Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men
A few brief remarks about the Oscar 2008 nominations:
The top nominees are: There Will Be Blood (8 nominations), No Country for Old Men (8), Atonement (7), Michael Clayton (7), Ratatouille (5), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (4), Juno (4).
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Whether in dramas or in comedies, dark themes dominated in just about every category:
- greed (There Will Be Blood, American Gangster),
- murder (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Sweeney Todd, Eastern Promises, No Country for Old Men, In the Valley of Elah),
- corruption (Michael Clayton, Sicko, Charlie Wilson’s War),
- war (No End in Sight, War/Dance, Beaufort, Katyn),
- illness (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Savages, Away from Her),
- political/religious repression (Taxi to the Dark Side, The Counterfeiters, Persepolis),
- dishonesty (Atonement, Gone Baby Gone),
- death (most of the aforementioned films, plus Into the Wild).
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James McAvoy, Keira Knightley in Atonement
Though all but ignored by U.S. critics, Atonement was a big hit with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, earning more nominations than any other film. The publicity surrounding the multiple Golden Globe nominations may well have made Academy members curious to watch Joe Wright's drama, which ended up receiving 7 Oscar nods, including best film. Even so, both leading lady Keira Knightley and leading man James McAvoy were snubbed. (This is the second McAvoy snub; last year he was ignored for The Last King of Scotland.)
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Laura Linney is the only American among the best actress nominees.
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Among the acting nominees, Julie Christie is the Oscar veteranest of them all: her first nomination was in 1965, for Darling. She won that year. Ruby Dee, however, is the overall veteran, having begun her show business career in the 1930s. As per the IMDb, Dee's first film was That Man of Mine, released in 1946.
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Six of the acting nominees have already won Oscars (Julie Christie, George Clooney, Tommy Lee Jones, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman). Nine of the nominees are Oscar first-timers.
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Cate Blanchett, nominated as best actress for Elizabeth: The Golden Age (above) and best supporting actress for I'm Not There, is the eleventh performer to receive two acting nods in the same year. The others were: Fay Bainter (38), Teresa Wright (42), Barry Fitzgerald (44 — for the same role in Going My Way), Jessica Lange (82), Sigourney Weaver (88), Al Pacino (92), Holly Hunter (93), Emma Thompson (93), Julianne Moore (02), and Jamie Foxx (04). The only double losers in this list are Weaver, Thompson, and Moore.
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Joel and Ethan Coen are the third duo to share an Academy Award nomination for best directing. The other two were winners Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for West Side Story in 1961, and nominees Warren Beatty and Buck Henry for Heaven Can Wait in 1978.
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This year, the Coens received a total of four nominations: best film (as producers), best directing, best adapted screenplay, and best editing. Warren Beatty has also received four nominations in a single year: for Heaven Can Wait in 1978 and for Reds in 1981.
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Five of the six nominated directors are first-timers in that category. Joel Coen, who received solo director's credit for the Academy Award-nominated Fargo in 1996, is the single exception. Ethan Coen was the solo producer of that thriller, which also received a best film nod.
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Sean Penn and his drama Into the Wild received nominations from both the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild. The Academy opted instead for Jason Reitman (for Juno), and for Away from Her and Atonement – in, respectively, the best director and best adapted screenplay shortlists. (Zodiac was the other Writers Guild nominee that was left out of the Academy's best adapted screenplay list.)
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Kseniya Rappoport in The Unknown
Giuseppe Tornatore's The Unknown was the big winner at the 2007 David di Donatello ceremony, but it failed to land a nomination in the best foreign-language film category. The other non-nominated shortlisted foreign-language films were Cao Hamburger's The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (Brazil), Srdan Golubovic's The Trap (Serbia), and Denys Arcand's Days of Darkness (Canada).
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Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey in Enchanted
Enchanted, composer Alan Menken, and lyricist Stephen Schwartz are competing against themselves for the best song Oscar. Enchanted received three nominations, all of them in the best song category. Their nominated songs are: "Happy Working Song," "So Close," and "That's How You Know." (However, the Oscar will probably go to Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová's "Falling in Love Again" from Once, but since those are the people who picked that pimps-and-bitches song a couple of years ago, one could never tell for sure…)
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The official composers of the song "Raise It Up" from August Rush are yet to be determined. (Full list of shortlisted songs.)