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Daron Aldridge: First, I have to vent that this is the third year now that I have been cheated out of my personal game of guessing what Best Picture nominee’s director would fail to get nominated. The Academy’s change to ten Best Picture nominees for the 2010 and 2011 awards (and now the "minimum of five but maximum of ten" rule) has kept me from sarcastically asking “Oh, I guess that nominated movie must’ve directed itself, like The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile did.” Wow, those examples just point out how much the Academy does not like Frank Darabont.

My immediate reaction to the Best Picture nominees was the dearth of recognizable mainstream films, especially with nine films in the field. Really, the only ones might fit that label would be The Help and Moneyball. It brought to mind the 1997 awards with The English Patient, Shine, Secrets & Lies, Fargo and Jerry Maguire. The Tom Cruise/Cameron Crowe project had earned $143 million by the time of the Oscars ceremony and the other four combined had earned $128 million. Incidentally, Jerry Maguire apparently directed itself that year as Crowe’s directing was passed over for Milos Forman’s directing of The People vs. Larry Flynt.

So looking at the actual grosses, this year’s Best Picture nominees are modest to middling earners, aside from The Help’s $169 million haul. The rest fall somewhere between Moneyball’s $75 million and The Artist’s $12 million. Look at the two previous years with ten nominations. In 2010, we had six of the ten that earned between $80 million and $700+ million with Up in the Air on the low end and Avatar, obviously, on the high end and District 9, Inglorious Basterds, The Blind Side and Up in the middle. Last year, seven of the ten earned between $90 million and $414 million, with The Fighter on the low end and Toy Story 3 on the high end and The Social Network, Black Swan, The King’s Speech, True Grit and Inception in between.

As David explained earlier this week, with the new convoluted Best Picture nomination formula, a tenth nominee is omitted this year. If that spot had gone to the final Harry Potter film, then my anticipation would rise exponentially. I wasn’t surprised it was snubbed but still just disappointed.

What all this says to me is that ABC will be sorely disappointed when the Oscar broadcast’s ratings come in Monday, February 27th.

For me the biggest shock came in the Animated Feature category. I fully expected The Adventures of Tintin to not only get a nomination but to take home the award in February. If a Steven Spielberg-directed and Peter Jackson-produced motion capture animated feature can’t get an Oscar nomination in this category, then that method is as dead as silent films…oh wait, silent films are apparently back en vogue with the Weinstein-financed and Oscar frontrunner The Artist.

I love that now thanks to Jim Rash’s screenplay nomination for The Descendants, we can now refer to him as Greendale Community College's Academy Award nominee Dean Pelton. Non-"Community" fans will just have to trust that this is truly great.

Finally, let's congratulate BOP's self-proclaimed poor nomination prognosticator Tom Houseman on doing a bang-up job this year. In the eight main categories, he got 33 of the 44 nominations correct or 75% correct. This is same percentage that Entertainment Weekly's Dave Krager achieved. So, strong work, Tom.

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