The link to the list of Oscar nominees is given at the end of this post. My thoughts:

Best Picture

I have to gloat, here. I decided at the last minute to, against all odds, vote against Miramax in the Oscar Nominations Game to put in Seabiscuit. I couldn't figure out whether to displace Cold Mountain or Master and Commander to do so, but I decided on culling Cold Mountain from the list and was rewarded with 5/5 correct guesses for it.

It's one of those faith-restoring moves on the part of the Academy. It isn't a set of Harvey Weinstein's pawns after all, nor is it the mechanical follower of the Golden Globes that everybody seems to think it is.

I saw Cold Mountain last weekend. I liked it. I was not blown away, by any stretch of the imagination, and ultimately it came off sort as sort of detached and forgettable. The most engrossing 15 minutes of it were all of Natalie Portman's scenes, where the emotion and energy suggests what I wished the rest of the film was like. Zellweger was fantastic. Jude Law and Nicole Kidman are quite good, but just short of being Oscar-worthy. I figured Kidman would get a nomination and Law would not, but the reverse happened.

In a strange sort of way, the early Oscar season, expected to help films released earlier and hurt the chances of those released later, when they don't have much time to build up momentum, actually worked the other way. Toward the end, Cold Mountain was losing steam, and Seabiscuit was gaining it. If the nominations voting had taken place a mere week later, I wouldn't have been as reluctant to vote Cold Mountain out and Seabiscuit in, but I guess it worked out the way it would have anyway.

Best Director

The surprise nobody was figuring on was Fernando Meirelles, for City of God. Meirelles was so far off my radar, I didn't even include him as a possibility in the predictions game. The Academy's rules for eligibility of foreign releases is a little weird; I thought City of God's chances began and ended *last* year. It chalked up not just a Best Director nomination, but one for screenplay and two for technical awards as well.

The rest of the nominees match the Best Picture list, minus Seabiscuit. Although I counted Cold Mountain out of the Best Picture race, I figured Anthony Minghella would still get a Best Director nomination for it.

Best Actor

The first three slots -- Penn, Kingsley, and Murray -- were foregone conclusions. The other two were up for grabs.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that my Best Picture fortune was counterbalanced here. I had five out of five correct guesses in this category for the longest time, then changed it unwisely at the last minute. Having seen Cold Mountain, I decided that Jude Law wasn't going to get enough respect for his performance that he'd need to get a nomination, so I swapped him out for Russell Crowe at the last minute. I didn't really believe in Crowe either, but the problem in this category was a dearth of real possibilities.

Apparently the Academy got tired of nominating Crowe and Kidman every year, though, and neither one showed up.

It is to my relief that Johnny Depp slipped in. Depp turned Pirates of the Caribbean from a pretty good movie to a really good movie and an incredibly fun one at that.

Best Actress

Score one for New Zealand. Keisha Castle-Hughes earned and unexpected nomination for Whale Rider. This category proved to be quite unpredictable, but the result was good: the nominations of Castle-Hughes and Samantha Morton, for In America, should bring some real attention to movies that are apparently worthy of a lot more than they're getting.

Too bad it's in a category that's locked up, though. Charlize Theron is one of the surest bets for the winner. Which leads me to Best Supporting Actor, but first I'll just say that the mass acclaim and predictable nomination for Diane Keaton puzzles me. I haven't seen Something's Gotta Give. Maybe she's fantastic. But without having seen it, it seems a bizarre sort of nomination. She may be good, but was the role really that complex or challenging?

Best Supporting Actor

A similar thing as Best Actress happened here. Djimon Hounsou finally landed some overdue Oscar recognition. And Ken Watanabi, a star in Japan but an unknown here, earned the nomination that should ensure he's no longer unknown here. But the category is locked up. Tim Robbins is the other solid acting lock this year.

Best Supporting Actress

The category that usually offers the most surprises this time offered none. Kind of. None of the nominees were unexpected, but one thing that's sort of unexpected was the shut-out of Scarlett Johansson from this *and* Best Actress. She was considered a likely contender for Best Actress (Girl With a Pearl Earring, which did well in technical nominations), and Best Supporting Actress (Lost In Translation, which did well across the board), but neither possibility panned out. Did her vote get split, despite that she was competing with herself in separate categories? That didn't stop Julianne Moore from scoring nominations in both last year. My guess is that the categories were just too crowded, and she wasn't quite *enough* of a frontrunner for either.

The Screenplay Categories

The lesson should have been learned last year. It seems foreign language films are more common in these categories than in the past, but despite last year's precedent, no one saw nominations for The Barbarian Invasions or City of God coming. My initial impulse is to doubt that either can win, but I just don't really know yet.

Best Animated Feature

The nominations list is predictable. What isn't predictable at all is whether the prize will go to Nemo or Triplets. It's a strange situation: early on, Nemo had as much of a lock on this category as Shrek did two years ago, but along comes this quirky little film from France and starts ticking off all kinds of critics awards. We'll see.

Despite being present in the entry form for the predictions game, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas was never a possibility: DreamWorks, discouraged with its unjustly low box office take, never submitted the film for consideration.

The Rest

Finally, Makeup wasn't weird and stupid. Finding Nemo got a Sound Effects Editing nomination instead of Rings? Cold Mountain's competing with itself in the Best Original Song category. The Visual Effects and Makeup categories were comprised entirely of very long titles.

The Matrix sequels scored not one single nomination. The original swept the technical awards, stealing them away from the more lavish but unloved Phantom Menace. But history repeated itself, in a way. The lavish but unloved Matrix sequels were shut out entirely. Not only did they not make the nominations, but they didn't even make the short lists for several categories: every time the Academy released the short lists for things like Visual Effects and Sound Editing, the Matrix was simply not there.