American Madness

In order to give Josh a hand I’ve whipped up a couple of posts to help him out along the way. Okay, so far that’s not true. In fact, I’ve only written this, but really, I blame Josh.

The time I had scheduled to write before my fleeing departure from the US was interrupted when Josh came over on Saturday. I would have typed up a few posts for him, but instead we went out to lunch and ate tasty Vietnamese sandwiches and discussed some of the weaker years that the Simpsons had on the air. So now, because I do feel pity for Josh, I have to take time out of my vacation to get his back and help him out with a post here and there this week. Here we go:

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So, some of you may know Aardman Animations.
They are the folks behind Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video and various other projects. Aardman Animations probably got their biggest hit from Nick Park’s creations like the Wallace & Gromit series, but also from their Academy Award winning Animated Short - Creature Comforts in 1990.
From the short, ITV1 (that’s a Brit company for all of you trying to locate it in your channel guides) created a full series and based on the success of that series, like all good British shows, America will be bastardizing it come Monday, June 4th.

Creature Comforts will premiere on CBS this Monday, fully Americanized to make it sound as dull as possible CBS has distilled the concept down to this: “excerpts are culled from real-person interviews and placed in the mouths of a wide variety of animated animals to produce humorous, charming and insightful commentaries on everyday life.”

By Jason Ihle

The nomination process went mostly as expected (results here). No big surprises. I am impressed with myself, though. I got 39 out of 43 in the top nine categories (including animated feature). I missed 1 each in Director, Actress, Supporting Actor and Actress.

You guys all know i’m a big fan of numbers and statistics, so here goes:

This is the first time in 24 years (since the year of Reds, Raiders, Chariots, Golden, Atlantic) that Picture and Director match up 5 for 5. A stunning 14 of the 20 acting nominees are first timers. Incredibly, only 3 of the nominated performances are for characters who die during the course of the film. 10 of them are real historical characters.

William Hurt got his first nomination in 18 years.

Here’s an interesting stat: film editor Michael Kahn earns a 7th nomination (for Munich), putting him in a 3-way tie with Barbara McLean and William Reynolds for most noms in that category.

All-time leading visual effects artist Dennis Muren adds number 15 for War of the Worlds.

John Williams picked up his 44th and 45th career nominations, making him tied with Alfred Newman as the all time leading nominated composer, and second all time nominations - period - behind only Walt Disney’s 60 career nominations.

Woody Allen - who was already the most nominated screenwriter since 1997’s Deconstructing Harry - has added a 14th writing nomination (and 22nd overall) for Match Point. The biggest crime of the nominations is that Scarlett Johannson was not nominated for her performance in that film.

Every year I engage in the crapshoot that is prediction the Oscar nominations. The top 8 categories are usually not so difficult. Typically there are 3 or 4 sure-things and a 5th spot that could go to one of 2 or 3 contenders.

This year is really no different. I’d say the Supporting Actor category was the most difficult because there are about 10 performances, most of which have an equal shot at a nomination.

I’ve included some potential spoilers in the top categories. I’ve made picks in the technical categories just for fun, it’s nearly impossible to gauge how the members of the Academy’s Sound Branch are going to choose the 5 films with the best sound recording.

So here’s my list of nominees for all categories (excluding foreign film, animated short, live action short, doc. short):

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