The "biggest mystery of this year's Academy Awards" is how director Christopher Nolan, 40, garnered Best Picture and Best Original Screeplay nominations for his dreamy sci-fi hit, Inception, but failed to get a Best Director nod, says Chris Lee at The Daily Beast. The puzzling omission is a "slap in the face for a film-making wunderkind whose meteoric rise from art house auteur to Intelligent Action Ace has made him, arguably, the hottest director in town." One theory: Perhaps Nolan's peers failed to nominate him because they're jealous that he "enjoyed too much success too soon." But it's a bit more complicated, says Lee. Here, an excerpt from the Daily Beast:
"The directors have always been a persnickety branch, often going for a foreign language director over a mainstream filmmaker," the source said. "They don't seem to like to reward blockbuster directors. And they rarely award sci-fi or heavy special-effects films."
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