Oscar Nods Announced

LOS ANGELES, January 22: The nominations for the 80th
Annual Academy Awards—which is still slated to take place February 24,
despite the ongoing writers strike—were announced this morning, led by No
Country for Old Men and There
Will Be Blood with eight nods each,
including best picture.

Rounding out the best picture nominees are Atonement, Juno
and Michael Clayton. The animated
feature film nominees are Persepolis,
Ratatouille and Surf’s
Up. In the documentary feature category,
Michael Moore’s Sicko is up
against No End in Sight, Operation
Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience,
Taxi to the Dark Side and War/Dance. And the foreign-language film nominees are Israel’s
Beaufort, Austria’s The
Counterfeiters, Poland’s Katyń, Kazakhstan’s Mongol and Russia’s 12.

In the performance categories, best actor in a leading role
nods went to George Clooney for Michael Clayton, Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd The Demon
Barber of Fleet Street, Tommy Lee Jones in In
the Valley of Elah and Viggo Mortensen in Eastern
Promises. For an actor in a supporting
role, the contenders are Casey Affleck in The Assassination of Jesse
James by the Coward Robert Ford, Javier
Bardem in No Country for Old Men,
Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson’s War, Hal Holbrook in Into the Wild and Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton.

Best performance by an actress in a leading role nominations
went to Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Julie Christie in Away from Her, Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose, Laura Linney in The Savages and Ellen Page in Juno. The supporting actress nominees are Cate Blanchett
in I’m Not There, Ruby Dee in American
Gangster, Saoirse Ronan in Atonement, Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone and Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton.

For achievement in directing, The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly’s Julian Schnabel is up against Juno’s Jason Reitman, Michael Clayton’s Tony Gilroy, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen for No
Country for Old Men and Paul Thomas
Anderson for There Will Be Blood.

—By Mansha Daswani