So, I get why Peter Jackson wasn't nominated for Best Director now. He didn't campaign.

Over at The Hot Button, David Poland suggests that Return of the King will be a powerhouse at next year's Oscars, especially since The Two Towers "only" got six nominations this year. He might be right, but it remains to be seen. The drop-off Oscar performance this year was expected, really; the question is, will people be pumped up enough about the third installment to propel it to grand achievements, or will there be more "been there, done that" to make its hold even shakier? I maintain that the reason Singing In the Rain struck out at the Oscars was simply because (the inferior) An American In Paris swept them the year before, and awarding another Gene Kelly musical would have been uninteresting.

But that's next year's Oscars, and we're hardly rolling with this one.

I read an Oscar columnist that bemoaned the omission of Leonardo diCaprio from the Best Actor category. What threw me for a loop was that he wasn't as upset about the lack of a nomination for Gangs as for Catch Me If You Can. I don't get it. I saw that movie. He was really good, but not Oscar material. And for all the buzz I've been hearing about Daniel Day-Lewis, I never heard much about DiCaprio in Gangs. Was his performance there more deserving than any of the five Best Actor nominees?

Two of my favorite actresses working today are frontrunners in this year's Oscars. Julianne Moore became the first actress to be nominated in both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress in the same year. Nicole Kidman competes with her in the Best Actress category. Moore is the critical favorite, and Kidman seems to be the front-runner. It wouldn't upset me to see them split the two Oscars, but you know what would tick me off? Zeta-Jones winning in Best Supporting Actress, thanks to the Miramax marketing machine and the momentum of Chicago.

Harvey Weinstein, head honcho at Miramax, is a marketing genius. Although Oscar campaigning dates back to the 1920s, Miramax is pretty much singularly responsible for raising the bar on Oscar campaigns, starting back in 1998. Weinstein has his name attached to four of the five Best Picture nominees. The fifth, The Pianist, is probably the least likely to win it.

Miramax films (The Hours, Chicago, Gangs, Frida, The Quiet American, and Hero, plus Two Towers, which isn't really a Miramax film but bears Weinstein's name anyway) got 21 of the 40 nominees in the top eight categories and 46 nominations total.

Strange omissions: About Schmidt, from Adapted Screenplay. City of God, from Best Foreign Language Film (chalk it up to bad marketing). Meanwhile, Antwone Fisher didn't get a single nomination. I'm sure I'll start hearing cynical theories of racism: "We did the black thing last year, so we don't have to this year." I don't buy any of that. But a screenplay nod sounds like it would have been in order.

Strange inclusion: Treasure Planet for Best Animated Feature? I'm really surprised. I haven't seen it; I'm not going on film quality here. But the Academy is made up of filmmakers, and as such they tend to want to distance themselves from financial failures. Not all nominees need be landslide *successes*, and sometimes too much success can hurt, as success invites backlash. But Treasure Planet *bombed* at the box office, plain and simple. I mean really embarrassingly. Disney animated features haven't done so badly in decades. I'm surprised that the Academy, whose livelihood depends on the financial success of films, saw past the box office failure and nominated it. I don't know if the nomination was deserved -- David Poland calls it the single worst nomination of this year -- but it at least shows the Academy was thinking. Then again, maybe it is explained simply by a lack of candidates. I was not expecting five nominees in that category (there were three last year), and this year has been a weak year for animation. There was no Shrek this year, that stormed the box office and spanned generations and demographics in its popularity. There was no Final Fantasy this year, that forged new territory in the art of animation (not that the Academy appreciated that movie in the first place). There was no reliable Pixar effort, a Monsters Inc or a Toy Story. And this year's raunchy-type cartoon, Eight Crazy Nights, wasn't particularly liked by anyone. In other words, if your studio put out a traditional animated feature film this year, it got a nomination. There was even room left over to nominate Spirited Away, which probably deserves the award but may only have commanded the Academy's attention for lack of anything else to nominate.

Another strange inclusion: Spiderman DOES NOT DESERVE BEST VISUAL EFFECTS. Yeah, Spidey webslinging his way through Manhattan looks good, but the vast majority of the CGI in that movie was so unconvincing as to break the suspension of disbelief. The early shots of Tobey Maguire leaping buildings out of costume are some of the worst blue screen effects since the tigers in the 2000 Best Visual Effects winner, Gladiator. If Spiderman beats Gollum on March 23rd, the error will be egregious indeed.

Although Chicago seems a clear front-runner, and better poised for a sweep than any other film, my hope is that the wealth of diverse nominees gridlock, and the awards are nicely split. This year feels like 2000's race, which saw Gladiator, Crouching Tiger, and Traffic all taking away decently-sized chunks of glory. I hope that happens this year, if only because a close race deserves a close finish.