Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

Thelma Adams' Oscar Snubs!

Are the Oscars over yet? I know that this year the Oscar season is shorter, but it already seems like a one-horse race: Brokeback Mountain. Here are some contenders that were seriously snubbed when the final nominations came down yesterday:

BEST PICTURE: Walk the Line was this year's Ray, only sharper -- great performances, great music, and an irresistible romantic heartbeat. And I resent the fact that it got pushed out of the top five by the self-important, intellectually-muddled Spielberg movie, Munich.

BEST ACTRESS: Q'oriana Kilcher may be impossible to spell, but the unknown teen's break-through role in the New World was spell-binding, an exhilarating portrait of a free-spirit making her way in a white-man's world.

BEST ACTOR: Viggo Mortenson powered through the under-recognized A History of Violence: cunning, sexy, sober -- a patriarch with a past who bets everything on preserving his hard-won domestic peace.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Robin Wright Penn delivered the year's ten tautest dramatic minutes in the underseen Nine Lives, as a pregnant wife whose chance encounter with a former lover in the aisles of an L.A. grocery store shatters her serene existence -- and his.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Jeffrey Wright is the finest actor of his generation, whether he's playing a buttoned-down white-shoe lawyer in Syriana, or Bill Murray's funky meddling neighbor in Broken Flowers. Give the man his props!

BEST DIRECTOR: Tommy Lee Jones made a bold, assured, wily feature directorial debut with a contemporary western, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. But, hey, it hasn't even played in most markets yet!

- Thelma Adams
January 31, 2006