Biggest losers on Oscar night

HOLLYWOOD — Never mind its handicapping by many gurus of gold as an odds-on Oscar front-runner heading into Sunday evening. The downsizing drama “Up in the Air” was completely excluded in all six categories for which it was nominated, including nods for George Clooney (best actor) and director Jason Reitman.

And “Up in the Air” was hardly the only multiple nominee to fall into a veritable hurt locker of Oscar indifference.

In director James Cameron’s trailblazing sci-fi epic “Avatar,” its 10-foot-tall alien characters utter the phrase “I see you” to one another as a kind of outer space affirmation, signifying: I understand and accept you. I validate your existence.

But on Sunday, Academy voters apparently looked in another direction, handing the $310 million 3-D thriller only three of the nine Oscars for which the film had been nominated — for visual effects, cinematography and art direction — in an unexpected snub.

As far back as December, writer-director Quentin Tarantino began laying bare his naked pursuit of Oscar gold by publicly musing how “awesome” it would be to claim an Academy Award “for every decade I’ve been in the business” referencing his best screenplay win in 1995 for “Pulp Fiction.” Tarantino’s Spaghetti Western cum World War II thriller “Inglourious Basterds” arrived as one of the films to beat this year with eight nominations in such marquee categories as best picture, best director and best original screenplay.

But “Basterds” went home without much to show for Tarantino’s awards season efforts, losing out in all but one category — Christph Waltz’s all-but-preordained best supporting actor award.

There were other surprises as well. In the best animated short category, the French-produced anti-consumerist cartoon send-up “Logorama” scored a surprise upset over the heavy favorite, four-time Oscar winner/Wallace &Grommit creator Nick Park’s “A Matter of Loaf and Death,” which took 2009’s Annie Award for best animated short subject.

And in the “notable omission” category, Farrah Fawcett — the star of TV’s “Charlie’s Angels” and such films as “The Apostle” and “Dr. T and the Women” — was somehow omitted from the broadcast’s montage of actors and filmmakers who died.

“No Farrah Fawcett in the memorial tribute?” tweeted Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, moments after the segment ended. “Major fail.”

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