Blockbusters, ‘Dreamgirls’ off Oscar’s list

John Hartl Film critic

Late last year, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” became the third film in history to top $1 billion at the worldwide box office. But it won’t be following the first one (“Titanic”) or the second (“Lord of the Rings: Return of the King”) to Oscar glory Feb. 25.

Each of its predecessors won 11 Academy Awards, including best picture, but “Dead Man’s Chest” isn’t in the running at all for that award. It’s most likely to score only in the special-effects department.

Instead, the Academy is bestowing its most important nominations on a multi-lingual box-office disappointment (“Babel”), a road comedy that became 2006’s biggest Sundance Film Festival success (“Little Miss Sunshine”), a crime drama that has turned out to be Martin Scorsese’s top-grossing film (“The Departed”), a Clint Eastwood-directed war movie that is only now going into general release (“Letters From Iwo Jima”), and a slow-building British-monarchy drama that has yet to break through to a large American audience (“The Queen”).

The most nominations (eight) went to “Dreamgirls,” but three of those are for best song — and it was shut out of the best-picture race. This happens rarely enough that you’d have to go back several decades for a comparable situation, when “Hud” (1963) and “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) each earned several key nominations but failed to land in the best-picture contest.

While there were few surprises in the acting categories, which are almost identical to the Screen Actors Guild nominations, Ben Affleck did fail to earn a nomination for his work as the 1950s Superman, George Reeves, in “Hollywoodland,” and Michael Sheen was passed over for his impersonation of Tony Blair in “The Queen.” Affleck won a Venice Film Festival prize for his work, and Sheen was named best supporting actor by the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association.

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Also among the missing are such notable performers as Annette Bening (“Running With Scissors”), Brad Pitt (“Babel”), Sacha Baron Cohen (“Borat”), Naomi Watts (“The Painted Veil”), Steve Carell (“Little Miss Sunshine”), Charlotte Rampling (“Heading South”) and Laura Dern (“Inland Empire”). Several actors were expected to score for “The Departed,” including DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson, but only Mark Wahlberg made the cut.

In the crowded field for best director, the missing include Bill Condon (“Dreamgirls”), Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (“Little Miss Sunshine”), Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth”), David Lynch (“Inland Empire”) and Alfonso Cuaron (“Children of Men”).

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