2009 Oscar Watch

We're back up to 10 nominees.  Not since 1943 have there been 10.  This was in retaliation from The Dark Knight missing out on a Best Picture nomination as well as to "drum up interest in the ceremony".  So what was the result?  The biggest movie of the year, Avatar, gets a nomination but it assuredly would have been nominated anyway.  A few movies that probably wouldn't have been included get nods like Up, District 9 and An Education.  Some truly terrible movies get nominated like The Blind Side and then we have some movies that only critics enjoyed like A Serious Man.  It's all much ado about nothing though because the race always comes down to 2 or 3 films anyway.  So some possibly less Academy friendly movies score a nomination but they still have no chance of winning.  That's exciting.

You can see my GABBY winners and nominees HERE

Best Picture

10. The Blind Side is one of the weakest movies to get nominated for Best Picture in the modern era.  This nomination is questionable on the level of something like Alexander's Ragtime Band.  Of all the movies released this year, this made your top ten?  Why?  Sandra Bullock puts on a fake accent to play a rich Tennessee white lady who finds a big black man walking the streets late at night, takes him in, helps him with his grades and gets him a spot on the high school football team.  The film left a bad taste in my mouth.  Not only is it filmed and written as if it were to be broadcast on cable television but the movie is so much about white privilege.  Every time Bullock walks into a poor neighborhood I felt like the movie was trying to tell us that all black problems could be solved if rich white people adopted them.

9. A Serious Man is a film I just don't understand the acclaim for.  It's unsettling in that dark Coen Brothers way but it doesn't have any of the style or characters that I have come to expect from their films.  It's a story about a Jewish man whose life is crumbling and it tests his faith.  So, for 106 minutes bad stuff happens to this guy and I'm left wondering, what the point of watching this was.  Barton Fink was confusing but at least it had great sets and cinematography.

8. An Education is a very pleasant film that probably did not need to be included in the Best Picture lineup.  It's good but not great, it gets nominated for Best Picture and you think, oh cool, I liked that movie, but you wouldn't think it got snubbed if it was missing.  Carey Mulligan, in an incredible breakout performance plays a young student who falls in love quickly with an older man.  The movie starts off as a sweet romantic comedy/drama but quickly changes gears when it is revealed that the man is actually a conman.  It's written by Nick Hornby, who wrote the books High Fidelity and About A Boy, and the performances are all quite good.  It's a good film, it's just missing something that makes me consider it a 'Best Picture'.

7. Avatar became the highest grossing movie of all time, I have no idea why.  It's a visual spectacle but the story is basically an epic telling of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest.  It was also the first film that really went for it with the 3D technology.  Inflated ticket prices led to it's success because people wanted to see it in 3D because it was new and cool.  It is thanks to Avatar that we got Clash Of The Titans in 3D and every summer movie of the 2010s in 3D.  The movie lost me when they mentioned that the mineral they were looking for was called unobtanium.  That's when I said, well this movie is dumb.

6. Precious: Based On The Novel 'Push' By Sapphire has a title that gives you too much information that you didn't need.  Although if you really liked the movie it does alleviate confusion as you are rushing to your nearest Barnes And Nobles.  This is not the feel good movie of the year by any means.  Precious is a 16 year old overweight girl who is pregnant with her second child which was a result of rape from her father.  Her first child has down syndrome.  She lives with her mother who collects welfare and physically and emotionally abuses her.  Did I mention that she's also illiterate?  And she gets AIDS?  She is such a depressing character that it is at times unbelievable but you have to assume that somewhere, someplace a woman like Precious exists.  It's a sad movie but in a weird way a movie filled with hope.  It's a good film but not something I want to watch again and again.

5. Inglorious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino's revenge fantasy for Adolph Hitler.  It tells of an alternate history with two plots to kill the fuhrer.  One involved Brad Pitt and a dirty dozen style team of Jewish soldiers who love killing and scalping Nazis and the other of a Jewish woman who runs a cinema that is about to hold a premiere of a Nazi propaganda film.  This movie is big, loud, violent and fun and does what all the other war movies it is emulating couldn't do.  They actually kill Hitler.  The Dirty Dozen and films of its kind end with a successful mission but this movie ends with the fiery death of Adolph Hitler.  It's probably my least favorite of Tarantino's films, which isn't saying the movie is bad, I just like his other films better but it does point out the fact that even with an incredible track record of films Tarantino has yet to win the big prize come Oscar night.

4. The Hurt Locker is a film that I found over rated at the time of its release.  Watching it again I liked it a little better but still don't see it as a Best Picture winner.  It's a very good film about bomb disposal experts in Iraq and has some terrific moments of tension.  But those moments are the only thing that stick in my memory.  The story takes a back seat to a handful of really exciting scenes.  It's a quality film but I don't think it can stand toe to toe with the best of the best.  It will probably land somewhere in the middle on my list of Best Picture winners.  One thing it did do however is earn Kathryn Bigelow an Oscar for Best Director, making her the first female to win the award.

3. Up In Air is a very simple film about a man doing his job.  George Clooney stars as a corporate downsizer.  His job is to fly into a city, go to a company's office and be the face employees see as they are being laid off.  The guys letting the people go don't want to do the firing so they call in him.  He knows that he's a bearer of bad news but he packages it with a line of BS that sugarcoats it.  As he's letting someone go he notices that they minored in French culinary and tells the man to follow his dreams of being a chef.  He's sold this so long that he believes it himself and it all comes to a head when his job is threatened with being obsolete as the company he works for is going to start firing people digitally.  The entire cast is fantastic and Jason Reitman was on a hot streak of character driven comedy/dramas following Thank You For Smoking and Juno.  If I could sound like Gene Shalit for a moment, Up In The Air soars.

2. District 9 is the best movie of the year having to do with alien and human relationships, don't let Avatar fool you, this is the best.  Now that I think of it, I wonder if this film's inclusion in the lineup siphoned votes from Avatar.  It takes place in Johannesburg, South Africa years after an alien space ship has landed.  The creatures aboard the craft are not the aliens we usually see in movies, the kinds that demand we take them to our leaders.  Instead they are malnourished and impoverished refugees and are treated by the government as such and thrown into internment camps.  One day a spineless bureaucrat is accidentally squirted with alien goo and starts to mutate.  He joins up with an alien trying to get home and becomes an unwilling anti hero.  It's got inventive visual effects, more impressive to me than the ones in Avatar, great performances and terrific direction.

1. Up is Pixar's best film.  They have had some incredible movies, all 3 Toy Story films, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles but none had me crying like a baby like Up did.  An old widower, upset with the gentrification of his neighborhood, ties balloons to his house to go on an adventure.  He also accidentally takes a talkative boy scout with him.  If the first 10 minutes don't have you choking up then the ending sure will.  For me, it's the moment when the talking dog, Dug, finds a home that gets me every single time.

There are some really solid films here but not a clear winner.  Most predictions had The Hurt Locker going up against Avatar like David going up against Goliath.  Also, The Hurt Locker was directed by Kathryn Bigelow who used to be married to James Cameron, director of Avatar.  So everyone was looking for a grudge match and the little guy ended up winning as Avatar ended up being the highest grossing movie of all time but The Hurt Locker ended up being the lowest grossing Best Picture winner ever.  Neither really factor in to my decision.  First off my list are The Blind Side and A Serious Man because I didn't like them.  Then I'm taking off Avatar because Cameron already got his Oscar for a much better film, the movie already had success at the box office so it's not like an Oscar was going to help that and the movie is pretty stupid if you take out the technical achievements.  The next off are Precious, An Education, Inglourious Basterds and The Hurt Locker because while I liked them, they don't have that extra something that makes them a Best Picture winner.  It's hard to explain but the my top 3 do have that quality.  Up, Up In The Air and District 9 were my favorites and I think the first one off that list is Up In The Air.  I love the movie but it is a bit light.  The only thing keeping me from voting for Up is the fact that it's also nominated for Best Animated Feature and is assured a win there.  That's probably what kept a lot of people away and why I was against the category in the first place.  I don't care, Up makes me cry, Up wins.

Oscar Winner: The Hurt Locker

My Vote: Up

GABBY Winner: Up

Best Actor

5. Morgan Freeman was born to play Nelson Mandela.  He looks like him, he sounds like him, this is an example of perfect casting.  Invictus tells the story of Mandela's first year as President of South Africa.  He spent 27 years as a political prisoner and then after release became the first black President of the country.  We get a little bit of his struggles ruling a country overcoming apartheid and fueled by racism but the movie mainly focuses on a rugby match.  Freeman just won an Oscar for a role he shouldn't have which is good because I would rather he didn't win for this standard sports biopic, no matter how well he resembles the real life man he's playing.

4. Jeremy Renner plays a cocky and headstrong bomb disposal expert in The Hurt Locker.  The only thing that might explode before those bombs is him.  What Renner does well here is create a character between the lines of his movie.  There's not a lot of setup for him but as soon as we see him enter the film we know all we need to know about him due to how Renner portrays him.  It's a really good performance but this is his first nomination and really his first lead role outside of his breakout performance as Jeffrey Dahmer so give him a little time before we go handing him the statue.

3. Colin Firth plays George Falconer, a depressed gay man in the 1960s mourning the death of his longtime partner in A Single Man.  I found this film pretty dry.  Tom Ford, the director tries to make it interesting with his sense of style but I had the same reaction to this that I did with A Serious Man.  This guy is sad, he's still sad, he continues to be sad, it's no fun watching a sad bastard for 90 minutes.  The saving grace of the film was Firth's performance he plays this character as if he's been living in this person's skin all his life.  A lot of people thought Firth could pull this out and be a surprise winner but I'm glad they waited a year because he gave an even better performance in 2010.

2. George Clooney is an actor who has found out that he can coast on his natural charisma and make it work for himself.  Coast is probably the wrong word because even though Clooney makes it look effortless, he never phones it in.  In Up In The Air he plays a man whose job is to fire people.  He flies into towns and lets people go and is an expert in managing people's fragile emotions.  The only feelings he can't get a handle on are his own.  Worried that he's going to become obsolete, he takes a young go-getter on the road with him to show her how important and precise his job is.  During the film he meets a fellow traveler that he thinks he can actually form an emotional connection with.  It's a great movie that rides the coattails of Clooney's natural likability.  Problem is, they gave him a consolation win in 2005 for Syriana because he also had Good Night And Good Luck that year.  This is what happens when you reward the person and not the performance.  A couple years later they knock it out of the park and you can't vote for them.

1. Jeff Bridges plays Bad Blake, a down and out country singer in Crazy Heart.  This role seemed like it was tailored to get Bridges an Oscar.  He definitely elevates the film with his performance.  The movie spends far too much time on Bridges actually playing guitar and singing which gets in the way of the story it is trying to tell.  You can't argue with the results though, Bridges has been scoring Oscar nominations since the early 70s but has yet to win and this was just the perfect marriage of character, actor and timing.  The only thing I don't like about wins like these are the fact that they seem so manufactured.  Before the movie is released we get the buzz about how great the performance is and that this is Jeff Bridges's Oscar role and the performance of a life time and then we get stories on how overdue he is.  It's like we're giving him the Oscar before the movie comes out.  The studio tells us that he should win and everyone just falls in line...

...As did I.  I gotta vote for Jeff Bridges.  This is a great performance, in a not so great movie, but it also might be the best chance he has at winning.  He's earned nominations for The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt And Lightfoot, Starman and The Contender, all good performances but not quite Oscar worthy.  He's proved himself one of the best and most dependable actors in the business and it's about damn time he wins an Oscar.  We might as well give it to him here than for a lesser role down the line.  Everything works out historically too as Freeman and Clooney already had theirs, Firth will get his next year and Renner still hasn't delivered another role worthy of Oscar gold.  I gave Bridges a win in 1998 for The Big Lebowski so I was allowed the luxury of picking someone else for my awards.

Oscar Winner: Jeff Bridges

My Vote: Jeff Bridges

GABBY Winner: Sharlto Copley for District 9

Best Actress

5. Helen Mirren just won an Oscar so I don't have to pretend that she deserved one for whatever the hell this movie was about.  I tried to watch The Last Station but my eyes started glazing over.  I found myself an hour into the film without the faintest clue of what was going on.  Have you ever read a boring book and then found that you've just read the same page twice?  That's what watching The Last Station was like.

4. Meryl Streep plays Julia Child in the uneven comedy/drama Julie And Julia.  The movie takes place in two time periods.  One is Amy Adams as Julie, she is writing a blog about cooking every meal in Child's cookbook.  Then we get Meryl as Child going through culinary school and overcoming obstacles of being a woman in a male driven profession.  The Julia Child part is definitely more interesting than the Julie part and Meryl is a hoot as the exuberant Child.  She already had 2 Oscars at this point and this isn't quite Sophie's Choice level performance.  That's the problem with Meryl, she gets nominated for everything and she wins for what might be one of the best performances of all time.  Are you gonna have her win for everything?  Or just stuff as good as that?

3. Sandra Bullock will be a strong favorite for my Worst Oscar Winner in this field.  I'm toying with the idea of making a list ranking all the winners in each field when I'm done with these.  There's nothing inherently awful about Bullock's performance as Leigh Anne Tuohy in The Blind Side, except for the distracting accent, but point me to the scene that earned her an Oscar.  It wasn't just the Academy, she won the Golden Globe and the SAG.  She also won the Razzie this year for her work in All About Steve.  Everyone saw something here that I didn't and I want to know what it was.

2. Carey Mulligan plays a young girl who leaves school to follow a conman in An Education.  You see, she's in school about to graduate but she's also getting an education in life because she falls in love with the wrong man and then ends up going back to school when it doesn't work out, the title has a double meaning.  While not her debut performance, this was Mulligan's first real prominent role in a film and she absolutely nails it.  She has the exact right amount of innocence for the character that you believe she could make such an error in judgement but also enough sense to make you believe that she can overcome her mistakes.

1. Gabourey Sidibe made her film debut in the title role of Precious: Based On The Novel 'Push' By Sapphire.  She plays the 16 year old, overweight, pregnant, sexually, physically and emotionally abused girl who is on her second child that was fathered by her dad.  Sidibe is extraordinary in the part.  She is completely believable as the character as if the role was made for her.  The main reason I don't want to vote for her is because this is her film debut and she hasn't exactly proven herself a talent outside of this film in the 10 years since its release.

Normally I would have to enforce my Jennifer Hudson rule and kick out Mulligan and Sidibe.  They are on their first nominations for their breakout roles.  If they are good they will have other chances, if they aren't then they will fade into obscurity.  In this category though, they are my top 2.  I can't vote for Helen Mirren and I don't want to vote for Meryl Streep.  Actually, now that I think about it, if Meryl wins here she doesn't win for The Iron Lady.  But that's beside the point, she shouldn't have won for either of them.  I can't vote for Bullock because I really hated her film.  That leaves only Mulligan and Sidibe.  Two performances I liked in movies I liked.  I hate to do this but I'm voting for Gabourey Sidibe.  The win wouldn't have held up at all but it might have been a little more palatable than Sandra Bullock.

Oscar Winner: Sandra Bullock

My Vote: Gabourey Sidibe

GABBY Winner: Melanie Laurent for Inglourious Basterds

Best Supporting Actor

5. Matt Damon dons a South African accent to play real life rugby captain Francois Pienaar in Invictus.  While his accent is consistent it is so not his real voice that it was distracting to me.  Freeman is playing a man we have heard speaking before and are familiar with.  Damon is playing a man who is not so recognizable so it seems like Damon is just doing a silly voice.  He certainly worked for the role, learning rugby and bulking up to look believable on the field but he's definitely the weak link in this category.

4. Christopher Plummer has a big white beard to play Leo Tolstoy in the last year of his life in The Last Station.  I mentioned this before when I talked about Helen Mirren but I could not get through this film.  It's about people fighting over Tolstoy's will and what to do with his works when he dies.  Plummer is fine in the role, he was 80 years old at the time so he plays the part with the wisdom of an 80 year professional actor.  I'm glad he ended up winning for Beginners because it would be a shame if they gave him a veteran Oscar for this.

3. Stanley Tucci is the best part of The Lovely Bones and I always like when an actor I liked in a movie I didn't like gets nominated.  I don't vote for them but it's nice to see them here.  This film is about a murdered young girl who ends up in the in-between.  She's in neither heaven or hell but staying on Earth and seeing her family cope with her passing.  Tucci plays the guy that murdered her and he's very good at being creepy and unnerving.  He takes a role that is basically the bad guy on a Criminal Minds episode but plays it just real enough that it is terrifying but believable.  My main gripe is I wish the movie gave him a more fitting ending.

2. Christoph Waltz steals the show as the villainous SS colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds.  This is a really great character and Waltz is the perfect guy to play it.  I imagine that the Tarantino dialogue doesn't come natural to every actor.  You have to be precise but also have a level of fun underneath.  None of his villains are straight up villains, they are almost cartoon characters.  Look at Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, he's hilarious but he's not saying anything particularly funny.  If an actor tried to read that dialogue completely straight it wouldn't work.  Waltz is great and definitely deserved the Oscar this year.  Only reason he's my number 2 is because I got my Jennifer Hudson rule.  This was pretty much Waltz's first American film and he could have very easily never been seen again.  He almost was, his next movie was as the bad guy in The Green Hornet.

1. Woody Harrelson had a pretty great year in 2009.  Even though he'd been working steadily he only popped up in mainstream films sparingly for the last 10 years.  Then this year he plays a Twinkie loving zombie slayer in Zombieland, is the best part of the end of the world special effects extravaganza 2012 and gets his first Oscar nomination for The Messenger.  This is a movie that feels like it was made in 1974, it has a real The Last Detail vibe to it.  Woody and Ben Foster are two casualty notification officers for the army.  They go to widows and inform them of their husband's death in the Iraq war.  Woody's character is great.  He's a recovering alcoholic who tries to stay emotionless when giving bad news but also has a whole lot of rules he obeys when dealing with grieving widows.  It's kind of like George Clooney's character in Up In The Air except with death rather than people getting fired.  He's absolutely terrific in the film.

There's no reason why Christoph Waltz shouldn't win this category.  Arguably, he gave the best performance, so he should win.  The Oscars are just littered with great actors who have never won and mediocre actors who got lucky so I like to right wrong when I can.  Waltz is not a mediocre actor but he could have been.  In 2009 we had no other information to go on except for the fact that he was hella good in this film.  He ended up winning a 2nd Oscar for another Tarantino film in 2012 so I'm gonna use this year to honor Woody Harrelson.  He's been consistently good since his stint on Cheers and has created some incredible characters before and after this nomination.  Harrelson and Waltz were really the only choices.  Tucci, Plummer and Damon were all in movies I didn't care for.

Oscar Winner: Christoph Waltz

My Vote: Woody Harrelson

GABBY Winner: Peter Capaldi for In The Loop

Best Supporting Actress

5. Penelope Cruz is one of the girls in Nine.  That's really all I can say about this nomination.  This is Rob Marshall's musical followup to Chicago.  It's based on the Broadway musical which is based on Fellini's 8½.  Daniel Day-Lewis stars as a director with a bunch of women and Cruz is one of them.  She has a sexy dance and that's about it.  She's fine in the role, actually she's good but not on screen enough to warrant a win, hardly a nomination.  She also just won this category so there is no need to consider her.

4. Maggie Gyllenhaal was a surprise nominee for her performance as a reporter who starts a romantic relationship with country singer Bad Blake in Crazy Heart.  She's fine in the role but there's not really anything Oscar worthy about the performance.  She's a single mother who starts interviewing Jeff Bridges and then ends up sleeping with him.  She has some nice moments but I think this was more a nomination for an actress who has done quality work in the past and less for a performance that deserved a nomination.

3. Vera Farmiga is really good in Up In The Air but it stinks to be the second best supporting performance in your film.  If I'm gonna vote for someone from this movie it's gonna be Anna Kendrick.  Farmiga plays a fellow frequent flyer that George Clooney meets on the road.  They strike up a friendship that leads to a series of sexual encounters when they are in the same town that leads to something more when he asks her to be his date to his sister's wedding.  She provides a nice balance to Clooney's perpetual bachelor by being both a romantic interest but also an appropriately aged woman that he can relate to.

2. Anna Kendrick plays the young corporate go-getter who joins George Clooney on the road in Up In The Air.  She has introduced a new way of firing people via video conferencing and a script.  Clooney thinks this will fail because desperate people being let go from their jobs need a human face to interact with.  She joins him while he fires people and quickly realizes that he's right.  She has a great scene where she fires a guy over video chat and is trying to use all of the tools she has been given to make this a smooth conversation and it is a disaster.  The guy starts crying and she can't do anything because she's on a video screen in the other room.  This is a great performance because Kendrick walks the line of being the inexperienced "little girl" and a woman who is just in a bit over her head.  She's obviously not dumb because she got this far in her career but she is a bit lost in the woods.  Kendrick never plays the character dumb for laughs even though she is still very funny.

1. Mo'Nique got one of those once in a lifetime roles here with Precious: Based On The Novel 'Push' By Sapphire.  She plays Precious's mother who is the worst woman in the world.  She is physically and emotionally abusive to her daughter and is completely unrepentant.  She's one of cinema's greatest monsters and she gets a scene near the end where she breaks down and you can see some glimmers of humanity within her.  This is simply an incredible performance the deserved the Oscar but I'll tell you why I'm conflicted about voting for her.

Ok, so it's down to Kendrick and Mo'Nique.  Cruz and Gyllenhaal are out right off the bat.  Imagine if Maggie Gyllenhaal won this category, how pissed would people be?  Farmiga would contend for a vote if she wasn't competing against her co-star.  So we have Kendrick and Mo'Nique and much like my decision with Best Actress, neither of them have proven themselves Oscar worthy actors yet.  Kendrick is new to film having only really appeared in the Twilight films before this and Mo'Nique is a stand up comedian whose film roles include Soul Plane and Phat Girlz.  Neither of them deserve an Oscar based on career so I gotta vote for the performance itself and that's Mo'Nique.  I can kind of tell that Kendrick is the better actor though and should hopefully have future chances.  This is probably the last time we will see Mo'Nique's name in the Oscar lineup.  When it comes to the Oscars I'm voting Mo'Nique based on performance and Oscar history.  For my awards I picked Kendrick because I want her to win at some point and this seems like the best opportunity for her.

Oscar Winner: Mo'Nique

My Vote: No'Nique

GABBY Winner: Anna Kendrick

Best Director

Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win Best Director and she does so by making a movie bereft of women.  It just goes to prove that storytelling is not about race, sex, religion or politics.  It's just about telling good stories and it doesn't matter who you are as long as you can do that.  After watching The Hurt Locker again I was really impressed with how Bigelow orchestrated all the madness in this film.  This movie doesn't have much in the way of special effects but things go off without a hitch because Bigelow is like a conductor making sure every piece of every scene goes right.  Her competition was pretty stiff too with Jason Reitman, Quentin Tarantino, James Cameron and Lee Daniels.

Best Original Screenplay/Adapted Screenplay
The Hurt Locker would be my 4th pick in the Original Screenplay category.  A Serious Man would be my 5th and Inglourious Basterds, The Messenger and Up would be better winners here.  The technical achievements in The Hurt Locker impressed me more than the actual script.  Precious: Based On The Novel 'Push' By Sapphire wins adapted screenplay.  If you didn't know, this movie was based on a book, the book Push, by the author Sapphire.  The script is pretty good but this was a tough category and I think either District 9, Up In The Air or In The Loop would be better winners.  An Education was the 5th nominee and my 5th choice.

Best Animated Feature
Up wins in a hands down decision.  It's not only the Best Animated Feature of the year but the best film of the year.  It got nominated in the Best Picture category so it would be a huge upset if it lost here.  The competition wasn't bad either as we have the stop motion Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox as well as the traditionally hand drawn The Princess And The Frog from Disney and The Secret Of Kells, a surprise nominee as it hadn't been released yet when it got nominated.

Best Documentary Feature
Fisher Stevens, the white guy who played an Indian in the Short Circuit movies wins an Oscar for The Cove a fairly moving documentary which deals with dolphin hunting in Japan.

Best Original Score/Original Song
Oh God, the score to Up is so good.  The first 10 minutes of the film where we see the life of a married couple set to that beautiful Michael Giacchino score is heartbreaking and the music definitely helps get it there.  Not sure why any of the other nominees showed up, especially Sherlock Holmes.  Over in the Best Song category, it seems like the stacked the deck in favor of Crazy Heart as The Weary Kind beats out two songs from The Princess And The Frog that cancel each other out, one of the new songs from Nine and a song from a film called Paris 36, which I have never heard of.

Best Sound Editing/Sound Mixing
The Hurt Locker surprisingly wins both categories over Avatar.  It is a warranted decision but I'm surprised the big, critically acclaimed special effects movie didn't win these easily.

Best Art Direction/Cinematography
While Avatar is pretty to look at, how much of it was green screen and CGI and how much was actual set decoration and camera work?  It also benefited from weak categories.  I would have picked Nine for Art Direction and Inglourious Basterds for Cinematography.

Best Makeup
Star Trek easily wins over The Young Victoria and something called Il Divo.

Best Costume Design
A lot of dull costume dramas this year as The Young Victoria beats out Bright Star and Coco Before Chanel.  Also nominated were The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus and Nine.

Best Film Editing
The Hurt Locker rightfully wins even though District 9 and Inglourious Basterds were in the mix.  Precious is kind of a questionable nomination here, I would have included Up In The Air.  Avatar is also nominated which again is benefited by CGI and seems like a cheat.

Best Visual Effects
Obviously Avatar wins but I was more impressed with District 9 and how they incorporated the live action footage with the visual effects.  We've come a long way since Bob Hoskins talked to a cartoon rabbit and this movie is seamless in incorporating real people and CGI creatures.

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