Nominees | 80th Annual Academy Awards | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

80th Annual Academy Award Winners

What the Academy got right:

• Marion Cotillard as best actress for her astounding performance as Edith Piaf. The other nominees were all excellent, but Cotillard was way beyond excellent, and she would have been my pick as well. Well deserved, but unexpected.
  
• Can't really quibble with the Coens. They are tremendous talents. Their Oscar for best adapted screenplay was completely obvious. That may be the best literary adaptation ever created. The Best Picture and Best Director awards - well, there could have been other reasonable choices as well, but they deserved it as much as anyone else.
  
• Christopher Rouse for editing the Bourne Ultimatum. If you read that screenplay you would never dream that it could be a brilliant movie. The director and editor made that movie in post-production. Rouse carried the baton not only for himself but also for Greengrass, who should have been nominated for best director.
  
• I don't know whether those Irish people deserved to win the Best Song Oscar, but I'm sure glad they did. That poor guy doesn't even own a decent suit, and he was up against a bunch of Disney songs. Who can root for Disney? That's like rooting for Exxon. One of Oscar's best moments!
  

What the Academy got wrong:

Surprisingly, not much at all. The choices among the nominees all seemed pretty sensible to me. I'd note only the exclusion of some dererving nominees:

• As mentioned above, Paul Greengrass should have been nominated for Best Director for The Bourne Ultimatum. He wasn't going to win against the Coens or PTA, but he deserved the chance to compete.
  
• The best documentary of the year, The King of Kong (96% positive reviews and an 8.5 at IMDb) wasn't even nominated so that the Academy could nominate lesser films about more important subjects.