American Hustle has ten Oscar nominations for 2014; so does Gravity. Following behind is 12 Years a Slave, with nine nominations, Nebraska and Captain Phillips with six, and The Wolf of Wall Street, Her and Dallas Buyers Club each with five nominations. These are the facts, but it's what we can glean from such data that proves most intriguing. The Academy, for example, proved once again on Thursday morning that it favours physical transformation in the acting categories (see 2014 nominees Matthew McConaughey, Christian Bale and Jared Leto), that Best Original Song is of concern to next-to no one (you'd be asking what Alone Yet Not Alone is if you actually cared) and that recognition is almost exclusively reserved for US flicks, bar a token British movie or two (this year, quadruple nominee Philomena gets the honour of being the film the UK media can pin all their misguided hopes on). But these things we already knew to be true from years of Academy Award predictability. Here, rather, is a list of lessons learnt from the Oscar nominations in 2014.
Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the dashing young princes. Follow Brogan on twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion: @BroganMorris1
