I just watched the live announcement of the Academy Award Nominations. This involved being awake at 5:00 AM, which is not my normal behavior. I didn’t even set my alarm for it; i just couldn’t sleep and realized I could probably get something out of it. So here we are. I know things about the Oscars that most of America doesn’t. On the other hand, most of America is getting some warm, cozy sleeping done. And a lot of people don’t care at all. So there’s that. At any rate, it’s time for some instant reactions.

Best Picture

Nine nominees, including pretty much all the ones everybody expected, plus Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I don’t object all that much to the varying number of nominees, because it let them sneak the surprise movie in at the end. It only worked for people actually watching the announcement, I guess, but I can view it as a little reward for being awake.

Acting Awards

I’m surprised to see no Ryan Gosling in there, since Ides of March got lots of talk back when it came out. And Drive was really good! The latter did get nominated for Best Sound Editing, which is absolutely deserved. There are some gunshots in that movie that are amazing. That campaign to get a nomination for Andy Serkis didn’t pan out, but I think that’s more because of the movie he was in. I liked Rise of the Planet of the Apes a lot, but it’s not the sort of thing the Academy Awards tends to dwell on. They gave Melissa McCarthy a nomination for Bridesmaids, which the unwashed masses are going to have to be happy with.

Animated Feature Film

I imagine the big surprise is no nomination for The Adventures of Tintin. Personally, I’m more interested in A Cat in Paris and Chico & Rita, neither of which I’ve heard of. Kung Fu Panda 2 was really good, so I’m glad to see it get nominated. It feels weird to think of Dreamworks as plucky underdogs, but they’ve definitely been behind Pixar for awhile. Not this year, though, because Cars 2 was awful. It deserved its non-nomination.

Original Song

There were only two nominees. Two! Not a good year for songs in film, I guess? I can’t remember any other songs, but I’m still pretty sleepy. The two songs were from The Muppets (“Man or Muppet”) and Rio (“Real in Rio”). That means the ceremony will probably have Muppets in it, although the one that sings that song is Walter, who I find boring. On the other hand, Bret McKenzie might win an Oscar and make a funny acceptance speech.

Last year, I did the Oscars Death Race, which is a desperate attempt to watch every single movie that’s nominated for any sort of Academy Award before the ceremony happens. Last year, 56 movies got nominations, and I saw 46 of them. Seven of the ones I missed were Documentary Shorts and Foreign Film , which are awfully hard to see if you’re not in New York or Los Angeles. But a couple of the moviesI wasn’t able to see were perfectly normal movies that it seems like I should have been able to get. One of them was Hereafter, in which Matt Damon can reluctantly talk to ghosts. I bet you already forgot that existed!

The other one was Julie Taymor’s The Tempest. It had a limited release on December 10, 2010, and then…nothing. It didn’t come out on DVD until December 20, 2011. Frankly, I can’t imagine how enough people saw it for it to get nominated for Costume Design. My guess is that the Academy just has an open slot for Sandy Powell’s latest project.

Anyway, my point is that I’ve had a “Watch The Tempest“-sized hole in my to-do list for almost a year. And now I finally saw it!

And…it’s not great. We had to turn on the DVD subtitles almost immediately, because people shouting during a shipwreck is hard enough to understand at the best of times, and this movie uses mostly accurate Shakespeare. I say “mostly” because some of the dialogue had to be jiggered around to make Prospero into Prospera and let Helen Mirren play a traditionally male role. That part mostly works, except they never really explain how she was Duke of Milan.

There are a few scenes of dazzling visual inventiveness. That seems par for the course with Taymor. Even Across the Universe, which I hated, knocked my eyes out three or four times. But it’s not always worth it to wait for the good stuff. And when things don’t look amazing, it’s kind of a slog.

Caliban is played by Djimon Hounsou, and I think it’s a weird choice. Caliban is constantly being described as a deformed monster, but Hounsou is one of those Charles Atlas-style perfect physical specimens. And his Oscar-nominated costume consists of what’s basically a diaper, so his physique is on display a lot. The only things the characters can be talking about when they mock his looks are the mud he’s got smeared all over him and the fact that he’s black. So the scenes where he’s delighted to have a new master whose feet he can kiss are uncomfortable. And also, I don’t know why the mariners are so baffled by his looks since they’ve just come from Africa. Tunis, sure, but still. You’d think they’d have seen a black man before.

Russell Brand is also in this. He plays the wacky comic relief drunkard Trinculo. And he’s actually quite good! He’s the only one who does his Shakespearean dialogue as though he’s actually speaking what he’s thinking, rather than trying to get through 500-year-old iambic pentameter. He also sounds and acts exactly like Russell Brand the whole time, but it works for the character. Someone’s got to do the fart jokes, and it helps to have someone around who’s good at them. I do think his costume was just stuff he brought from home, though.

Okay. Yes, there are a lot of movies coming out in 3D, and it’s pointless a lot of the time. But not all of the time. I’m going to take as my example the surprisingly good Kung Fu Panda 2.

There are some great action scenes in this movie. Which is as it should be, since any movie with the phrase “Kung Fu” in the title is making certain promises. But the thing that makes them especially great is that even if you’re watching the regular 2D version, they were conceived with 3D in mind.

Here’s the thing. Most movies take place on a one-dimensional scale for the most part. Things move left and right. Sometimes something will move behind another, but that’s just a momentary overlap. It’s because movies are basically descended from theater, where there’s only so much you can do. You enter stage left, and you exit stage right. Even when people determine to use the whole screen, the additional movements are largely up and down.

But when you’ve got an action movie where the director has “3D” in mind, that frees them up to imagine a whole new range of action. The fights in Kung Fu Panda 2 move left and right, up and down, and in and out. It’s not a bunch of random things flying at the audience’s face (although there’s some of that, too, since that’s always fun); it’s what you get when the traditional restrictions on visual storytelling are recognized as being more traditional than actual. Taking advantage of the third dimension in storytelling is more than just the occasional over-the-shoulder shot. And the fight scenes in Kung Fu Panda 2, which is a brilliantly visually inventive movie in a lot of ways, would not have happened if the filmmakers hadn’t been consciously pushing for a three-dimensional film.

Look, 3D filmmaking is still new. There are going to be movies that use it badly. There are going to be movies that use it as a gimmick. I’ve seen a lot of movies from the dawn of sound, and I know what I’m talking about here. To see some of these movies, when they were still working out what they should be like, you’d never think sound in a movie made sense. But there were movies that made sound make sense. And eventually there were movies that used sound brilliantly. I think that’s going to happen here.

We’re not going to get to a point where all movies are 3D, but I think it’s having a positive effect on the way things move around inside movies. It’s good to shake up the way things have always been done.