The Oscar nominations were announced about an hour and a half ago. I feel like the last thing a girl needs on a cold Tuesday morning in Park City is to wake up to Dave Karger refusing to admit that he doesn’t actually know how to predict the future, so I didn’t get up to live blog it, but you can check out the full list of nominees here. Just skimming the list, I don’t see any huge huge surprises, but here are some thoughts:

**Two nominations for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Best Supporting Actor and Best Cinematography––the exact categories it should have been nominated in, really, but the latter’s something of a surprise, considering that most Academy members must have watched the film on a DVD screener. Imagine what Warner Brothers could do if they actually tried.
**Costume Design seems to be the place to give consolation prizes to ambitious but laughable period pics. I doubt either Across the Universe or The Golden Age will beat Sweeney Todd, but both get a kind of credibility that they probably don’t deserve just by being nominated. Then again, Golden Age is a film about costuming in a way like nothing else I’ve seen, maybe ever––it exists as an excuse to pit Cate Blanchett in a suit of armor––so if this category is really about which director gave up trying to tell a story in order to put on a batshit insane fashion show, it’s got to be a lock.

**This year, Atonement is the film that directed itself–it landed a Best Picture nomination, but Joe Wright was left off the Best Director top five in favor of Julian Schnabel. Say what you will about Atonement, but it’s an extremely showy film––that unnecessary Dunkirk tracking shot alone might have guaranteed Wright the nomination in another year. But Atonement peaked at Toronto, and now it’s getting steamrolled by the ascendant Diving Bell and Juno. Blerg. In a perfect world, none of these three films would be considered among the best of the year, but there are some more egregious products of hype here than others. As a Best Picture nominee, Juno will look, in forty years, the way Oliver! looks today––and if it wins, as that film did in the same year that Faces and 2001 were nominated for screenplay and directing prizes but failed to make the Best Picture cut, it’s going to be just as much of a long-term embarrassment.

**The flip side of that timing/hype equation: a lot of prognosticators had left Paul Thomas Anderson off the list of director nominees until fairly recently. I can’t say enough good things about how well Paramount Vantage and Miramax have handled this release. This is as least as difficult a film as Jesse James, but they’ve truly managed to sell it as must-see for grown-ups. Maybe it takes two studios working together to do it, and maybe it can’t happen more than once a year, but I hope it’s a sign that the old-fashioned, biggish budgeted art film can still draw an audience and dominate the Oscars.

**Tommy Lee Jones’ Best Actor nomination for In The Valley of Elah is a major victory for that film–or, at least, for it’s DVD sales. Sarah Polley’s adapted screenplay nomination is also a huge deal––not because Away From Her is in the same kidn of trouble, but because this should guarantee the sometime actress further work behind the camera if she wants it.

**The Oscar blogs weighed in on the Jonny Greenwood snub over the weekend. To me, the worst thing about that is that his original compositions on the score might have been eligible for Best Song, if AMPAS had informed the producers before the ballots were actually due.

**Alex Gibney produced and/or directed two of the five films nominated for Best Documentary. It’s not a surprise that either No End in Sight or Taxi to the Dark Side was nominated, but if there was any doubt that he has become one of the highest-profile names in non-fiction film over the last year, this should clear it. Months ago, I said that this award was a lock for Sicko, but now I’m not sure. The two Gibney war on terror films might split the vote, but they also have a better chance in arousing passion in the Academy’s old-school liberal electorate. The aging Boomer contingent has to be edging out the Mickey Rooney voting class at this point in sheer numbers of votes, and it just doesn’t seem like health care could top war dissent as a passion issue for the Redfords and Streisands, you know?