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I'm sure I sound like a broken record saying this (actually, is that metaphor even relevant in 2014? Should it be "sound like a corrupted mp3"?) but 2013 was a very, very good year for cinema. Probably one of the best in my lifetime, and certainly the best since I started writing about film in a serious way. While it might be a bit too much to expect the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to comprehensively reflect the sheer volume of quality released last year - a token nomination for Upstream Color, even in Sound Design or something, would have been nice - by and large the nominations this year get a lot of things right, representing some of the better films that exist within the Academy's seemingly very narrow and conservative taste palette.

However, for fear of sounding like Frank Costanza, I've got a lot of problems with the nominations this year, largely because I write about films on the Internet. If I didn't have considerable grievances to air against The Academy, then either we've had a perfect year for cinema and everyone should just stop trying, or I've given up being all that interested in film. Fortunately, neither of those things is true; it was a very good year, but far from free of stinkers, and I'm as in love with film as I've ever been. And while I could rail about how it's ridiculous that American Hustle, a perfectly fine film that isn't anything special, should be nominated for Picture and Director (though it fully deserves its nominations in the acting categories, since everyone in it does great work, even if it's to no real end), or how it's even crazier that American Hustle didn't get nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling (it fucking opens with five minutes of a man doing his hair, and appearance is central to the story, how much more deserving could it be?) I feel it's better to focus on what the Oscars got right.

As is traditional, I've combed through the nominees in the hope of highlighting the interesting, funny or just plain odd results that AMPAS have thrown our way this year.

Delight No. 1: All Three Creators of I'm Alan Partridge Are Now Oscar Nominees

When I'm Alan Partridge debuted in 1997, becoming the perfect vehicle for Steve Coogan's iconic, pathetically egomaniacal DJ, few could have expected that the men who gave us immortal phrases like "You're a mentalist!", "Jurassic Park!" and "Stop getting Bond wrong!" would one day all have the distinction of being nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars. But here we are; after Peter Baynham received a nomination in 2007 for co-writing Borat (and consider this a reminder that the Oscars once nominated Borat. For Writing.) and Armando Iannucci did the same in 2010 with In The Loop, Alan himself has managed to make it a hat-trick by co-writing Philomena (as well as getting a nomination for Best Picture, which is only fitting for North Norfolk's premier purveyor of mid-morning natter). This surely means that a nomination for the screenplay of Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, which all three collaborated on, at the 2015 Oscars is now a fait accompli.

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