Avatar, Hurt Locker lead Oscars

2010-02-02 18:15

Beverly Hills - The science-fiction sensation Avatar and the Iraq war thriller The Hurt Locker lead the Academy Awards with nine nominations each, including best picture and director for former spouses James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow.

For the first time since 1943 the Oscars feature 10 best-picture contenders instead of the usual five.

Also nominated for best-picture Tuesday: District 9; the animated comedy Up; the World War II saga Inglourious Basterds; the football drama The Blind Side; the recession tale Up in The Air, the 1960s drama A Serious Man and the teen tales An Education and Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire.

Acting nominees include the four stars who have dominated early awards shows: lead players Sandra Bullock for the American football drama The Blind Side and Jeff Bridges for the country-music tale Crazy Heart and supporting performers Mo'Nique for Precious and Austri's Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds.

The best-picture and director categories shape up as a showdown between ex-spouses who directed films that have dominated earlier Hollywood honours.

Cameron's Avatar won best drama and director at the Golden Globes, while Bigelow's The Hurt Locker beat out Cameron at the Directors Guild of America Awards, whose recipient usually goes on to earn the best-director Oscar.

The Hurt Locker also beat Avatar for the Producers Guild of America top prize and was chosen as last year's best film by many key critics groups.

Honour

Bigelow, whose films include Point Break and K19: The Widowmaker, is only the fourth woman nominated for a directing Oscar, following Sofia Coppola for 2003's Lost in Translation, New Zealand director Jane Campion for 1993's The Piano and Italian director Lena Wertmuller for 1975's Seven Beauties.

No woman has ever won the directing Oscar, and until Bigelow, no woman had ever won the Director's Guild honour.

Lee Daniels, who made Precious, became only the second black filmmaker nominated for best director, after John Singleton for 1991's Boyz N the Hood.

Also nominated for best director are Jason Reitman for Up in the Air and Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds. Up in the Air co-writer Reitman also had a nomination for adapted screenplay, while Tarantino also earned a nomination for original screenplay.

Longtime audience darling Bullock has never been nominated for an Oscar before but is considered the best-actress front-runner, playing a wealthy woman who takes in homeless teen Michael Oher, now a star with the American football team the Baltimore Ravens.

Bullock is up against past Oscar winners Meryl Streep as chef Julia Child in Julie & Julia and Britain's Helen Mirren as Leo Tolstoy's bullheaded wife in The Last Station, along with first-time nominees Carey Mulligan as a British teen involved with an older man in An Education and Gabourey Sidibe as a Harlem teen overcoming horrible abuse and neglect in Precious.

Sidibe made her screen debut in Precious, earning an Oscar nomination for her first professional acting job.

Academic

Bridges, nominated four times previously without winning an Oscar, is viewed as the man to beat this time for his role as a boozy country singer trying to clean up his act in Crazy Heart.

Also nominated for best actor are past Oscar winners George Clooney as a frequent-flyer junkie in Up in the Air and Morgan Freeman as South African leader Nelson Mandela in Invictus, Britain's Colin Firth as a grieving gay academic in A Single Man and Jeremy Renner as a bomb disposal expert in Iran in The Hurt Locker.

Mo'Nique and Waltz were nominated for wicked roles - she as a reprehensible welfare mother in Precious and he as a gleefully garrulous Nazi in Inglourious Basterds. They were breakout roles for both, Mo'Nique leaping into the awards elite after a career of mainly lowbrow comedy, Waltz making his first Hollywood splash after working mostly in European theatre and television.

Also up for supporting actress are Up in the Air co-stars Vera Farmiga as Clooney's frequent-flyer soul mate and Anna Kendrick as his reluctant business protégé. The other nominations went to past Oscar winner Spain's Penelope Cruz as a filmmaker's needy mistress in the musical Nine and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a single mom involved with Bridges' character in Crazy Heart.

Joining Waltz in the supporting-actor lineup are Matt Damon as a South African rugby player in Invictus, Woody Harrelson as a military man giving bad news to next of kin in The Messenger, Canadian Christopher Plummer as aging author Tolstoy in The Last Station and Stanley Tucci as a serial killer in The Lovely Bones.

Nomination

With 10 best-picture contenders, this is the first time since 1943 that so many films are competing for Hollywood's highest honour. From 1931 to 1943, the Oscars featured between eight and 12 best-picture nominees. There were 10 in 1943, when Casablanca won best picture, but the show switched to five nominees after that.

Last summer, academy organisers decided to go back to 10, saying they wanted a broader range of titles in the mix, including worthy populist movies that often miss out on best-picture nominations in favour of the smaller dramas Oscar voters typically prefer.

Freeman got the news of his nomination while in Rome.

"This is my fifth nomination and I'm more proud of that than all the rest of it I think," he said, also approving of the expansion of the best picture category although it did not include Invictus.

"I think it's a good call, a good call, some good pictures. We didn't get a best picture nomination? Well that's a big letdown. Well there you go. That's my problem, I thought we should get a best picture nomination. But it's OK."

Blockbuster best-picture contenders usually translate to better ratings for the Oscar broadcast, whose TV audience peaked with Cameron's Titanic triumph 12 years ago. Ratings have been so-so ever since, hitting an all-time low two years ago.

Luckily for Oscar overseers, the show this time includes the biggest thing since Titanic. Cameron's Avatar has soared past Titanic to become No 1 on the box-office charts, with $2bn and climbing worldwide.

Up,  a travel adventure about a lonely widower who flies his house to South America suspended from helium balloons, is only the second animated film ever to earn a best-picture nomination, following Beauty and the Beast in 1991, when the category had only five contenders.

Huge hit

Along with best picture, Up was nominated for animated feature, along with Coraline, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Princess and the Frog and The Secret of Kells.  Pixar Animation, which made Up, has produced four of the eight winners since the animated-feature category was added in 2001, including Finding Nemo and WALL-E.

Along with Avatar and District 9, a third sci-fi hit, Star Trek, had been considered a likely best-picture nominee, but it missed out, scoring only technical nominations, including visual effects and makeup.

Best-picture nominee The Blind Side was a huge hit but generally viewed as a long shot for a nomination in the top Oscar category.

Actors snubbed for acclaimed performances included Emily Blunt for The Young Victoria, Julianne Moore for A Single Man and Diane Kruger for Inglourious Basterds.

Oscar nominees are chosen in most categories by specific branches of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, such as actors, directors and writers.

The academy's full membership of about 5 800 was eligible to vote for best-picture nominations and can cast ballots for the winners in all categories at the Oscar ceremony itself.

The 82nd Oscars will be presented on March 7 in a ceremony airing on ABC from Hollywood's Kodak Theatre.

This season's ceremony continues last year's effort to liven up the show. Organisers chose song-and-dance Hugh Jackman as host a year ago rather than the usual comedian, and this time, they decided to go with dual hosts, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.

Oscar producers Adam Shankman, a choreographer and director whose films include Hairspray and Bill Mechanic, a former studio boss at 20th Century Fox, are promising to step up the fun quotient at this year's show.

Honorary Oscars, which took up a big chunk of space during past shows, were moved to a separate event last fall, freeing up more time to focus on the expanded best-picture nominees and other categories viewers care most about.

- AP