2009 Japanese Academy Award Nominations

Ken Watanabe in The Sun That Doesn't Set / The Unbroken (Shizumanu Taiyo)

Setsurô Wakamatsu's The Unbroken, inspired by the 1985 airplane crash that killed 520 people in what remains Japan's worst airline disaster, is one of five films in the running for the Japanese Academy's Best Picture award. (See partial list of nominees below.) The film's star, Ken Watanabe, received a best actor nomination.

The other four Best Picture nominees are:

• Isshin Inudou's Zero Focus, a murder mystery set in postwar Japan
• Daisaku Kimura's The Summit: A Chronicle of Stones, about a group of men who set out to climb the unconquered peak in the early 1900s
• Miwa Nishikawa's Dear Doctor, in which a village doctor (best actor nominee Tsurube Shofukutei) is exposed as a con artist — but the locals don't seem to care
• Kichitaro Negishi's Villon’s Wife, about the difficult relationship between a woman (Takako Matsu) and her self-destructive writer husband (Tadanobu Asano) in postwar Tokyo

Tadanobu Asano is competing against himself in the best actor category. He's up for both Villon’s Wife and The Summit: A Chronicle of Stones. He, Tsurube Shofukutei, and Ken Watanabe are joined by Nao Omori for The Vulture. Clint Eastwood, for his part, is competing against himself in the foreign film category: both The Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, and Gran Torino, starring Eastwood himself, are in the running.

The five best actress nominees are Haruka Ayase (Oppai Volleyball), Ryoko Hirosue (Zero Focus), Du-na Bae (Airdoll), Takako Matsu (Villon’s Wife), and Aoi Miyazaki (The Shonen Merikensack).

The Japanese Academy Award winners will be announced in early March 2010.

Source: Wildgrounds