No nominations for Tom Hanks, Robert Redford, Oprah, or Emma Thompson, but Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa is an Oscar nominee . Crazy!
No nomination for Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips.
This is just insane. Tom Hanks has been Captain Hollywood for decades now, and his performance in Captain Phillips is the best he's given in ages. The final 10 minutes of the film, as Phillips finally absorbs the harrowing trauma he's been through for days, are an acting master class. The Best Actor category was by far the most competitive this year, and I guess Hanks just could not avoid the surge of support for American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street.
Wait, sorry, I just realized again Hanks isn't nominated for this performance. It's really crazy!
Columbia Pictures
No Oprah, and nothing for Lee Daniels’ The Butler.
Maybe the Academy couldn't get over Oprah Winfrey's Oprah-ness, but she was so surprisingly good and non-Oprah-esque as the long-suffering wife of a White House butler in Lee Daniels' film that the goodness of her performance is pretty much the only thing people who've seen the movie can agree on. More likely: Even though the film was a bona fide hit (it grossed $116.4 million in the U.S.), the Academy just didn't like its embrace of historical melodrama. The bizarre fight between The Weinstein Company and Warner Bros. over the title likely didn't help, either. The movie got zero nominations. Zero!
The Weinstein Company
And no Robert Redford either!
Like I said, there is no more competitive Oscar category this year than Best Actor. And Redford's film — All Is Lost, about a man stranded in the Indian Ocean after his yacht is struck by a floating shipping container — is the least seen among the main contenders. (It's grossed just $6.1 million.)
But Redford's near wordless performance is also crazy great, grueling as hell, and unlike anything the 77-year-old has done in his entire career. There was a period this fall when it seemed like Redford could be a favorite to win this year, and now he's not even invited. It's a real shame.
Roadside Attractions
Nothing for Emma Thompson, and almost nothing for Saving Mr. Banks.
Last month, a veteran entertainment journalist predicted to me that Saving Mr. Banks was going to win Best Picture. Instead, its only nomination is for Best Score. Not even Emma Thompson's brilliantly brittle performance as Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers earned nomination. There was a lot of grousing that the film made Travers seem too much like a harridan and Tom Hanks' Walt Disney seem too much like an avuncular and patient god of Hollywood. It would appear that that grousing translated into the Academy virtually ignoring this movie.
Walt Disney Pictures
