Hark one and all! Today is Oscar Nominations Day! ‘Tis the very, merry day in which each year I establish just how much of my upcoming free time will be spent watching movies… and reading about movies, and thinking about movies, and hey, what do you know? Writing about movies.

I’m not going to duplicate the monstrous nominations list here, since it’s available literally every other nook on the internet. So check it out at the source if you are so inclined.

The nominees are not wholly surprising, with a few exceptions :

  • No Carol for Best Picture
  • No Ridley Scott for Best Director
  • No Sorkin or Tarantino for Screenplay
  • No Will Smith or Steve Carell for Acting
  • In fact, no Concussion anywhere
  • I have no idea what is happening with the Songs category, but who ever does
  • It also looks to be a repeat of last years #OscarsSoWhite, so that’s fun.

No doubt the list of snubs will grow with additional reflection and dissection. It always does.

By the numbers, it appears that Iñárritu remains in the Academy’s good graces, as The Revenant picked up twelve nominations. Additionally, my man George Miller not only got nominations for Director and Picture, but his film Mad Max : Fury Road snagged an impressive 10 nominations. The other 6 Best Picture nominees fared as follows :

  • The Martian – 7
  • Bridge of Spies – 6
  • Spotlight – 6
  • The Big Short – 5
  • Room  – 4
  • Brooklyn – 3

Star Wars picked up several technical nominations, as well as one for Best Score (John Williams’s 50th Oscar Nomination!) I doubt it will win any of the tech awards though, not when it goes up against The Martian and Mad Max in every one of those categories. Morricone seems a likely lock for his work on The Hateful Eight, so Williams may be out of luck when it comes to his 6th Statue.

In total, 57 unique films received nominations this year. If you take out the various short features, animated films, documentaries, and foreign film categories you are still left with 28 full length films. That’s a lot of movies!

So far I’ve seen 9/57, a sad 15.7%. Or 32% if you look at only the nominees from the major feature film categories. Or 35% if you remove the Best Original Song section, since all of those only received one nomination a piece… though that removal doesn’t help me much as I actually saw this year’s Razzie frontrunner 50 Shades of Grey.

Either way you look at it, I’ve got a lot of viewing to get done.

What are my early picks? It’s hard to say, and sometimes I feel like I really should make two, or even three different ballots. What the Academy-mind wants to win, what the rest of the film industry awards project will win, and what I want to see win. Mad Max was my favorite film of the year, and is deserving of any award it’s given. Will it take anything from The Revenant though? Doubtful, since the Academy isn’t too fond of action and sci-ffi features. Then again, I don’t have tickets for Revenant until next Tuesday, so maybe it will blow my mind and surpass my love of post-apocalyptic Australian automotive mayhem.

Happy viewing!