US:Nominations are in, but the race is wide open, writes Film Correspondent Michael Dwyer
The Oscar nominations announced yesterday in Los Angeles are spread across a wide range of films with few clear front-runners, reflecting the consensus that this is an unusually open year for contenders.
The standard is also unusually high across the board, and predicting the winners will be exceptionally difficult in most categories. In 16 of the past 20 years, the film with the most nominations went to take the most coveted prize, the Oscar for best picture, but Dreamgirls, a stylish musical that leads the field this year with eight nominations, failed to make the shortlist for best film or best director.
The nominees for best documentary feature include US director Amy Berg's Deliver Us From Evil, dealing with Oliver O'Grady, an Irish priest jailed in California on paedophilia charges. The film features a chillingly frank "confession" from O'Grady. The nominees in this category also include An Inconvenient Truth,in which former US vice-president Al Gore makes his case against practices that cause global warming.
The nominations are the most cosmopolitan in Oscar history. Whereas US dramas and white actors have dominated the shortlists for decades, this year's nominations are spread across the globe. One of the best picture nominees, Clint Eastwood's wartime drama Letters From Iwo Jima, is in Japanese, which, incidentally, Eastwood does not speak.
Another best picture nominee, Babel, is set on three continents and employs various languages - English, Spanish, French, Berber, Japanese and sign language.
The other nominees for best picture are the British film, The Queen; the low-budget road movie, Little Miss Sunshine, which was made for $4 million; and The Departed, Martin Scorsese's thriller set among Irish-American criminals in Boston, which is a remake of the Hong Kong production, Infernal Affairs.
In the four acting categories, five of the 20 nominees are black, and there is one nominee each from Spain, Mexico and Japan. Of the five shortlisted for best actress, the only American is Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada, with the others going to Spanish actress Penelope Cruz and three British actresses, Helen Mirren ( The Queen), Judi Dench ( Notes on a Scandal) and Kate Winslet ( Little Children).
This is the 14th nomination for Streep, who has won two Oscars and has been nominated more often than any other actor. Nevertheless, this is one of the very few categories where there is anything close to a certainty about its outcome, and the Oscar most likely will go to Mirren for her subtle portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen. The other near-certainty is that Martin Scorsese, who has been regarded as a bridesmaid at the Oscars so often in the past, finally will walk up the aisle of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood and receive his Academy Award for best director. He may be nervous to learn that his competition includes Eastwood, who took the best director award two years ago for Million Dollar Babywhen Scorsese was the hot favourite to win for The Aviator. However, The Departedis a much more accomplished film than The Aviator, and this appears to be Scorsese's year.
The other nominees for best director are two Englishmen, Stephen Frears for The Queen and Paul Greengrass for the 9/11 airline drama United 93, and a Mexican, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu for Babel. This year's Oscar nominations mark a triumph for Mexican filmmakers, with Babelcollecting seven nominations, and six going to Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, which is set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Mexican writer-director Alfonso Cuarón also received a best adapted screenplay nomination for his PD James adaptation, Children of Men.
There were quite a few surprising omissions when the nominations were announced. Pedro Almodovar's Volverhad been regarded as the frontrunner for the best foreign-language film award, but it was not nominated. That certainly favours the riveting German entry, The Lives of Others, which deals with surveillance, informants and betrayal in mid-1980s East Berlin.
The competition is formidable, and includes fine films from Denmark ( After the Wedding), Canada ( Water), Mexico ( Pan's Labyrinth) and Algeria ( Days of Glory).
Another surprise came when Jack Nicholson, a 12-time nominee and three-time winner, failed to be nominated as best supporting actor for The Departed, while Mark Wahlberg was shortlisted in that category for the same film. The other nominees include Alan Arkin ( Little Miss Sunshine), who achieves his first Oscar nomination since 1968 when he was shortlisted for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
Another actor making a comeback in this category is Jackie Earle Haley, who returns from the wilderness as a paedophile in Little Children. The other nominees are Eddie Murphy, securing his first Oscar nomination for Dreamgirls, and Djimon Hounsou, the Benin-born actor formerly nominated for Jim Sheridan's In America, who is shortlisted for Blood Diamond. Despite being eliminated as a contestant on the US TV talent contest American Idol, Jennifer Hudson is nominated as best supporting actress for her film debut in Dreamgirls. This year's youngest acting nominee is 11-year-old Abigail Breslin, who is in the same category for Little Miss Sunshine. The other nominees here are former winner Cate Blanchett ( Notes on a Scandal) and two of the Babelcast, Rinko Kikuchi, who is Japanese, and Adriana Barraza, who is Mexican.
The controversial comedy, Borat, which has been the subject of several lawsuits, is nominated in the best adapted screenplay category, where it faces formidable competition from Little Children, The Departed, Notes on a Scandaland Children of Men.
Comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres will be the presenter for the 79th Academy Awards ceremony, which takes place on February 25th.