After director Joe Wright failed to nab an Academy Award nomination for his helming of Atonement a couple months ago, the reaction of most Oscar experts was one of surprise. After all, the film was the only one of the five Best Picture nominees not to cinch a Best Director nomination, and it's exactly the type of middlebrow period piece - an epic wartime romance brought to life with painstaking attention to details of costuming and production design - that almost never fails to land its director in the nominees' circle.
But the reason for Wright's snub may very well be the most absurdly simple one imaginable: he didn't deserve the nomination. It's entirely possible that Academy members, like myself, find Wright to be an obviously talented craftsman who hasn't yet made a film that amounts to more than the sum of its admittedly impressive parts. Atonement, like Wright's Pride & Prejudice adaptation before it, is easy to admire for its intelligence, handsome period decor and acrobatic camerawork, but impossible to love because its dramatic inertia fails to do justice to the source material it's based on - in this case, Ian McEwan's psychologically dense novel.
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