Academy Award nominations were announced this morning, and best-picture nominees are The Departed, Babel, Little Miss Sunshine, Letters From Iwo Jima, and The Queen. Dreamgirls, though not nominated for best picture, leads with eight nominations. The acting categories reach beyond such expected front-runners: Best-actress nominees include Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada and Penelope Cruz for Volver; Blood Diamond earns a best-actor nod for Leonardo DiCaprio and a supporting-actor for Djimon Hounsou; and, for lovers of super-badass cops everywhere, Mark Wahlberg scores a supporting-actor nod for The Departed. The best-director category mostly echoes best picture, except for Paul Greengrass's nomination for United 93. It seems odd that the Borat movie gets a best-adapted-screenplay nod, with its mix of documentary, improvisation, and sort-of plot. Three of Dreamgirls' nominations are in the best-song category, which it shares with Melissa Etheridge's "I Need To Wake Up" (An Inconvenient Truth) and Randy Newman's "Our Town" (Cars), so in any case, there'll be no Three 6 Mafia-type surprises this year.
Best-foreign-film nominees are: Pan's Labrynth, After The Wedding, Days Of Glory, The Lives Of Others, and Water.