of Wellington for anoth­er Sound Dept. nom­in­a­tion, this time for Transformers. Mike already has two Oscars for LOTR: The Two Towers and for King Kong.

When I said in my end of year round-up that 2007 had not been a good year for “great” films I had an ink­ling that there were a few good­ies wait­ing to come down the pipe. Of the Best Picture con­tenders, only Atonement had been released in New Zealand at time of writ­ing. All the oth­ers are due out dur­ing the next four weeks. Juno (a sur­prise Best Picture nom) sneaks this week­end; Michael Clayton and No Country for Old Men open with it next week and There Will Be Blood is down for 14 Feb.

There are plenty of oth­ers com­ing in the next few weeks: In The Valley of Elah (Tommy Lee Jones, Best Actor); Gone Baby Gone (Amy Ryan, Best Supporting Actress); The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, Best Director) are all likely to be worth the wait.

Interestingly, there are a few films nom­in­ated that don’t have NZ release dates at present: The Savages (Laura Linney, Best Actress); Persepolis (Animated Feature); none of the doc­u­ment­ar­ies (apart from Sicko) and none of the Foreign Language features.

At GreenCine Ronald Bergen sum­mar­ises all the films that were in the frame for Foreign Language Feature and picks out those that were overlooked.

At Time, Richard Corliss notes that all of the Best Picture nom­in­ees were made for less than US$30m and four of the five were from the “Indie” sub­si­di­ar­ies of the majors (i.e. made inde­pend­ently and picked up at mar­ket or developed inde­pend­ently and fun­ded by a major).

The full list of noms can be found at Oscar.com.