THE DAY OF THE NOMINATIONS!

I woke up without my alarm this morning at the precise moment that the nominations were set to be announced! THAT'S how in tune I have become with all that is Oscar. So I jumped out of bed and ran to my TV...

Just kidding. I went back to sleep. You can check the list whenever you wake up, after all, and it was still dark out for Oscar's sake! (The complete list is here.)

If anybody is new here, this is the time of year when I challenge myself to see every nominee in every category before the Awards air on February 9th. I do this, not because the Academy is always right and they will correctly define what is the best, but because I love films, I love a challenge and this gives me a place to start so I can catch the films each year that get people talking, thinking or feeling.

My plan for Oscar-nominated-movie-viewing domination is well under way. I have used my pre-nomination time wisely and guessed well. I have already seen all of the nominees in the following categories:

Best Picture
Directing
Actor in a Leading Role
Adapted Screenplay
Original Screenplay 
Costume Design
Film Editing 
Original Score 
Production Design
Sound Editing
Sound Mixing

I think there's some things to celebrate, apart from my viewing list being so manageable. Parasite is being celebrated with six nominations, including a Directing nod for the South Korean film maker, Bong Joon Ho. That's impressive, and it's so great to see a very different type of film in the mix this year.

Many are claiming that women got snubbed this year, with Greta Gerwig (Little Women), Kasi Lemmons (Harriet), Lulu Wang (The Farewell), Melina Matsoukas (Queen & Slim), Marielle Heller (Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood) and Lorene Scafaria (Hustlers), to name a few, not acknowledged for their directorial work. But I look at this as a positive! When has Oscar ever had so many amazing women to snub all at once? That's real progress!

I do feel sad for the poor Mexican director triumverate. Cuaron, Innaritu and Del Toro have won five of the last six Directing Awards. And not even one nomination for them this year. I'd like to think it's because they have been vacationing together someplace really interesting, like Muncie, or Nova Scotia.

The real mess that I'd like the Academy to clean up is the "International Film Award", formerly called the Foreign Language Film category. A couple of films from Nigeria and Austria were notably disqualified this year because of the rule stating that a Foreign Language film must be at least 50% in a language other than English. The problem with that is that the official language of Nigeria is English. So is the Academy really willing to disqualify that country from ever competing (along with many others)? Perhaps in response to this problem, perhaps not, this year the award name was changed to the International Film Award. The rules, however, were not changed a bit. That makes complete sense, Academy! This is so dumb to me. Fix the language rules so that any country can submit their films for consideration. The more, the better.

So we are off to the races! It's time to overindulge on movies! It's time for me to review so many movies that I start to get really weird about it. It's time to inundate your FB feed with Oscar posts until you want to unfollow me. It's Oscar Glutton time!!!!!!