Academy Awards 2009: Notes on the Nominees

• We shoulda known: the Caped Crusader and the loveable robot got the cold shoulder from Oscar voters when it came to nominating the year’s five best pictures. Oscar’s choice instead was the stuffy Holocaust drama The Reader, which scored a lowly 58 on MetaCritic; that makes it the worst reviewed movie nominated for Best Picture this decade. The irony is that The Dark Knight and WALL-E both received more nominations: eight and six, respectively, compared to Reader’s five.

Academy Awards 2009: Predicting the Nominees

The Academy Award nominations are announced on January 22, two days from now, so it’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is. Here are my predictions for who will hear their names called on Thursday morning.

“Frost/Nixon”

Dir. Ron Howard
(R) ★ ★ ★ ½

There’s truth and there’s fiction, objective quantities, but then there’s the interview, where anything can be made to mean anything else, depending on who is asking the questions and who is giving the answers. Those are the stakes of Frost/Nixon, a fascinating film about verbal combat and the clash of two outsize personalities; the Richard Nixon legacy, at the time still engulfed by the fallout of Watergate, could have been recorded by the history books as that of a common crook or a misunderstood hero, depending on how he performed.