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Romanticized world-views like
Benjamin Button and
Slumdog Millionaire dominated the nominations
this year, and it was the latter British/Indian version
which knocked out the ageing
Brad Pitt in the
end, winning 8 awards including the Best Film.
There were
few big surprises in the Kodak Theatre, with Heath
Ledger receiving his much publicized posthumous
recognition and Kate Winslet winning her first Academy
Award not for her best performance, probably with the
"in due time" argument weighing heavy in the voters'
minds.
The biggest
surprise may have been
Sean Penn snubbing Mickey Rourke in the heavy Best
Actor category, but neither of the performances were
quite good enough to warrant a big upset in not winning.
For 2008,
the Academy once again failed to acknowledge other genres than
rather traditional drama. Nothing negative about the
many fine drama films competing for glory this year, but
it is worth noticing that of the 15 nominees in the
dedicated "Comedy/Musical" categories from the Golden
Globes (Film, Actor, Actress), the Oscars have failed to
acknowledge a single one.
On a more
positive note (from my point of view) is the fact that
Josh Brolin was nominated for his part in
Milk. That
the film itself was somewhat more uneven didn't stop the
Academy of nominating it ahead of better films such as
In Bruges,
WALL-E,
The
Dark Knight,
Låt den rätte komma in or
Gran Torino
(to name a few) in the Best Film category, but that is
typical Academy stuff - combine biopics and politics and
you're safe.
More
disappointing was the fact that the wonderful
Låt den rätte komma in
was overlooked in the Foreign Language category, and, of
course, that Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman's uplifting Oscar
nominee "Down to Earth" from
WALL-E was snubbed, probably due to Slumdog's
coattails.
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