Psychoanalysing Oscar

If you’re a Hollywood celebrity, there are only 23 clothes-shopping days until the Oscars. And if you’re one of the nominees, then, well, you don’t have long to polish your acceptance speech or to practise your I’m-totally-happy-that-my-damn-nemesis-beat-me face. Those nominations were revealed earlier this week, on Monday, one of the biggest days in the film calendar or one of the most detestable, depending on your point of view. Yet, however you feel about the whole affair, there’s no doubting that it reveals something about where the American film industry – one of the biggest purveyors of mass culture in history – is at. Which is why we’ve sifted through the nominations and annotated them, below.