Oh, and another thing the Academy tends to overlook…

Although this year’s list of Academy Award nominees for Best Picture aren’t as obscure or impossible to watch as last year’s, I’m noting a distinct lack of love for genre titles, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button notwithstanding. I never really held out hope that The Dark Knight would get into the ring with the “serious” movies, but I’m taking its snub worse than I anticipated. (But I am laughing at its nomination for Best Film Editing.) I truly thought that it had the best shot at getting a science-fiction/fantasy film back into consideration after the years-long drought since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won in 2004.

As I predicted, Wall*E gets to sit at the kiddie table with Bolt and Kung-Fu Panda. The Best Animated Feature is the “Hurray! Everyone’s a winner even when they’re a loser!” category. If critical success stands above any other marker (which explains how No Country for Old Men won last year), then how the hell could Wall*E have been excluded and The Reader promoted? Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, and Entertainment Weekly’s individual pools of critical reviews all place Wall*E at the top (or nearer to it than any of the nominees).

(…)

Robert Downey Jr. is nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his “daring” role in Tropic Thunder (which he will never win, because two words: Heath. Ledger.) and never mind that he gave a more lively, funny, sly, and vulnerable performance as Tony Stark in Iron Man. It’s just a stupid comic book movie, and nobody died after making it; ergo, as only one “fringe” movie may be praised at a time, The Dark Knight trumps.