The powers-that-be announce the nominees for the 81st Academy Awards, with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button garnering 13 nominations (it helps when your Oscar Bait is FX-heavy), Slumdog Millionaire grabbing ten, and Milk and The Dark Knight notching eight apiece. (That being said, TDK was frozen out of the main awards, Ledger’s inevitable Supporting Actor bid notwithtanding.)
Also in the running for major stuff: The Reader (picture, actress, director), The Wrestler (actor, supporting actress), Doubt (actor, screenplay, actress, supporting actress), Frost/Nixon (director, actor, screenplay), and WALL-E (screenplay, animated film). And the happy semi-surprises: Richard Jenkins for The Visitor and Robert Downey, Jr. for Tropic Thunder.
I’ll make my picks with the GitM 2008 list, which should be coming up within the next week or two. (The movies I’ve been waiting for — Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, and The Wrestler — all open here tomorrow.) And, don’t worry, 2009 isn’t being slighted all that much: I highly doubt Paul Blart: Mall Cop was going to make the cut anyway.