If you’re online much, you’re already aware this year’s Academy Awards nominations were announced today. If you follow either The Hollywood Reporter or The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences on Twitter, you had the opportunity to see the categories live-tweeted one at a time early this morning. If you shared my mistake of following both entities, you were treated to a double-barrel Oscar-nom redundancy blast that turned Twitter to sludge for fifteen minutes. Homework question: how many live-tweeters does any given event really need?

I’ll not waste your bandwidth copying-‘n’-pasting the full list of nominees that’s readily available on a million other news sites. Several thoughts popped into my head throughout the day while mulling over the results:

* As discussed in the past, since 1997 I’ve made a point every year of seeing every Best Picture nominee as soon as possible. This year I’m facing quite the obstacle course, as I’ve only seen one of the nine nominees so far (hint: the one with the spaceship). In my defense, six of the nine only opened here in Indianapolis within the last month, a few of which were packed exclusively into the single art-house theater on the other side of the city. Late December and early January are never the best time of year for leisure travel. Unless they’re each gifted with a wider re-release in the nearer gen-pop theaters, I’m seeing a lot of mileage in my immediate future.

Beyond the curtain for more…