KEY POINTS:
Borat wuz robbed. Give Marty an Oscar, just not this year. Does anyone here speak Esperanto? Oh and while you're at it can someone look up the pronunciation of Babel*?
Such are the shape of this years Academy Award nominations announced today.
The list was short on surprises and long on air miles.
Oscar has gone very serious this year - even if stageshow-to-screen musical Dreamgirls managed eight nominations, having missed out on best director and best picture, it's not going to do a Chicago.
As predicted Brits dominated the best actress categories and three out of five of the best director nods went to non-Americans.
While even the two American nominees weren't particulary American, Clint Eastwood was included for Letters to Iwo Jima, his all-in-Japanese companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers. While Martin Scorsese's The Departed, also up for best picture, was a remake of Hong Kong hit Infernal Affairs.
While we're on the subject of Scorsese, yes the master director deserves an Oscar and the campaign drums are already beating after his Golden Globe win. But just as he didn't for the bloated Gangs of New York and the leaden The Aviator, he doesn't for the actors gang-bang of The Departed. It's just not that good.
When Peter O'Toole - nominated for this eighth time this year for Venus was given a Lifetime Achievement Oscar a few years ago he quipped he'd still love to win the little bugger outright. So it should be with the man who the Academy snubbed for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and the rest.
O'Toole might just take the best actor award, if only because he's playing an actor who's seen better days in Venus and there are plenty of those who can sympathise with that feeling among the voters in the Screen Actors Guild.
But then again, this is the global-consciousness Oscars and not just because Democrat vice president turned unlikely movie star Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is surely a shoo-in for best documentary.
Africa looms large whether its Golden Globe winner Forest Whitaker's portrayal of Ugandan despot Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou's respective best actor and best supporting actor nominations for Blood Diamond, or Babel which starts its border-hopping in Morocco, or the Algerian Days of Glory figuring in the foreign language category.
Mexican film makers figure heavily in the nominations with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu up for best director and best picture for Babel, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth receiving two nominations and director Alfonso Cuaron nominated for adapted screenplay among the writers of his Children of Men.
Alas, the glorious nation of Kazakhstan only figures briefly despite its profile boost by its unfavourite son Borat.
Sacha Baron Cohen and his co-writers are nominated for best adapted screenplay for Borat (adapted because the character appeared earlier in a television incarnation).
Strange he's up for script for a film that seemed so, well, unscripted. And it's a pity Cohen wasn't recognised for best actor and not just for the potential entertainment value of the acceptance speech.
If an Italian clown can get best actor for playing a Jew in a feelgood picture about the Holocaust, as Roberto Benigni did for Life Is Beautiful, surely a Jewish Brit can at least get a nomination for playing a well-meaning misogynist anti-Semite on a personal odyssey across USA.
But the Academy hasn't forgotten comedy.
Little Miss Sunshine - which, for what it's worth, Herald reviewers voted the best film of 2006 - is up for best picture. That's despite being a) a small indie movie mostly set in a van, albeit starring some recognisable names b) a comedy albeit one where "Proust" is a punchline.
It's got supporting performance Oscar nominations for veteran Alan Arkin and for 10 year-old Abigail Breslin. If she wins, it's going to be a Very Oscar Moment. Just hope the orchestra can get its bows around Rick James' Superfreak on her way to the stage.
*Babble, apparently
