Lincoln leads an Oscar field full of surprises and snubs

By Scott Tobias | January 10, 2013 | 2:38pm

Aux Features Film

Congratulations, Lincoln.

In an Oscar contest that was widely expected to be a two-film race between Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty—with Ben Affleck’s Argo serving as the potential spoiler—the Academy tipped its hand this morning by shutting both Bigelow and Affleck out of the Best Director category, suggesting diminished support for those movies. (Recent DGA nominee Tom Hooper was also denied a Director nod for shoving his camera up his actors’ nostrils.) Granted, all three were nominated for Best Picture, along with six others (Amour, Beasts Of The Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Life Of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook), but the horserace in that category (and likely in Director, too) seems likely over before it started.

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So who benefits from the snubbing? The three big winners were Amour, Beasts Of The Southern Wild, and Silver Linings Playbook, all of which received Best Director nominations for Michael Haneke (!), Benh Zeitlin, and David O. Russell, respectively. Amour also got expected nominations for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actress (Emmanuelle Riva), Beasts picked up a Best Actress nomination for young Quvenzhané Wallis, and Silver Linings Playbook pick up nominations in every single acting category—Bradley Cooper for Best Actor, Jennifer Lawrence for Best Actress, Robert De Niro for Best Supporting Actor, and Jacki Weaver for Best Supporting Actress. Other weird shit worth noting:

• Life Of Pi quietly hauled in 11 nominations without any of them in the acting categories. That’s enough for bored Oscar prognosticators to pretend it has a chance for an upset bid.

• The Best Picture category can include up to 10 nominees, but this year the number is 9, because no room could possibly be made for a second-rate film like The Master, which will have to settle for being talked-about and studied from now until the apocalypse. (It did get actor nominations for Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams, though, which helps salve the burn of Jonny Greenwood’s score and Mihai Malaimare Jr.’s cinematography.

• No Kathryn Bigelow. Astonishing. While it seemed clear that the controversy over the torture narrative of Zero Dark Thirty would damage the film’s Oscar hopes—Academy voters are probably not anxious to be tagged as torture endorsers for supporting it—no one predicted Bigelow would get shut out entirely.

• Support from critics guilds like the New York Film Critics Circle didn’t give Rachel Weisz enough of a boost to get a Best Actress nomination for The Deep Blue Sea, which is terrible. Also terrible is seeing that Ann Dowd’s self-financed campaign for Best Supporting Actress for Compliance also fell short.

• How does Moonrise Kingdom not get a Best Production Design nomination? That should be a given every time Wes Anderson makes a movie. Instead, he and Roman Coppola will have to settle for a Best Original Screenplay nod.

• Lincoln’s 12 nominations extend across all category types: acting, directing, screenwriting, music, cinematography, and various technical fields. It’s going to win a lot of those.

The complete list of nominees:

Best Picture
Amour
Argo
Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Django Unchained
Les Miserables
Life Of Pi
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty

Best Director
Michael Haneke, Amour
Ang Lee, Life Of Pi
David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
Benh Zeitlin, Beasts Of The Southern Wild

Best Actor
Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Hugh Jackman, Les Miserables
Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
Denzel Washington, Flight

Best Actress
Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Emmanuelle Riva, Amour
Quvenzhane Wallis, Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Naomi Watts, The Impossible

Best Supporting Actor
Alan Arkin, Argo
Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained

Best Supporting Actress
Amy Adams, The Master
Sally Field, Lincoln
Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
Helen Hunt, The Sessions
Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook

Best Original Screenplay
Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom
Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty
John Gatins, Flight
Michael Haneke, Amour
Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained

Best Adapted Screenplay
Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin, Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Tony Kushner, Lincoln
David Magee, Life Of Pi
David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
Chris Terrio, Argo

Best Animated Feature
Brave
Frankenweenie
ParaNorman
The Pirates! Band Of Misfits
Wreck-It Ralph

Best Cinematography
Roger Deakins, Skyfall
Janusz Kaminski, Lincoln
Seamus McGarvey, Anna Karenina
Claudio Miranda, Life Of Pi
Robert Richardson, Django Unchained

Best Costume Design
Colleen Atwood, Snow White And The Huntsman
Paco Delgado, Les Misérables
Jacqueline Durran, Anna Karenina
Eiko Ishioka, Mirror Mirror
Joanna Johnston, Lincoln

Best Documentary Feature
5 Broken Cameras
The Gatekeepers
How To Survive A Plague
The Invisible War
Searching For Sugar Man

Best Documentary Short
Inocente
Kings Point
Mondays At Racine
Open Heart
Redemption

Best Film Editing
Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers, Silver Linings Playbook
William Goldenberg, Argo
Michael Kahn, Lincoln
Tim Squyres, Life Of Pi
Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg, Zero Dark Thirty

Best Foreign Language Film
Amour (Austria)
Kon-Tiki (Norway)
No (Chile)
A Royal Affair (Denmark)
War Witch (Canada)

Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Howard Berger, Peter Montagna and Martin Samuel, Hitchcock
Peter Swords King, Rick Findlater and Tami Lane, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Lisa Westcott and Julie Dartnell, Les Miserables

Best Original Score
Alexandre Desplat, Argo
Mychael Danna, Life Of Pi
Dario Marianelli, Anna Karenina
Thomas Newman, Skyfall
John Williams, Lincoln

Best Original Song
“Before My Time,” Chasing Ice (music and lyric by J. Ralph)
“Everybody Needs A Best Friend,”Ted (music by Walter Murphy; lyric by Seth MacFarlane)
“Pi’s Lullaby,” Life Of Pi (music by Mychael Danna; lyric by Bombay Jayashri)
“Skyfall,” Skyfall (music and lyric by Adele Adkins and Paul Epworth)
“Suddenly,” Les Misérables (music by Claude-Michel Schönberg; lyric by Herbert Kretzmer and Alain Boublil)

Best Production Design
Rick Carter and Jim Erickson, Lincoln
Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer, Anna Karenina
David Gropman and Anna Pinnock, Life Of Pi
Dan Hennah, Ra Vincent and Simon Bright, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Eve Stewart and Anna Lynch-Robinson, Les Miserables

Best Animated Short
Adam And Dog
Fresh Guacamole
Head Over Heels
Maggie Simpson In “The Longest Daycare”
Paperman

Best Live Action Short
Asad
Buzkashi Boys
Curfew
Death of a Shadow
Henry

Best Sound Editing
Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, Argo
Eugene Gearty and Philip Stockton, Life of Pi
Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers, Skyfall
Paul N.J. Ottosson, Zero Dark Thirty
Wylie Stateman, Django Unchained

Best Sound Mixing
Ron Bartlett, D.M. Hemphill and Drew Kunin, Life of Pi
Scott Millan, Greg P. Russell and Stuart Wilson, Skyfall
Andy Nelson, Mark Paterson and Simon Hayes, Les Misérables
Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom and Ronald Judkins, Lincoln
John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff and Jose Antonio Garcia, Argo

Best Visual Effects
Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton and R. Christopher White, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Philip Brennan, Neil Corbould and Michael Dawson, Snow White And the Huntsman
Janek Sirrs, Jeff White, Guy Williams and Dan Sudick, Marvel’s The Avengers
Richard Stammers, Trevor Wood, Charley Henley and Martin Hill, Prometheus
Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer and Donald R. Elliott, Life Of Pi