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So when looking at the films in the running for Best Film Editing in 2010, the potential nominees were the five Eddie Drama nominees, as well as a couple of dramatic Best Picture nominees. Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The King's Speech, The Social Network, plus 127 Hours, True Grit, and Winter's Bone. The King's Speech and The Social Network, as Best Picture frontrunners, were both guaranteed spots, which meant there were six films fighting for three spots.

The Coens do not have a good track record in this category. The only times they have been nominated for Best Film Editing (using their nom de edit Roderick Jayne) were for their biggest hits, Fargo and No Country for Old Men. True Grit had not achieved that level of popularity, which meant it was at a disadvantage. If you're going to get a Film Editing nomination without an Eddie nom in your pocket, you need a strong argument, and neither True Grit or Winter's Bone had that.

On the other hand, 127 Hours did. Its editing is very memorable, mostly because Danny Boyle's films are very stylized. The film jumped through time and combined a variety of different kinds of shots (dream sequences, shots taken from a video camera) to tell the story. Editor Jon Harris had never been nominated for an Oscar before, and 127 Hours was his first collaboration with Boyle, but he had worked with Mathew Vaughan multiple times before (including on Kick-Ass, which was also released that year).

So if you're asking me why voters didn't put Inception on their ballots, I don't have an answer for you. It's baffling. In my mind Inception had the second best editing of any film from 2010, with only Black Swan beating it out. Why the editors decided that that was the film to leave out, instead of The Fighter, I can't explain. But clearly several voters made a conscious decision to vote for 127 Hours instead of Inception, and I can certainly understand why 127 Hours got votes. Danny Boyle's directorial style is somewhat polarizing, but people who love it will fall for the cinematography and the editing every time.

Sometimes these snubs happen and they don't make sense. Voters love what they love. Sometimes the choices are representative of the Academy as a whole, such as when their snub of Up in the Air was a harbinger of Precious beating it for Best Adapted Screenplay. Sometimes it's not, though, as Inception still did pretty well for itself at the Oscars. I only expected it to win Best Sound Editing and Best Visual Effects, but it also took Cinematography and Sound Mixing. It is unlikely that it would have also taken Best Film Editing had it been nominated, as that award was reserved for The Social Network. I guess all we can do in the case of such a snub is to look back, shake our heads in confusion, and hope that The Dark Knight Rises fares better.

Do you have a question about the Oscars? Want to know why your favorite film got snubbed (it's probably because your favorite film is Operation Dumbo Drop) or what the difference is between Sound Mixing and Sound Editing (the second one involves less mixing)? Submit your question via BOP Feedback and I will try to get to them.

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