2012 Oscar nominations announced, major director snubs

So here's the thing. We all have our own opinions, but once a year, the film industry choose to voice their opinions about themselves in the form of The Academy Awards. This determines the best film has to offer. Because we can all totally agree that self-rewarding is the most honest rewarding that there is, and the Academy always chooses the best film based on merit and no one ever argues about it.

With that out of the way, here's the deal. Traditionally a film nominated for Best Picture has its director nominated for Best Director. Make sense -- if the film merits an award for being awesome all-around -- it should also mean that the directing was pretty spectacular too, right? Apparently, wrong. The most outrage over the Oscar nominations surrounds Kathryn Bigelow and Zero Dark Thirty. ZDT was nominated for Best Picture, but Bigelow was not for Best Director. As the only female to ever win Best Director, in 2009 for The Hurt Locker, and one of only two women to even be nominated for the award (the other was Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation), most people are crying sexism on this snub. For the record, Ben Affleck and Quentin Tarantino were also missing from the Best Director list, while their films are both up for Best Picture.

Other surprises, slightly more pleasant ones, included multiple nominations for Beasts of the Southern Wild (including Best Picture, Director, Actress, and Adapted Screenplay) and Amour. The trend, shown by earlier awards, to give credence to indie films seems to have leaked into the Academy, for the better. On the less pleasant side, Looper, The Dark Knight Rises, Marion Cotillard, and Leonardo DiCaprio, all at least expected to garner noms from their history alone, not even counting good performances, were snubbed. Cotillard and DiCaprio both have solid bodies of work and continue to be left out. Looper and The Dark Knight Rises were huge blockbusters, with relatively few vocal critics -- unlike other films that were nominated like Silver Linings Playbook or Les Mis, which had divided reviews. The Master and Moonrise Kingdom also crop up in interesting categories: Best Actor, Supporting Actor, and Actress for The Master, but no love for the cinematography or Paul Thomas Anderson. Moonrise Kingdom earned no acting awards, only Best Original Screenplay.

The winners of the 85th Academy Awards will be announced February 24.