Oscars 2012: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close gets an unlikely Oscar nomination Timed for impact like a smart-bomb, it was the shock the Academy left to the very end of yesterday's broadcast. From the layout of the Best Picture slots on screen, anyone watching could have sworn there were going to be eight nominees. Scorsese's Hugo, bringing up the rear, made two neat columns of four. Then the fateful words slipped out, drawing gasps, some slightly psychotic-sounding cheers, and an even louder volley of vituperative tweets. And... Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close!. That exclamation mark isn't part of the title, but it was fully audible in the tone of the announcement. Stephen Daldry's 9/11 drama, based on the already-divisive Jonathan Safran Foer novel, had been declared dead in the conversation when barely any other awards groups gave it the time of day. Critics, too, have been notably unkind: it's an already-tiresome game to replace the two adjectives in its title with a variety of uncomplimentary alternatives. Crass. Tedious. Mawkish. You get the drift. There's even some speculation that it might be the worst-reviewed film ever to get a Best Picture nomination. I wouldn't normally use the review-aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes as proof of anything much, but the film's dismal score of 48% has got to be considered ominous, from the perspective of someone who hasn't seen it yet, and whose job it is to remain as open-minded as possible. Even The Blind Side, which we previously might have picked for this dubious accolade, stands at 66%. With this nomination, Extremely Loud went from being this year's The Lovely Bones - the juggernaut on paper whose critical mauling ruled it out of the running - to this year's The Reader, which sprang back from widespread antagonism to become a potential (if not very likely) spoiler in the main race. It may not escape your notice that The Reader was also directed by Stephen Daldry, whose Oscar record is so uniquely charmed by this point as to seem almost sinister. He's only made four films to date, and has Best Director nominations for the first three, and Best Picture nods for all but the first. Every one of his films does look, in fairness, like the kind of thing designed to attract awards, but it's amazing how well this keeps paying off, far more consistently than it does for his fellow British theatre stalwart Sam Mendes. The fact that Extremely Loud has just one other nomination (for Max von Sydow as Best Supporting Actor) makes it more of a novelty outlier than a serious threat, but even getting these nominations is a feat just about no one was predicting. Like I say, I haven't seen the film yet, and wouldn't want to agree, sight unseen, with the mud most of America's key critics are flinging at it. Still, if you could bottle that Stephen Daldry magic - unless it's just some really juicy dirt on half the Academy's voting body - you could make a fortune hawking it up and down Sunset Boulevard.