I would be so so, happy if Tom Hanks was banned from the Oscar stage until the end of time. However, since I have no power whatsoever, he's up there again, this time to hand out the Best Director Oscar. The nominees are:

Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain
Paul Haggis, Crash
George Clooney, Good Night, and Good Luck
Bennett Miller, Capote
Steven Spielberg, Munich

Ang Lee?! No freaking way! This is, like, as huge as the Three 6 Mafia win! Sigh. Yes, he won. We all knew he would win. It's a pretty movie, and socially conscious, and he seems like a very nice man who really loves his work. It's just so damn boring that he wins all the time! That said, however, at least Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity will have a whole lot to talk about tomorrow. All those damn liberals, trying to make our kids gay and whatnot.

Last week, Newsweek guessed at who the Oscar nominees for Best Director would be, gathered the five men they chose together, and let them loose. The resulting two hour conversation touched on topics from politics to the cost of making movies; from Oscar ad campaigns to The Facts of Life* and is worth a read, if only because it's rare to get so many talented, prominent people in a room together. Oh, the five directors? George Clooney, Ang Lee, Paul Haggis, Steven Spielberg, and Bennett Miller. So yeah, it was a pretty good guess.

*A bit of utterly bizarre Oscar trivia: Paul Haggis was a writer for The Facts of Life when George Clooney was on the show. I wonder how much money you could have won from of the pair of them by betting that two decades later, they'd be nominated for the best director Oscar - in the SAME FREAKING YEAR.

Along with Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, King Vidor, and Clarence Brown, Robert Altman holds the dubious record for most best director Oscar nominations without a win: all five men have been "just happy to be here" five times. Now, though, Altman, whose nominations have been for MASH, The Player, Nashville, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park, is going to get his well-deserved statuette, even if it is just honorary.

It's hard to overstate what Altman has meant to American movies. Always unconventional, his improvisational techniques, innovative use of sound, long takes, and broad, rambling stories have, over the years, given Hollywood entirely new ways too look at filmmaking. Though they can never like the man enough to just vote for him already, Academy members decided Altman deserves a lifetime award because of his "innovation, his redefinition of genres, his invention of new ways of using the film medium and his reinvigoration of old ones." Amen.

I think it's safe to assume that Altman will not be spending the next two months carefully revising his acceptance speech. Whatever he says, we'll get to hear it on March 5, during the thirteen hour Oscar ceremony.