“Button” and “Slumdog” Lead The Way
By Ty Burr
Globe Staff / January 22, 2009
A man who ages backwards and a Mumbai slum kid are the front runners for this year’s Oscars, while the year’s most popular movie was snubbed.
Nominations for the 81st annual Academy Awards were announced Thursday, and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a fantastical drama in which Brad Pitt moves from old age to infancy, received 13 nods, including best picture, best actor, best supporting actress (Taraji P. Henson), best director (David Fincher), and best adapted screenplay. Only two films have garnered more nominations: “Titanic” (1997) and “All About Eve” (1950), both of which received 14.
“Slumdog Millionaire,” an independent audience-rousing drama about a young man whose life is revealed through his participation on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” received 10 nominations, including best picture, best director (Danny Boyle), and best adapted screenplay. Stars Dev Patel and Freida Pinto, however, were shut out by better known Hollywood names.
By contrast, “The Dark Knight,” which made over $500 million in US theaters and was the pop event of 2008, received eight nominations, almost all in technical and craft categories. As expected, the late Heath Ledger was nominated for best supporting actor and is widely expected to win, but “Knight” went unrewarded in other major categories. It stands as one of the major snubs in Oscar history—even non-winners “Star Wars,” “Jaws,” and “E.T. the Extra-terrestrial” made it into the race for best picture—and proves that popcorn movies based on comic books still face an uphill battle with the Academy's voting members.
Overall, the 2009 nominations were a mixture of conventional wisdom and left-field surprises. Besides “Button” and “Slumdog,” the best picture nominees were a biopic (“Milk”) and prestige adaptations of a Broadway play (“Frost/Nixon”) and a best-selling novel (“The Reader”). In another departure from Oscar tradition, all five directors of those movies were nominated as well; usually, the Academy unaccountably overlooks one best picture director to make room for another, riskier name. This year, the riskier name was arguably Christopher Nolan of “The Dark Knight,” and voters didn’t rise to the challenge.
“The Reader” proved surprising in other categories, too. Kate Winslet, who won two Golden Globes two weeks ago, is up for only one Oscar, a best actress award for her performance as a World War II death camp guard in the drama. The film’s studio, the Weinstein Company, heavily campaigned to have Winslet considered in the supporting category, since she was expected to get a lead nod for her unhappy ’50s housewife in “Revolutionary Road.” Academy voters refused to play ball, and the “Reader” nomination can be read as a repudiation of Oscar campaign strategies in general and studio head Harvey Weinstein in particular.
Despite having two films in the running, “Gran Torino” and “Changeling,” Clint Eastwood walked away with hardly anything (“Changeling” had three nods: actress, art direction, and cinematography). Sally Hawkins, the star of Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky,” and another Golden Globe winner, surprisingly did not receive a nomination for best actress. “The Wrestler” picked up acting nominations for Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, but director Darren Aronofsky and writer Robert Siegel were ignored. Continued...