HOLLYWOOD — After a lot of hype, positioning, and debate, the short-list nominees for the 84th annual Academy Awards were revealed, with director Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” garnering the most nods at 11 nominations, including that for Best Picture and for Best Visual Effects.
Other films now vying for the gold in the Visual Effects category alongside “Hugo” are: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2,” “Real Steel,” “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” and “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.” No longer in the hunt are “Captain America,” "Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” “The Tree of Life,” and “X-Men,” which made the top 10 but failed to get on the short list.
For Animated Feature Film, two foreign features with an atypical style for 2011 made the list—"A Cat in Paris," a hand-drawn movie from France, and "Chico & Rita," a cartoony ink-and-paint style film from Spain. These join three CGI features from the US: "Kung Fu Panda 2," "Puss in Boots," and "Rango." Perhaps surprising is the fact that “Tintin,” which bested “Rango” and “Puss in Boots,” as well as “Cars 2” and “Arthur Christmas,” recently for a Golden Globe, was left out off the list. Notable, too, is that “Cars 2,” a Disney-Pixar film, did not make it, either.
The nominations in 10 of the 24 Award categories were announced live by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Tom Sherak and 2010 Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence. Lists of nominations in all the categories were then released.
Academy members from each of the branches vote to determine the nominees in their respective categories – actors nominate actors, film editors nominate film editors, and so forth. In the Animated Feature Film and Foreign Language Film categories, nominations are selected by vote of multi-branch screening committees. All voting members are eligible to select the Best Picture nominees.
Nominations ballots were mailed to the 5,783 voting members in late December and were returned directly to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the international accounting firm, for tabulation.
Official screenings of all motion pictures with one or more nominations will begin for members the weekend of January 28 at the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater. Screenings also will be held at the Academy's Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood and in London, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
All active and life members of the Academy are eligible to select the winners in all categories, although in five of them – Animated Short Film, Live Action Short Film, Documentary Feature, Documentary Short Subject, and Foreign Language Film – members can vote only if they have seen all of the nominated films in those categories.
Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2011 will be presented on Sunday, February 26, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center, and televised live by the ABC Television Network. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 225 countries worldwide.