It's a classic Hollywood confrontation: a gritty little war film with modest returns against the biggest-grossing film in history. Their directors are connected: she is only the fourth woman in history to be nominated as best director — none has ever won — and he's famous as the self-proclaimed "king of the world" for his previous Oscar victory. They're ex-husband and ex-wife.
And even their movies have something in common: Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, a tense drama set among American soldiers who defuse bombs in the Iraq war and Canadian filmmaker James Cameron's Avatar, a big-budget fantasy that sends American soldiers to a distant planet to pacify the natives and steal their riches.
The riches of the Academy Award is at stake in this runoff, as The Hurt Locker and Avatar lead the pack with nine nominations each for the 82nd annual Academy Awards.
They're neck-and-neck everywhere except at the box office, where The Hurt Locker (which is military slang for a very bad place) has brought in some $16 million U.S. worldwide and Avatar some $2 billion U.S., surpassing Cameron's previous record-breaker, Titanic. And they dominate in a year when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expanded the best picture category to 10 movies from the previous five for the first time in 66 years.
The move was meant to add some more populist titles to the list, but those who were hoping for the Academy to step out and include the raunchy comedy The Hangover or the relaunch of the fanboy epic Star Trek were disappointed (although that movie got four nominations in technical categories.) The one bow to convention was the nomination for The Blind Side, the Sandra Bullock crowd-pleaser — based on a true story — about a white family that adopts a poor black boy and helps him become a football star.
Aside from that, the best picture nominees are just a more diverse collection of the kind of critical darlings that mark the Oscars, although even there the academy can be hard to decipher. For instance Up — an animated movie that tells the touching story of an old man who takes a trip to South America, fulfilling a promise he made to his late wife — is nominated for best picture and also as best animated movie, part of its collection of five nominations. It becomes only the second animated film to be nominated in the best picture category, after Beauty and the Beast in 1992.
Meanwhile, the well-received Crazy Heart isn't on the list, although it did get three nominations in other categories.
The rest of the best picture nominees:
Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's Second World War fantasy — and recipient of eight nominations — in which a group of American soldiers sets out to slaughter Nazis and winds up with the entire German high command in an exploding movie theatre;
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire — which got six nominations — the grim but hopeful story of a young black woman who fights out of a horrific childhood of abuse and neglect to find her own life;
Up in the Air, an early Oscar front-runner, directed by another Canadian, Jason Reitman, about a businessman who flies around the U.S. to help businesses lay off excess employees. In total, it got six nominations, including its entire main cast;
District 9, a metaphorical sci-fi film set in South Africa in which invading aliens are locked in apartheid-type camps, which received four nominations. It was directed by Neill Blomkamp, a South African-born filmmaker who now lives in Vancouver;
An Education, another based-on-truth story about a young woman's coming-of-age in 1960s London when she meets an older man. It got three nominations in total;
And A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers film, inspired by their own father, about a university professor who suffers the torments of Job when everything in his life starts going wrong.
Notable by their absence are Invictus, the true story of how a South African rugby team helped heal the wounds of apartheid, and Nine, the big-budget musical whose star, Daniel Day-Lewis, was also snubbed.
The race for best actor is dominated by Jeff Bridges, a five-time nominee who has never won an Oscar, although he did get the Golden Globe award for his portrayal of a down-and-out country singer in Crazy Heart. His closest competition will come from George Clooney, who brings his smooth charm to the role of the corporate downsizer in Up in the Air.
In the best actress category, the race is thought to be between Bullock, whose performance of the feisty mother in The Blind Side is a departure from her reputation as a romantic-comedy sweetheart, and Meryl Streep, earning a record 16th nomination for her hilariously immaculate impersonation of Julia Child in Julie & Julia.
In the best director race, Bigelow — who recently won the Directors Guild of America prize, a fairly reliable indicator of Oscar success — and Cameron are facing off against Tarantino, Reitman and Lee Daniels, director of Precious, and only the second African-American director (after John Singleton in 1991) to be nominated in the category. The most notable absentee is Hollywood favourite Clint Eastwood, who directed Invictus.
The supporting actor and actress races are thought to be foregone conclusions for Christoph Waltz, as the multilingual Nazi villain of Inglourious Basterds and Mo'Nique, who provided an electric charge of terror as the abusive mother in Precious. However, Maggie Gyllenhaal was a surprise nomination for her role in Crazy Heart.
Canadian theatre veteran Christopher Plummer also got a nod for best supporting actor for his portrayal of Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station. Among other Canadian connections in this year's race are the three technical nominations (art direction, costume design and makeup) that went to The Young Victoria, which was directed by Quebec filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallee; In addition, the nomination for art direction for Nine includes Gordon Sim of Toronto.
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