The Oscars make mistakes.  A lot.  Granted, they are subjective awards, but Stanley Kubrick never won an Oscar, and nothing changes that.

This year, the biggest snub is generally considered to be The Dark Knight receiving neither a Best Picture nor Best Director nomination.  While I agree with the masses that it’s deserving of both nominations (Slumdog Millionaire should win both in my opinion), it still received eight well-deserved nominations, and will more than likely win (and deservedly so) Best Supporting Actor for the late Heath Ledger.

The other big snub was Wall-E for Best Picture.  Again, I agree, especially since the Best Animated Feature has devolved into a Pixar Appreciation award.  But it will win, and it stands a pretty good chance of winning Best Original Screenplay and Best Song.

My biggest beefs with the academy are found within those two categories though.

First and foremost: Best Song.  I’m not convinced there are any rules for this category anymore. Any film with more than one song generally has all of them nominated, and it leaves a number of songs in the dust.  This year, though not agregious as Enchanted or Dreamgirls dominating the nominations, two from Slumdog Millionaire were nominated, while Bruce Springsteen’s song of the same name from The Wrestler was ignored entirely.  Likewise with Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino.  Only three songs were nominated from two movies this year, and those two songs wound up ignored.  Madness.

My second beef is that In Bruges only recieved a single nomination.  Yes, it absolutely deserves at least a Best Original Screenplay nomination, but it’s a challenging and satisfying movie that ranked on a lot of critical top-ten lists and earned Colin Farrell a Golden Globe.  It’s not a movie that’s easily categorized (it ranges from laugh-out-loud funny to bittersweet to downright tragic), but it’s an incredible movie.  Perhaps it proves that there’s a real need for a Best New Filmmaker award, as it was Martin McDonogh’s first theatrical effort, and proof that there’s still a lot of great stories left to be told.

Beyond that, I don’t have any major issues.  It’d be nice if the nominations for blatant Oscar-bait (I’m looking at you, The Reader and Milk) would once and for all give way to validation of more original and creative works like In Bruges, but the movies I’ve enjoyed most this year have, by and large, been nominated.