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I also watched Away from Her last night and it is indeed a rough movie. Not because I have any personal experience but really because it is my worst nightmare about growing old. It is pretty important to my life plan that either I die first or we die quickly at the same time.
Julie Christie was great but I must admit to a psychological block because of internally shouting "how can she get rewarded when Gordon Pinset gets nothing, he did all the really heavy lifting." I know the nominations from a movie aren't fair but still, he could easily replace Johnny Depp in the best actor list.
So that's probably the last Oscar nom I'm going to see before the awards.
I've seen all the nominees in the following categories (my pick in parentheses):
Best Picture (No Country for Old Men)
Best Actress (Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose)
Best Supporting Actress (Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton)
Best Original Screenplay (Brad Bird, Ratatouille)
Best Art Direction (American Gangster)
Best Costume Design (Across the Universe)
Best Sound (3:10 to Yuma, mostly because I want that to get an award of some sort)
Best Sound Editing (no opinion other than that no one should ever be able to say this sentence fragment: "Academy Award winning Transformers...")
Best Visual Effects (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, mostly by default)
Best Animated Short Film (none but if tortured into it "Peter and the Wolf")
Best Live Action Short Film ("Tanghi argentini")
My worst non trivial category is Best Supoprting Actor where I've only seen two of the performances (missed Assassination of Jesse James, Charlie Wilson's War, and Into the Wild) but I still feel pretty confident in my pick of Javier Bardem and Anton Cigurh in No Country for Old Men.
In the leading actor category I also missed Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah. Interestingly, for three of the four performances I've mentioned missing I have alternative performances by that actor in 2007 that I unconsciously use in my decision making. Casey Affleck was very good in Gone Baby Gone. Philip Seymour Hoffman was better than Laura Linney in The Savages. Tommy Lee Jones was great in No Country for Old Men. But I'll still pick Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood even if I wasn't blown away by the movie itself.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the big impediment to making informed decisions since it it the sole missed nomination in Best Director (the Coens), and Best Adapted Screenplay (the Coens).
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