2011年奥斯卡小金人究竟花落谁家?

MELISSA BLOCK, host: So those movies at Sundance（圣丹斯电影节）, some of them will be next year's Oscar hopefuls. But now to this year's. The Academy Award nominations were announced this morning.

And our movie critic Bob Mondello is here to talk us through them. Hey, Bob.

BOB MONDELLO: Hey.

BLOCK: And all these 10 Best Picture nominees, Bob, gave us an inspiration to come up with an idea for a great new movie. We're imagining this pitch（广告宣传片） from an eager Hollywood screenwriter. Are you ready? Here goes.

A Pixar（皮克斯动画工作室） animated film, it's about a one-eyed, gun-toting（持枪的） ballet-dancer with a stutter who flees her lesbian parents and gets trapped in a deep chasm in the Ozarks（欧扎克）. Now she's one-armed and one-eyed, and she dreams within a dream that she's created a new social networking site for washed-up boxers. What do you think?

MONDELLO: The public will eat it up. That's all 10 of the pictures of Best Picture this year.

BLOCK: There you go.

MONDELLO: Let me see if I can do them in the pitch's order. That would be "Toy Story 3,"（玩具总动员3） "True Grit,"（大地惊雷） "Black Swan,"（黑天鹅） "The King's Speech,"（国王的演讲） "The Kids Are All Right,"（子嗣无忧） "127 Hours," "Winter's Bone,"（寒冷刺骨） "Inception,"（盗梦空间） "Social Network"（社交网络） and "The Fighter."

BLOCK: And, Bob, what do you make of that list?

MONDELLO: Well, it's a pretty predictable bunch of nominations. There aren't any real surprises. My 10 Best list had nine of the 10, although I cheat a little bit because I have, like, 22 picture.

BLOCK: Yes, you do. You have a very long list. But we always love surprises or controversies in Oscar nominations. None this year?

MONDELLO: Well, the one that I'm always used to complaining about is when a director gets nominated for Best Director, and his picture doesn't get nominated as a Best Picture, which makes no sense to me at all.

With the new system of 10 Best Picture nominees, that will never happen again. This time, the directors' nominees were for "Black Swan," "True Grit," "Social Network," "The King's Speech" and "The Fighter," perfectly legitimate pictures that would have been nominated in any year.

There is some fuss going the other way, that "Inception's" director, Chris Nolan, was not nominated. That'll probably get him a consolation prize for original screenplay.

BLOCK: What about in the acting categories, Bob? Any surprises there?

MONDELLO: Again, I think it was pretty straightforward. I think everybody thinks that the Best Actor race comes down to Jesse Eisenberg as a guy who talks fast and invents Facebook, and Colin Firth's king who can't talk very well. I think those two are the big ones.

If I were guessing, I'd say Natalie Portman's ballet dancer will end up winning Best Actress. Christian Bale has a lock on Best Supporting Actor for his drug-addicted brother in "The Fighter," and the one category that's harder to predict because the people in it are not very famous is Best Supporting Actress.

BLOCK: And Bob, we don't have time to talk through every category, even though we might like to. But final thoughts on this year's nominees?

MONDELLO: Well, I have one thought about process. This is what makes the Oscars more authoritative than other awards. A film doesn't get to 10 or 12 Oscar nominations without getting cited for things like Costume Design. And only costume designers, people who actually do that work, vote on the nominations for that.

There are only a few costume designers out there. So you can get nominated with as few as 20 votes, but those votes really mean something, as opposed to when I vote for Best Costume in a critic's group that I'm in, and I'm thinking, really, well, that's pretty dress

It's why the Academy likes the Oscars to come last, after all the critics have given their awards, after the Golden Globes, after all that. It's as if they're saying, well, okay, the kids get to play, and now the grownups are going to come in, and we're going to tell you what's actually what.

BLOCK: Okay, our movie critic Bob Mondello. Thanks so much.

MONDELLO: It's always a pleasure.