Here's the second part of my post-nominations article, in which you get to read my long-winded ruminations on what this year's set of nominations Mean. Sound like fun? Excellent! And away we go...

Top Snubs:

1. Dreamgirls misses out on Best Picture and Director. This is the biggie this year. Best Director wouldn't have raised too many eyebrows because of the category's competition and the Academy's penchant to award unobvious choices in that category. So United 93's Paul Greengrass taking Bill Condon's spot? Fine. But Dreamgirls losing out on Best Picture, too? What we're looking at here is a case of too much hype, too early -- dating back to the Cannes Film Festival, where an exclusive fifteen or so minutes of the film was shown. Sometimes hype just can't last that long. Another theory? It was a musical and an all African-American cast, and the Academy is largely a body of white males. But while those no doubt were factors, the New York Times has a more specific, plausible explanation:

The decision to send out screeners of the movie late was built on hubris — the same reason that Parmount/DreamWorks chose to charge $25 for early peeks at the movie — which suggested that it was an Important Film that must be seen on a big screen. But the death of President Gerald Ford, combined with a national holiday, meant that most academy members did not get the film until Jan. 3, 10 days after they had received “Letters From Iwo Jima,” a movie that wasn’t even supposed to come out in 2006. That means that academy members saw the hype long before they saw “Dreamgirls” and had just 10 days to see it before they voted.

2. Volver misses out on Best Foreign Language Film. This one is much less interesting than the Dreamgirls snub. It just seems like an oversight -- the Academy loves Pedro Almodovar, as can be witnessed by the Oscar successes of Talk to Her and All About My Mother (although last year's Bad Education got nada), so the possible excuse that these are female-driven films doesn't work. And Penelope Cruz was nominated for Best Actress. So why was it left off this in favor of much more obscure foreign titles like After the Wedding? Your guess is as good as mine.

3. The Adapted Screenplay category is giving me a headache. The snub here in question is Jason Reitman's satire of spin and the tobacco industry, Thank You For Smoking, which many thought would get a nomination. It was left off in favor of, yes, my worst fear, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. (See the bad grammar in the title? Ho, ho, chuckle. That Borat sure is a character). Now that movies which are at least 50% unscripted can get nominated for script awards, how can I trust the Academy anymore whatsoever?

But then...oh, look at that, they did nominate Children of Men, which I was rooting for all the way and totally deserves it. So the voters for this category were both monumentally stupid...and really smart. In other words, total jerks.

Top Surprises:

1. Everything about The Departed's cast. First, Leonardo DiCaprio is nominated for Best Actor not for The Departed, but for Blood Diamond. Despite the similar SAG nomination, how does that make sense? The Departed has grossed 120+ million and also boasts nominations for most other major awards; Blood Diamond has grossed about 30 million, got worse reviews, and has only Supporting Actor backing it up in major awards. Don't ask me.

Then there's the Supporting Actor switcheroo: Mark Wahlberg got in instead of perennial favorite Jack Nicholson. This one was still a surprise but slightly easier to understand retrospectively. Many critics called out Nicholson's performance as being too over-the-top, while Wahlberg provided, to many, both the humor and moral center of the film. They were both nominated for a Golden Globe and both snubbed for a SAG nomination; between the two of them, I'm happy that first-timer Wahlberg got in, even though I didn't predict him.

2. Pan's Labyrinth walks away with six nominations. Yup, six nominations for a Spanish-language fantasy fairy tale with no Oscar pedigree from the director of Hellboy. It did, however, boast some rave reviews and strong box office within the limited release it's had so far. A Foreign-Language Film nomination was expected, but it officially crossed over into mainstream with nominations for Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction, Makeup, and Original Score.

3. Film Editing is a bit livelier than usual. So I know nobody really cares about this category, but you should for two reasons: (1) I do, and (2) oddly enough, the Editing category has long had a direct correlation to the Best Picture category...I don't have the stats in front of me, but the winner of Editing is usually the winner of Picture. This year only two of the nominations matched up (Babel and The Departed), while it was rounded out by Blood Diamond, United 93, and Children of Men.

As far as my predictions go...

-Everything is 20/20 in hindsight, but I shouldn't have stayed quite as "safe" with my director predictions. Condon always seemed the weak point, so why didn't I follow my own advice that Director is an offbeat category and throw somebody like Paul Greengrass in there? It was lazy of me.

-I similarly screwed up Supporting Actor. While my personal bias led me to leave off Alan Arkin (he was good, but I assumed his part was too small), where my bias could've helped was with Mark Wahlberg, whom I was rooting for. Instead I threw Michael Sheen on there from The Queen, which I'm disappointed didn't pan out, especially after seeing the film. He was excellent.

-So who will the winners be? This race is strange in that for the first time in recent memory, there's no clear frontrunner for Best Picture. Leading the five by a smidge is probably Babel, simply because it has the most nominations of the Picture nominees. The box office needs a significant boost within the next few weeks, though. The Departed was damaged slightly by DiCaprio's Blood Diamond switch, but since Scorsese is still the frontrunner for Director, I wouldn't be surprised (although I would be thrilled) if it pulled through for Picture as well. The dark horse is definitely Letters from Iwo Jima, but the subtitles might cancel out the God-like pull of Clint Eastwood. And wouldn't it be interesting if all these choices were split and The Queen came out as the winner?

-Aside from Best Picture, the major categories seem like remarkably easy calls: Forest Whitaker, Helen Mirren, Jennifer Hudson, Eddie Murphy, and Martin Scorsese. The screenplays are slightly tougher: The Departed is the frontrunner for Adapted Screenplay, while Original Screenplay is a surprising conundrum. If Babel wins Best Picture, it could be supprted by this category, Little Miss Sunshine seems the most screenplay-y, and The Queen was the surprise winner at the Globes. Right now, in my mind, the scales are tipping toward The Queen. But I'm sure I'll overthink all of it in the coming weeks.