The 2011 Oscar Nominations Are In

From a stuttering king to animated toys, the 2011 Oscar Nominations span quite a number of genres and it’s not too late to catch all of them, either on the silver screen or on DVD.

Leading the pack is ‘The King’s Speech’ – a movie directed by Tom Hooper that picked up 12 nominations. Included among those are Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor and Actress.

With 10 nominations, ‘True Grit’ comes up second. The Coen brothers get a nod as Best Directors, and Jeff Bridges gets the nod for Best Actor. His female lead, Hailee Steinfeld was only tapped for Best Supporting Actress due to her age; some reviewers feel she was robbed.

‘Inception’ and ‘The Social Network’ each snagged eight nominations.

Many Left Out on Scores

There was a great deal of debate over the way nominations were assigned for Best Original Score. The current Academy standards require that the majority of the score be original, written for the movie itself. Four films were rejected because they relied too heavily upon pre-existing music to shape their musical score.

It has been suggested that the Academy actually needs two musical categories; one that judges original music and another that judges how well a score incorporates existing music in to an overall performance.

Animated Appeal

It is rare for an animated film to be honored in the lofty ranks of Best Picture, but ‘Toy Story 3’ is listed among the contenders. ‘Toy Story 3 ‘is also among the 3 films nominated for Best Animated Feature Film along with ‘How to Train your Dragon’ and ‘The Illusionist’. In what could only be considered a serious snub, ‘Despicable Me’ was completely passed over, as was Disney’s ‘Tangled’.

Of course, since only 3 films get nominated in the Animated Feature Film category, the competition can be fierce. Perhaps this is another area where the Academy should rethink the system.

And the Winner is…

The Oscar’s ceremony will be held on Sunday, February 27, 2011 in the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood and Highland Center. With an estimated audience of several hundred million viewers, the show on the red carpet is sure to be exciting.

Michael Rupkalvis works with the LedBulbsandLights website. The site features a variety of different types of environmentally-friendly LED products, including the PAR16 LED spot light and other LED lights .