The 81st Oscar nominations came with some surprises up its sleeve this morning, snubbing the year’s biggest film and finding room for smaller performances.

The Dark Knight, the second-largest-grossing movie of all-time, was left off the Best Picture list in favour of a list of critical favourites that include Slumdog Millionaire, the little movie that could. Slumdog, which won the Golden Globe earlier this month, also garnered nominations for adapted screenplay and for director Danny Boyle. In all, it got nine nominations.

The other nominated pictures are The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which led the pack with 13 nominations, along with Frost/Nixon, Milk — which had eight nominations — and The Reader. All the Best Picture directors were also nominated.

The Reader, a post-Holocaust drama about the love affair between an older woman and a young man, was a surprise inclusion because of its controversial subject matter. It also won a Best Actress nomination for Kate Winslet, who had earlier won the Supporting Actress award at the Golden Globes. Winslet had been touted as a possible Best Actress nominee for the acidic 1950s drama Revolutionary Road, but she and co-star Leonardo DiCaprio were snubbed, as was the movie itself.

Joining Winslet in the Actress category was Melissa Leo, star of the well-received but decidedly small drama Frozen River. She’s going up against Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married, Angelina Jolie in Changeling, and Meryl Streep in Doubt.

It was a good day overall in the Jolie household: husband Brad Pitt, who ages backwards as Benjamin Button, was also nominated, along with Mickey Rourke, the comeback kid, who won the Golden Globe for his portrayal of an over-the-hill wrestler in The Wrestler. Frank Langella, who played Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, and Sean Penn, as the gay politician Harvey Milk in Milk, are joined by longtime character actor Richard Jenkins, the star of another small but much-loved movie The Visitor.

The supporting categories also were filled with unexpected names. The Supporting Actress nominees included favourites Marisa Tomei as a stripper in The Wrestler and Penelope Cruz as an angry wife in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but also Amy Adams as the innocent nun and Viola Davis as the mother of a boy who may have been abused, both in Doubt, along with Taraji P. Henson, another surprise for her turn as the adoptive mother of Pitt’s character in Benjamin Button.

The supporting actor nominations were headed by the favourites, the late Heath Ledger, as the evil Joker in The Dark Knight and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a priest who may or may not be a child abuser, in Doubt. But the rest of the list showed a tendency for the Academy to take chances: Josh Brolin as the conflicted politician in Milk, Robert Downey Jr., performing in blackface as a method actor in Tropic Thunder, and Michael Shannon as the mentally ill intruder in Revolutionary Road, the only major award for that movie.

The Quebec movie The Necessities of Life, which was on the short list for Best Foreign Film, did not make the cut.

The nominations for the 81st Annual Academy Awards:

BEST PICTURE

BEST ACTOR

BEST ACTRESS

BEST ACTOR – SUPPORTING

BEST ACTRESS – SUPPORTING

BEST DIRECTOR

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

Canwest News Service

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The cast of The Dark Knight are lobbying on behalf of the late actor for the gold statue.

Heath Ledger’s costars from The Dark Knight, including two-time Batman Christian Bale, took turns at a press event this weekend praising and remembering the late actor’s intense style. A few of them are even lobbying for a gold statue on his behalf.

“Definitely,” said Aaron Eckhart, who plays doomed district attorney Harvey Dent to Ledger’s droll and very creepy Joker. “Why not?”

Fellow castmember Gary Oldman was more pointed about it.

“Heath had this frequency none of us could hear,” said Oldman. “The Academy tends to overlook movies like this, but this acting is so good it’s going to be very hard for them to avoid it.”

His other Gotham cohorts marveled at Ledger’s obsession with detail:

He patched together influences ranging from A Clockwork Orange to ventriloquist dummies to Charlie Chaplin. The result: a Joker so demented and creepy he makes Nicholson’s 1989 version look like Elton John in a bad mood.

“He called me during preproduction from time to time to tell me what he was working on,” director Christopher Nolan recalled. “He told me he was researching the way ventriloquist dummies talk. It was a bit peculiar.” “He’s raised the bar,” said Bale.

If the Academy does honor Ledger for his Joker character, it would be only the second posthumous acting win ever. The first went to Peter Finch for the 1976 movie Network.

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Helen Mirren (as Queen Elizabeth II) in The Queen

Christie Lemire and David Germain, film writers for the Associated Press predict the Oscar winners. See if you agree. Read on:

With the Academy Awards best-picture category a wide-open affair, Associated Press film writers Christy Lemire and David Germain at least have one thing to disagree about.

For best director and the four acting categories, Lemire and Germain are in complete agreement on who’ll win. Here are their picks (Lemire writes their joint opinion for director and actor, Germain for actress and the supporting categories, while they duke it out over best picture):

BEST PICTURE

Nominees: Babel, The Departed, Letters From Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen.

GERMAIN: I would make a lousy academy member, not only because I lack all applicable talents to become an academy member, but also because I would perpetually vote for losers in the best-picture category.

My favourite films among the five nominees almost never win, and this year, my top three – The Queen, Little Miss Sunshine and Letters From Iwo Jima – are the ones I think are least likely to come away with the prize.

The Queen deserves to win because it’s a masterpiece of economical filmmaking. It packs a lifetime of high drama for Elizabeth II into the single toughest week of her 50-year-plus reign, the span when public opinion turned sharply against her over the royal family’s aloofness after Princess Diana’s death.

Little Miss Sunshine merits second place because it’s an extreme version of all our messed-up kin, presenting an endearing portrait of blood ties strained and regained that, like many stories of family bonds, would be tragic if it wasn’t so funny.

Letters From Iwo Jima should come in third because it’s a grand, gut-wrenching examination of fatal devotion to a lost cause, a compassionate rendering of an enemy Hollywood historically has reviled as Japanese troops fight and die defending the Pacific island.

I would rank the mob tale The Departed next and the ensemble drama Babel last, yet I suspect the best-picture winner will be one of the two.

The Departed is hardly Martin Scorsese’s best work, though the first two-thirds come close before the film concludes with a repetitive bloodbath. Still, it’s enormously entertaining, a breathlessly paced crime epic that’s a reminder of Scorsese’s finer films – making it also a reminder that the academy never has honoured him with the best-picture prize.

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