Other Immediate Reactions

Biggest Surprises:

• Brokeback Mountain shut out of Best Editing.
• Only three nominees for Best Song? Is this a reaction to last year's truly awful collection of songs (quite possibly the worst in Academy history)? It's unfortunate timing, because I actually had trouble narrowing my selections down to five this year.
• The Academy actually went for a song called "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp!"
  
• Memoirs of a Geisha? Best Sound Editing?
• Revenge of the Sith shut out of Sound and Visual Effects categories. The first Star Wars film to go unrecognized for its visual effects.

And that's about it for the shockers. I wasn't betting on William Hurt to pull through, but enough people had talked about him for it to be less-than-shocking. I also thought the classification screw-up would keep Syriana from picking up a screenplay nomination, but nope.

At first glance, this seems like a rehash of 1999 when American Beauty also led with a relatively paltry 8 nominations.

This is the first time since 1981 (and only the fourth time in history) that all five Best Picture nominees were nominated for Best Director.

First time since the Best Animated Feature category was introduced that not a single CGI movie was nominated. Corpse Bride and Wallace & Gromit are the first two stop-motion features nominated.

Munich still has an uphill battle ahead if it hopes to win the big one. Only ten films in history have won Best Picture without a single acting nomination.