With the Oscar season’s culmination Sunday at the 81st Academy Awards ceremony, it’s time to take a final look at where the nominees stand going into the show.
The ‘Best Motion Picture of the Year’ nominees have caused a bit of a ruckus in the past month. Danny Boyle and the production staff of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ were slammed for taking advantage of 8-year-old stars Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail and Rubina Ali (The Huffington Post reported Ali was paid 700 pounds for a year’s worth of work and Ismail was paid 1,700 pounds, though Boyle claims he set up trust funds for both actors and paid for their educations). Movie news outlets report it may have been the people behind ‘Milk’ stirring up the controversy, trying to knock the Academy’s sweetheart from its top rank.
‘Slumdog Millionaire’ is the projected ‘Best Picture’ winner among film critics, with ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ as a close second, ‘Milk’ a distant third and ‘The Reader’ and ‘Frost/Nixon’ bringing up the rear.
Most notably absent from the list are ‘The Dark Knight’ and ‘WALL-E,’ the latter of which was bumped to ‘Best Animated Feature Film of the Year.’
‘The Dark Knight’ received nods for Heath Ledger’s supporting role, art direction, cinematography, film editing, makeup, sound editing, sound mixing and visual effects. The Academy skimped over ‘The Dark Knight’ for the big awards ‘- like ‘Best Picture’ or ‘Best Director’ ‘- and gave smaller nominations as compensation.
There is no contest for visual effects and make-up:’ ‘Benjamin Button’ will sweep all categories that in any way include the marvelous special effects used to age Brad Pitt from 80 to 20. But whether the film deserves being ahead of ‘Milk’ in the ‘Best Picture’ race is another debate entirely.
A lot of hands have been tossed in the air about ‘WALL-E’ being categorized as ‘Best Animated Feature Film’ instead of ‘Best Picture.’ Some critics thought the Academy would have graced Pixar’s last hurrah independent from Disney with a ‘Best Picture’ nod, but instead they categorized it with the likes of ‘Bolt’ and ‘Kung Fu Panda.’
Also snubbed was the brilliant ‘Latika’s Theme’ from ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ for ‘Best Original Song.’ Though the film was nominated for two of the three ‘Best Original Song’ spots, ‘Latika’s Theme,’ the love theme of ‘Slumdog,’ stood out from the rest of the music, and yet didn’t receive a nomination.
At least London-based singer M.I.A. was included in the nomination for ‘O … Saya’ along with A.R. Rahman, to make up for the fact that her already released single ‘Paper Planes’ could not be nominated as an original song for the movie.
Though the ‘Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role’ Oscar is, without question, going to Heath Ledger. The fact that Josh Brolin ‘- another recent Academy sweetheart ‘- was nominated instead of Emile Hirsch, who gave an arguably better performance in ‘Milk,’ returns to the theme of the Academy playing favorites instead of taking any risks.
The film industry is changing. It’s possible for an animated film about a robot to be better than a sweeping, artistic epic starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. 2008 was the year that redefined genre stereotypes, but the Academy missed their shot. Because of their snubs, studios may be less likely to back films trying to reach some new artistic level, instead of settling for An Animated Film or A Comic Book Movie (fortunately for the billions ‘The Dark Knight’ made in the box office, this isn’t as big of a crisis as it could have been).
With films like ‘Watchmen’ ‘- based on the genre-changing graphic novel by Alan Moore, which Time Magazine listed as one of the top 100 novels of the last century ‘- coming out in 2009, let’s hope audiences don’t snub imaginative new movies like the Academy did.

‘- Terri Schwartz can be reached at [email protected].