theOneliner.com Academy Award Nominations 2003: It's little gold figurine time again...

It's now almost an entire year since Peter Jackson and The Fellowship of the Ring were robbed at last year's Oscar's ceremony, with Best Picture and Best Director awards both, bafflingly, going to A Beautiful Mind. Alongside this were undeserved statuettes for Halle Berry and Denzel Washington - Washington in particular is a very fine actor, but Training Day is far from his best work. As for Berry, cynics claim that her award was due to a race card being played. We can but hope that this is not the case, that our society is beyond needing to do this, and that the Academy in fact reward talent and nothing else. Unfortunately, this seems unlikely, given that she had very little to do in Monster's Ball, and that if anyone deserved an acknowledgement from the Academy for that film it was the excellent Billy Bob Thornton, who also missed out with another potential Oscar-winning turn in the Coens' The Man Who Wasn't There.

Anyway, the nominations were announced this morning, and here they are for your perusal. Everyone wondered if (and hoped that) The Two Towers would fare better than Fellowship. Alas, it has received even fewer nominations, despite being regarded by many critics as superior to the first film. The Academy's notorious antipathy towards sequels may have something to do with it, but perhaps they are, as the current rumour buzz suggests, just waiting for Return of the King and are going to bestow every award going on it. Surprisingly, though, there's no directing nod for Jackson, making The Two Towers the only one of the nominees for Best Picture not also represented in the Best Director category. Also controversial (though, perversely, its inclusion would have been equally so) is the absence in the Best Supporting Actor category of Andy Serkis, for his incredible performance as Gollum, though, given it was such a wonderful collaboration between Serkis and the CGI maestros at WETA, some kind of new, combined-work Oscar may have had to be invented.

One of the most open fields in years, predicting the winners will be hard, but given its recent strong performance at the BAFTAs, Roman Polanski's The Pianist is now a front-runner, though don't be surprised to see Oscar finally give the scandalously-overlooked Martin Scorsese his first directing award for Gangs of New York.

All will be revealed on March 23rd. (Oh, and by the way, you can all breathe easy - Julia Roberts isn't up for ANYTHING this year. Woohoo!)