Life of Pi - Oscar Nominations

LOS ANGELES: The 85th Academy Awards season jolted into place on Thursday, as the heaviest number of Oscar nominations - including nods for best picture - went to Lincoln. The movie, about a US president's struggle with civil war, is directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Reliance Dreamworks.

Famed Carnatic musician Bombay Jayashri has been nominated for the category 'Achievement in music written for motion pictures' for her lyric of Pi's Lullaby from the Ang Lee movie Life of Pi that talks about a shipwreck survivor and a tiger.

Close behind were Silver Linings Playbook, a comedy, of sorts, about mental illness, and Les Miserables, filled with songs of the oppressed. Argo, about political captivity, Amour, a French-language film about death, and Django Unchained, about slavery and retribution, are also in the reckoning

Beasts of the Southern Wild, about a child's encounters with rising floodwaters, and Zero Dark Thirty, about the murky pursuit of a national enemy, for the abuses of slavery also scored heavily and were nominated for best picture.

But the real surprise was a triple snub in the best director category: Neither Kathryn Bigelow, who directed Zero Dark Thirty, nor Ben Affleck, who directed Argo, nor Quentin Tarantino, who directed Django Unchained, were included among the five directing nominees.

Those were Steven Spielberg, for Lincoln, Ang Lee, for Life of Pi, Michael Haneke, for Amour, David O Russell, for Silver Linings Playbook, and Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild.

In all, nine films received best picture nominations, in a field that can include as many as 10 or as few as five, depending on how voters from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences spread their hand.

Hollywood now faces a somewhat longer-than-usual campaign period. A new digital voting system - despite its reported hitches - allowed the Academy to announce nominees two weeks earlier than last year, and more than six weeks before the awards ceremony, on February 24 at the Dolby Theater in LA.

Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg, had gone into the day as the picture to beat, and it remained a leader, with 12 nominations. But it barely outpaced Life of Pi, which beat the expectations by coming up second, with 11 nominations in all, even as Zero Dark Thirty, an early favourite, fell into the pack, with just five.

Mr Spielberg's directing nomination was his seventh while Daniel Day-Lewis received his fifth best actor nomination, this time for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln. (He has won twice.) Sally Field was among the Lincoln nominees, as a supporting actress for playing Mary Todd Lincoln, as was Tony Kushner, for writing the film's adapted script.

 

 

Source – Economic Times

 

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