2013 Oscar Nominations and Observations

The Oscar nominations were announced a couple weeks early this year.  I wasn’t expecting them until more towards the end of this month.  I just started a big movie category, thinking I had some time before I would be starting my Oscar nominated films reviews.  I’ve decided that at this point I will do this post that lists every nomination and then drills a little deeper into some trends and fun facts.  I will then finish my current movie category (Mainers Making Movies) before starting my reviews of Oscar films.

The 2013 Oscar nominations were announced a few hours ago.  Going down through them I didn’t see any really huge surprises among the Best Picture nominees, but the Best Director category was another matter.  Here are the nine Best Picture nominees:

Amour

Argo

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Django Unchained

Les Miserables

Life of Pi

Lincoln

Silver Linings Playbook

Zero Dark Thirty

I will post reviews for as many of these movies as I can prior to the Oscar telecast on February 24^th.  At this point I have seen only one of the nine.  I will also post my predictions in the days leading up to the ceremony.

Click “Read more” for a complete list of the nominees, what got the most nominations, and some other things of interest.

Most nominations among the Best Picture nominees:

Lincoln – 12

Life of Pi – 11

Les Miserables – 8

Silver Linings Playbook – 8

Argo – 7

Amour – 5

Django Unchained – 5

Zero Dark Thirty – 5

Beasts of the Southern Wild – 4

Multiple nominations among other “Oscar bait” films:

Anna Karenina – 4 (Cinematography, Production Design, Costume Design, Score)

The Master – 3 (Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress)

And that’s it.  Last year there were five such films with multiple nominations.  This year expected multiple nominees such as Moonrise Kingdom and Hitchcock received only one apiece (Original Screenplay and Makeup, respectively).

Mainstream movies with nominations:

Skyfall – 5 (Cinematography, Score, Original Song, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing)

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – 3 (Production Design, Makeup, Visual Effects)

Flight – 2 (Actor, Original Screenplay)

Snow White and the Huntsmen – 2 (Costume Design, Visual Effects)

The Avengers – 1 (Visual Effects)

Prometheus – 1 (Visual Effects)

Ted – 1 (Original Song)

Mirror Mirror – 1 (Costume Design)

Best Animated, Foreign Language, or Documentary nominees with any other nominations:

Amour – 5 (Foreign Language Film, Picture, Director, Actress, Original Screenplay)

Movies Nominated Only for Acting:

The Master (Joaquin Phoenix – Actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman – Supporting Actor,

                     Amy Adams – Supporting Actress)

The Impossible (Naomi Watts – Actress)

The Sessions (Helen Hunt – Supporting Actress)

One Movie was nominated in all five major categories; plus, a bit of history:

Silver Linings Playbook had that achievement.  It’s pretty rare for this to happen now since movies tend to demote one of the male or female film leads to the Supporting category instead.  Last year’s big winner The Artist is one such example.  Berenice Bejo was really a lead actress, but she got nominated in the Supporting Actress category.

In fact, not only did Silver Linings Playbook receive nominations for Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Adapted Screenplay, it also received nominations for Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress.  Other than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Sunset Blvd., A Streetcar Named Desire, Network, and Reds, no other film has ever achieved this in the history of the Oscars.  Whether Silver Linings Playbook will join It Happened One Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and The Silence of the Lambs as the only films to sweep all five major categories remains to be seen.  It's worth noting that Woolf, Sunset, Streetcar, Network, and Reds all failed to do so.  

Other observations:

• Looking at the “real” Best Picture nominees (those that also received one of the five Best Director nominations) we see that Django Unchained is on the outside looking in, which is not really a surprise.  What are surprises, though, is that Argo, which had a lot of buzz for Ben Affleck’s direction, Les Miserables, which has been praised for all aspects of the film, and Zero Dark Thirty, with director Kathryn Bigelow revisiting her past success, did not receive nominations for their directors.  Amour’s Michael Haneke and Beasts of the Southern Wild’s Benh Zeitlin were nominated instead.
• Les Miserables is the only one of the nine Best Picture nominees that did not get nominated for either Best Original or Adapted Screenplay.  Last year four of the nine failed to get a Screenplay nomination.
• In fact, most of Les Miserables’ eight nominations are in the minor categories.  “Minor” means those categories where the nominees have spent just as many years and decades as the actors/actresses perfecting their craft, but which the general movie-watching populace knows little about.
• Not one of Life of Pi’s eleven nominations was in an acting category – just like the film Hugo last year.
• Last year the nominations were spread over many more films than just the ones nominated for Best Picture.  After Hugo (11) and The Artist (10) there was a big dropoff.  This year among the candidate films not nominated for Best Picture only Anna Karenina and The Master received multiple nominations.
• In the Actress category Emmanuelle Riva, at almost 86 years of age, is the oldest woman ever nominated.  Quvenzhane Wallis, at nine years of age, is the youngest person ever nominated in this category.  She beat Whale Rider’s Keisha Castle-Hughes by three years.  And Castle-Hughes was herself the youngest Best Actress nominee by almost ten years before Wallis received her nomination this year.
• Sally Field received her first Oscar nomination (Supporting Actress) since her Best Actress win in 1985 – 28 years ago.
• The foreign language film Amour receiving five nominations is huge.  Even last year’s lock for Best Foreign Film – A Separation – only received two nominations.
• The last two years I have included some analysis of how the Golden Globe winners did in regards to getting Oscar nominations, but the noms came so early this year that the Globes have not been awarded.
• Last year only two songs received Best Original Song nominations, and strangely neither was from one of the Best Animated Film nominees.  This year the Academy returned to having five nominees for Best Original Song, but even more strangely not one of them is from an animated movie, nominated or not.
• Continuing with this category, one of the nominated songs is from a documentary film.  This is not unprecedented; An Inconvenient Truth actually won for Best Original Song.  What is unprecedented is that the documentary the song is from – Chasing Ice – is not even nominated in the Best Documentary category.
• The two Snow White movies from 2012 – Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsmen – will go head to head in the Best Costume Design category.

  

Here is the complete list of nominations in all twenty-four categories.  I will list my picks for all of them just prior to the Oscars:

Best Picture

Amour

Argo

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Django Unchained

Les Miserables

Life of Pi

Lincoln

Silver Linings Playbook

Zero Dark Thirty

Best Animated Picture

Brave

Frankenweenie

ParaNorman

The Pirates! Band of Misfits

Wreck-It Ralph

Best Foreign Language Picture

Amour	(from Austria)
War Witch	(from Canada)
No	(from Chile)
A Royal Affair	(from Denmark)
Kon-Tiki	(from Norway)

Best Documentary

5 Broken Cameras

The Gatekeepers

How to Survive a Plague

The Invisible War

Searching for Sugar Man

Best Actor

Bradley Cooper	(in Silver Linings Playbook)
Daniel Day-Lewis	(in Lincoln)
Hugh Jackman	(in Les Miserables)
Joaquin Phoenix	(in The Master)
Denzel Washington	(in Flight)

Best Actress

Jessica Chastain	(in Zero Dark Thirty)
Jennifer Lawrence	(in Silver Linings Playbook)
Emmanuelle Riva	(in Amour)
Quvenzhane Wallis	(in Beasts of the Southern Wild)
Naomi Watts	(in The Impossible)

Best Supporting Actor

Alan Arkin	(in Argo)
Robert De Niro	(in Silver Linings Playbook)
Philip Seymour Hoffman	(in The Master)
Tommy Lee Jones	(in Lincoln)
Christoph Waltz	(in Django Unchained)

Best Supporting Actress

Amy Adams	(in The Master)
Sally Field	(in Lincoln)
Anne Hathaway	(in Les Miserables)
Helen Hunt	(in The Sessions)
Jackie Weaver	(in Silver Linings Playbook)

Best Director

Michael Haneke	(for Amour)
Ang Lee	(for Life of Pi)
David O. Russell	(for Silver Linings Playbook)
Steven Spielberg	(for Lincoln)
Benh Zeitlin	(for Beasts of the Southern Wild)

Best Original Screenplay

Amour

Django Unchained

Flight

Moonrise Kingdom

Zero Dark Thirty

Best Adapted Screenplay

Argo

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Life of Pi

Lincoln

Silver Linings Playbook

Best Original Song

Before My Time	(from Chasing Ice)
Suddenly	(from Les Miserables)
Pi’s Lullaby	(from Life of Pi)
Skyfall	(from Skyfall)
Everybody Needs a Best Friend	(from Ted)

Best Original Score

Anna Karenina

Argo

Life of Pi

Lincoln

Skyfall

Best Cinematography

Anna Karenina

Django Unchained

Life of Pi

Lincoln

Skyfall

Best Editing

Argo

Life of Pi

Lincoln

Silver Linings Playbook

Zero Dark Thirty

Best Production Design

Anna Karenina

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Les Miserables

Life of Pi

Lincoln

Best Costumes

Anna Karenina

Les Miserables

Lincoln

Mirror Mirror

Snow White and the Huntsmen

Best Makeup

Hitchcock

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Les Miserables

Best Visual Effects

The Avengers

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Life of Pi

Prometheus

Snow White and the Hunstmen

Best Sound Editing

Argo

Django Unchained

Life of Pi

Skyfall

Zero Dark Thirty

Best Sound Mixing

Argo

Les Miserables

Life of Pi

Lincoln

Skyfall

Best Animated Short

Adam and Dog

Fresh Guacamole

Head Over Heels

Paperman

The Simpsons: The Longest Daycare

Best Documentary Short

Inocente

Kings Point

Mondays at Racine

Open Heart

Redemption

Best Live Action Short

Asad

Buzkashi Boys

Curfew

Death of a Shadow

Henry