Just a month to go until the 81st Academy Awards, and the nominations were announced this morning.
What will shock no-one: Heath Ledger is nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
However, The Dark Knight didn’t get a Best Picture or a Best Director nomination, as many had speculated it would. Instead, The Reader became the dark-horse fifth nominee, joining Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, and Milk. I was also surprised that The Dark Knight didn’t get a Best Original Score nomination.
In overall tallies, Benjamin Button leads, with 13 nominations. Slumdog Millionaire follows behind with 10, though two of those are in the Best Original Song category, meaning it can only win a total of 9. (Note: if the split vote causes the song from WALL-E to win, I will eat my hat. And be very unhappy.) Hey, at least we’re guaranteed a Bollywood number during the ceremony!
Carissa Turner Smith is a compulsive reader, writer, and Irish dancer. She earned her Ph.D. in English at Penn State and currently teaches writing and American literature at Charleston Southern University. At age three, she announced that all she wanted to do was “sit at a desk and read and write,” and she has been trying to make good on that promise ever since. Fortunately, she is occasionally distracted from this mission by her husband Stephen and their cheese-obsessed cat. A loyal native of Arkansas, she has always loved the fact that Jesus dwelt in an underappreciated corner of Galilee (see John 1:46). 
I only remember one song from Slumdog. I don’t remember the tune or the words or anything much except its exuberance. So I guess whatever that song is, it should win—since none of the other songs in any movie I’ve seen last year are remotely in the realm of anything I can remember.
(I didn’t even remember that WALL-E featured an original song.)