at least it's an ethos: Oscar Nominations!

Raise your hand if you were up at 5:30 this morning to see the live announcement of the Oscar nominations! (why am I always the only one with my hand raised?)

The field is now set for our favorite holiday of the year. The official countdown can now begin! Just a little over a month until Oscar Day. So what happened this morning? Let's get into it...

How about we start with the awesome: Melissa McCarthy got nominated for Bridesmaids! That seemed like a surefire Golden Globe nomination, and then she was snubbed so I was a little worried. While Oscar almost always goes serious in the lead actor categories, it does have a bit of a soft spot for comedic performances in the supporting categories (see Marisa Tomei for My Cousin Vinny). If nothing else, it's just nice to see her actually get the attention of a nomination. Let's go ahead and pull out that picture again, shall we?

In other awesome news, one of my favorite movies of the year (and thus far pretty overlooked in awards season) got some love in the form of a Supporting Actor nod for Nick Nolte for Warrior. Seriously, if you haven't seen that movie yet, take the time to do so. It's not just for inspirational sports movie lovers, I promise. Of course, it doesn't really matter, because Christopher Plummer is as close to a sure thing as you can get (and rightfully so), but I'm glad that movie got some appreciation.

Now, of course, there were some terrible things too, most notably the snubbing of Michael Fassbender. The man turned in 4 strong performances (in 3 of my favorite movies of the year), and is just stupid good in Shame. There's no other way to describe it. Leaving him off is just wrong. I love Gary Oldman about 10x more than the next girl, and I hate that he's never been nominated for an Oscar, but Fassbender deserves it way more. I can't speak to the other surprise nominee, Demian Bichir, having not yet seen his movie, but I would also throw out Pitt in a second for Fassbender to be nominated. One thing's for sure, this category will not approach the heretofore unseen levels of hotness of its corresponding Golden Globes category (Clooney, Pitt, DiCaprio, Fassbender, and Gosling. just wow.)

I did not create this assortment, that picture of Pitt would definitely be the last one I would choose to enlarge, but oh well.

In smaller disappointments, Melancholia continued to be completely snubbed, Drive was absolutely ignored (most notably Albert Brooks), Jessica Chastain got a nod for her least interesting performance of the year (and there were a lot to choose from), and we probably don't get to see what Tilda Swinton would wear to the Oscars. Sigh.

One of the biggest surprises of the day was all the love for a movie currently sitting with 48% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. We here at 3pies4rolls haven't seen it yet, but it seems like a bit of an "F you" from Oscar to critics. We'll let you know what we think once we've seen it, it's hard to get up in arms about an unknown (unless its name is War Horse). With the new nominating rules, most people were expecting 7 nominees (there are now between 5 and 10 best picture nominees and a movie has to pass a certain threshold of number one votes in order to get nominated), so having 9 make it in was a surprise. And while I kind of want to give Tree of Life the middle finger, I know there were enough people who loved it that its inclusion doesn't really surprise me.

Now just keep your fingers crossed in the hopes that with only two nominees for Best Song, we'll get a chance to see Jason Segel perform "Man or Muppet" live, and that The Artist continues its quest to charm the socks off every single person in the world. And if you're still bummed about the Michael Fassbender snub (as I am) I find it really helps to just look at pictures of Michael Fassbender: