The Academy handed out their nominations earlier this week and I have to hand it to them, they did a superb job of judging the films and performances based on artistic merit instead of merely repeating the same list of nominees that we've seen over and over again at the various awards ceremonies during the past few weeks.

Capote landing nominations for both Best Picture and Best Director was a huge surprise, and I felt the same way about Good Night and Good Luck despite magazines like Entertainment Weekly talking about how George Clooney could be nominated in three separate categories (which turned out to be true, as he was also nominated for Supporting Actor for his performance in Syriana). I was also pleased to see Crash land a best picture nomination, which I honestly didn't believe had a chance of happening despite being named the best film of the year by the world's most famous critic.

By far the biggest surprise of all was the nomination of Terrence Howard for Best Actor for Hustle & Flow, a movie that has been sitting on my Netflix.com rental queue and now must be moved to the top of the list. That's what's great about introducing a little diversity into the nominations: it encourages people to actually watch movies that they may have skipped otherwise. I'm sure the producers of Capote are thrilled for this reason as much as for the artistic recognition.

Posted February 1, 2006 | link