Oscar Nominations for 2011 (2012 Ceremony)
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 8:53AM 
BEAR WITH ME AS I UPDATE! MORE COMING INCLUDING A PODCAST! ENTIRE OFFICIAL NOMINATION CHART IS COMPLETE (individual category pages will reflect the nominations by end of the day with more intricate updates to come)
We've finally arrived. So many shockers this year in the nominations including nine best pictures. Most people assumed, given the complicated math required to become a Best Picture nominee, that the number would be closer to five than ten. A nine nominee total indicates that there wasn't a ton of consensus. Lots of pictures had passionate bases.
Things I was right off the top of my head: If Mara made it she would bump out Tilda. I got Moneyball exactly right in each category. Supporting Actress perfect score. Chico & Rita for animated film!
Things I was wrong about off the top of my head: I overestimated the nomination tally of The Help and underestimated War Horse, Dragon Tattoo and Extremely Loud (but then didn't everyone?).
BEST PICTURE
- The Artist Thomas Langmann, Producer
- The Descendants Jim Burke, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor,Producers
- Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Scott Rudin, Producer
- The Help Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan, Producers
- Hugo Graham King and Martin Scorsese, Producers
- Midnight in Paris Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum, Producers
- Moneyball Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz and Brad Pitt, Producers
- The Tree of Life Nominees to be determined
- War Horse Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy
FULL CHART FOR EVERY CATEGORY -individual pages not yet complete but the chart is fully "official" now.
MY HITS AND MISSES - prediction stats, bragging rights, shameful stumbles
PODCAST - has been recorded! Waiting for iTunes to receive it.
Oscars (11)
Reader Comments (106)
Happy for Glenn and Malick. Well Done.
Sad for Tilda, Vanessa and Drive and heartbroken over Fassy (You were right!).
In my opinion the love for Mara is excessive. Also very shocked with Bichir and Oldman. Who would have thought?
PS They were terrible reading the names!
@Robert Yes! Those surprise noms for Demian & Gary Oldman were great! Though I do miss Fassbender... Why couldn't there be six noms hehe...
And yea for 'Man or Muppet'! I love the music from Rio as well, but the Best Song Category left a lot off this year, didn't it? Weird...
Your theory that Drive will be a big cult hit down the line is looking even better. It's only nominated for Sound Editing, which is the same category that got Fight Club it's only nomination.
I love hearing the self-importance of the Oscar nominations undercut by Tom Sherak's accent Noo Yawk accent.
Jennifer Lawrence seemed uncomfortable and charmless in the spotlight. Perhaps she's still in character as Katniss Everdeen?
Gotta say with no Swinton, Dunst, or Theron....I am feeling Meryl can take this.
Close and Mara will not win.
Spencer is a lock for Supporting Actress and I feel for some reason HELP will NOT get 2 performance Oscars....and between Williams and Streep....Streep is just getting more traction.
Lucky #17 indeed :)
If Viola Davis wins though, can we just pretend she's the first black actress to win in that category and not Halle Berry? Lord knows Viola's win would be a much better milestone in the history books.
@Jamie I have to agree with you on the Best Actress race. After no Adapted Screenplay or Director nod for 'The Help' I'm wondering now if both actresses can get in... Maybe SAG will give us a better idea.
Meryl for the win!
One nomination for The Ides of March. Much, much more for Moneyball.
Excuse me. I owe someone some ice cream.
hey hey! I am kind glad that Oldman got in, I am a big fan of that performance. Kevin and Shame were a bit of a hard sell to the voters, although ther performnaces were quite compelling. I am quite happy that Von Sydow surprise, Although I would have loved for Drive, my favorite from 2011, to get some major. Gosling was wise in staying away from all this, considering he was snubbed quite a few times by the academy after being teased by the precursors. Thanks for the update Nat :) It turned out to be an interesting and unpredictable Oscar race.
So Clooney is a double nominee this year, I just noticed that. I always love when they read out a best picture nominee then go 'nominee's TO BE DETERMINED', I have images of producers fighting over credit for the picture.
Fassbender will get nominated soon, it is generally seen that he was snubbed, Clooney made him even more famous (infamous) with the GG acceptance speech so he is more on the radar, by this time next year he will seem 'overdue' for one. I guess you can say the same about Tilda for the last 2-3 years but she already has an Oscar.
LET'S GO BRAD! Comeoncomeon. Hoping for an upset here!
Man, if only they'd nominated "Pretty Bird" from RIO instead. Then we could have had both halves of Flight of the Conchords going head to head for the win!
I knew we couldn't have two awesome Best Actress fields in a row. Boo for Close, Mara and Williams (a career worst performance, stay away from the biopics Michelle!). Replace them with Dunst, Swinton and Knightley and I that would have been exciting!
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close????? No one likes this movie it has a metacritic score of like 40. I think some academy voters vote before they even see the movies based on what they think will be good. I think the academy should give out tests before, that voters must pass with questions about the contenders to make sure they’ve actually seen the movies.
I don't know about Best Actress-at this point I could see Streep, Davis, or even Mara getting the trophy (keeping in mind that this gives them a "pretty young thing" nominee to compete alongside Davis and Streep). My gut is telling me Streep, but my heart (and my own personal tastes) side with Davis. It'll definitely be the biggest competition of the acting trophies, with the other three being easy gets for Clooney, Plummer, and Spencer. Though I have to admit, aside from Brad, I'm really curious at who would be second place in those other two categories-I'm kind of feeling that it would be von Sydow and McCarthy.
@Kyle. Um, wait. Why must Melissa McCarthy give a groundbreaking performance equivalent to one of the best comedy performances of all time in order to be simply nominated, when her supporting actress peers have not? Isn't that the double standard frequently mentioned on this blog and elsewhere?
Mara is a major dark horse for a Best Actress win...she's closer to 30 than 20, she's hot, young, fresh and in a hit movie that will continue to build steam. Plus, they seem to like her. Didn't they give her academy membership for her tiny screen time in Social Network?
Michael, You can't look at the overall score and understand Extremely Loud's nominations. The people who LOVE the film are raving about it. The people who hate it really hate it. It's polarizing moreso than universally hated. Hence, it easily cleared the 5%film threshold because the people who love it would have no second thoughts about putting it at number 1.
@W.S. Wouldn't that have been awesome? Both The Muppets & Rio's music are wonderful...
I'm still wondering what happened with the Best Original Song category though... Maybe Nat can shine some light on that question for us!
@JP Thanks for the SNL OSCAR INFO. So nice to see so many alumni have done so well in critically acclaimed roles... (Especially my beloved RDJ... Here's to many more Oscar noms!).
Two nominees for song will make the Academy a bit shorter (no more than five minutes). Last year each song got around 2 minutes the most. So don't count on it.
I think it's kind of weird that everyone is saying Jonah Hill got in over Albert Brooks...wouldn't the logical assumption be that Max Von Sydow, or even Nick Nolte, took Brooks's slot?
Best tweet about the Oscars so far, courtesy of Albert Brooks:
'And to the Academy: "You don't like me, you really don't like me." '
Caroline,
That was just an example, maybe an unattainable one, but let's try again..."she's no Robert Downey in Tropic Thunder".
So....for fun...what do we think the five best pic noms would've been if it was still like the old days?
I'm so happy for Gary Oldman! Btw, has anyone seen the film "A Better Life" and Damián Bichir's performance in it? I don't think I have been living in a bulb in the past months but I haven't even heard about it (or him) and scanning through the comments nobody seems to be talking about his nomination.
*Demián
I DO think Mara may win. Young, fresh, new, in a so-called groundbreaking role...... The youngest of the nominees.... She may Be IT this year!
Hey, can Brad Pitt be a double nominee? He was one of the producers of The Tree of Life, I think
If they want to reward young and bright, then Williams is the one that will get it. there is no way Mara is winning best actress over Michelle, Meryl AND Viola, she's lucky to be nominated.
desplat snub.
williams' tintin and war horse were mediocre.
i'm glad to see reznor off the list.
i'm glad to see iglesias on the list.
allez ludo bource!
@cal roth. Pitt is a double nominee for acting and producing Moneyball.
@cal roth:
Actually, Brad Pitt is a double nominee as he is one of the producers of 'Moneyball'. In fact he might be a triple nominee.
Keeping in mind Nat's obsessions, my favorite part of the announcement was when they were doing Best Picture and they set it up with four names on one side so you thought it would be a total of eight and the eight you were expecting got in and then all of a sudden there was a ninth and it was kind of out of left field and somebody in the audience shrieked. I haven't seen ELAIC, don't know if it's any good but that was a great moment right there. Worth being 40 minutes late to work!
Overslept this morning because I stayed up late doing predictions and then couldn't sleep due to excitement. Haha. Whoops!
Initial Thoughts:
-"British Block": ha! Nine best pictures and Tinker Tailor still doesn't get in? I don't believe for a second that they went for War Horse instead.
-I love that EL&IC got nominated by popping out from behind the Best Picture title card. Just when you thought there were only 8 nominees, Daldry appears! He's magic!
-The animated branch hates motion capture that much, eh?
-Why have they hated Swinton so much since giving her the Oscar?
-So happy for Bridesmaids! I thought McCarthy would be out due to genre bias. Alas, AMPAS pulled the old "surprising snub for Alexander Payne" trick. At least it was semi-surprising.
-At least Foreign Language Film wasn't surprising!
ELAIC fans were extremely loud during the announcement.
Viola has SAG in the bag, but Oscar feels so weird these days. I suppose because of the black actress in the leading category thing always makes things so impossible to believe it'll actually happen. Davis, a woman in her 40s -- this is one shot deal time for her.
Women in their 40s who beat Meryl Streep in Best Actress (Shirley Maclaine, Cher, Kathy Bates, Susan Sarandon, Sandra Bullock).
I've seen A Better Life, and Bechir is great in it. It's really easy to see how anyone who has watched the movie would see him as worthy of acclaim. I am just surprised that enough people saw the movie. Now maybe the movie will get more attention. That's a good thing.
We're in 2012. It's time for a hot new actor to present the nominations or even better, a female president again.
Happy for Melissa and Kristen Wiig! If one more person says something about her shitting in the sink, I will lose it. What in the world does that have to do with anything??? I can understand if you weren't digging her performance like some of us were, but that moment has nothing to do with the quality of the performance and just makes you sound like one of the prudes that stop comedies from getting nominated.
I'm sad Rooney got in. I'm sorry, but Charlize, Tilda, Kirsten, Kristen.....I would've rather any one of them. In fact, I would have LOVED one of them.
Actor got exciting. So so glad Leo is out, sad for Fassy though.
So happy Shailene got left out. And supporting actor is...interesting. Awful, awful category this year.
The original song category is soo baffling and stupid.
And YAY FOR NO CARS 2!!!!
I almost feel like Pixar flopping forced Academy members to look for more under the radar animated films.
This is a minor quibble, but you would think the president of the Academy, Mr. Tom Sherak, would do a little research on the pronunciations of some of the contenders. Seriously, it was painful to hear him read off some of the nominees, especially Michel Hazanavicius. I mean, seriously, he had to be aware that he was a likely nominee and that everyone is going gaga for The Artist. Thank god Jennifer Lawrence did her homework beforehand or at least has the intelligence to make educated guesses on how to correctly formulate a foreign language! You go girl!
There's a lot of online gratitude toward Demian Bichir. I'm very happy that he got the nomination-- everyone knows that Oscar needs to be a little less WASPy with its picks. But that said, it seems if this same performance and character had been from a major motion picture, people would have been complaining about how Oscar baity it was. A tragedy about an immigrant father trying to make life better for his kid? Of COURSE they go for that! But instead, since it's from an indie, everyone's willing to overlook that it's really just more of the same.
Also, given that everyone knew that The Artist was going to score big time, you think that the president of AMPAS would have worked on pronouncing Hazanavicius correctly. It's not that hard, Tom!
Aaron-- great minds think alike. Though on the Jennifer Lawrence front, I thought I hard Asghar Fardari or Fardahi or something like that. But you're right- better than the AMPAS president.
I know right! Tom Sherak is so annoying. He does that every year.
Like, I never thought I'd say Mo'Nique did a better job presenting the nominees than the president of the academy and Jennifer Lawrence, but...
For the most part, I am really happy with the Oscar noms this year. Where they lacked for choices I liked, they were at least unpredictable. Surprise makes up for disappointment!
Worst category nominations, BY FAR, is Best Original Song. Only two nominees, really? Enchanted got three noms (of which it only deserved two) but The Muppets can only eke out one, and not even for its best song?!?!?!?!
Close behind it is Best Supporting Actor. Jonah Hill besting Patton Oswalt and Albert Brooks is a travesty (now he has to always be referred to as Oscar Nominee Jonah Hill. Thank you, Academy!) and Nick Nolte's nomination is weird since the film couldn't get any traction elsewhere.
I am THRILLED at the love for Bridesmaids in Screenplay and Supporting Actress (even though it should have been Rose Byrne)! Also glad that Moneyball's editing and sound were recognized. I'm hopeful that Hugo's nomination-leader status will get more butts in seats in the theaters (if it's still around - re-release, anyone?).
I'm probably most sad about Tree of Life missing out on special effects and Young Adult being shut out completely. Slightly sad that Pina was not a double nominee and that Descendants got in for editing (...wha?!?!?!)
When was the last time a best picture nominee had done worse in Rottentomatoes than Extremely Loud? Anyone knows? it's 48% fresh with the score 5.8/10!
I'm F@#kn' sad for Tilda!!!
No Fassy?! No Shame?! S-H-A-M-E !!!
The Awards season is over (for me!).
I'm Happy for Rooney, and that's all.
Now that Oldman got nominated, who will take his position as Head of the Overdue Club? Is it too soon for Peter Sarsgaard? Secretary Jennifer Jason Leigh could also be a good idea.