ARRIVAL received 8 Oscar nominations yesterday including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and Special Effects. It was a slight surprise that Amy Adams was not nominated.

In other genre nods, PASSENGERS got two (music and production design). Anybody seen PASSENGERS? The reviews have been bad. ROGUE ONE also got two (music & sfx). STAR TREK BEYOND got one for Makeup. And, THE LOBSTER got one for its bizarro script.

PASSENGERS is a great-looking movie with a couple of cripplingly bad decisions in the script.  That production design nomination is well-deserved, the cast is perfect, and when it does sci-fi adventure stuff, it can almost make you forget just how horrifically misguided the romance angle is.

Dennis Villenueve's immersive sci-fi tale may very well be the most intimate 'alien invasion' movie yet made. Told almost totally through the eyes and, most importantly, THROUGH her perspective of protagonist Louise (Amy Adams), ARRIVAL becomes an intense experience if one gets on its wavelength. Many have faulted its deliberate pace and some of the plot machinations (the military subplot is the weakest part of the movie), but the ending comes together so beautifully and impactfully that those are minor critiques. Rarely, has a sci-fi movie (or, just about any other) so thoroughly asked us to question of very way of thinking and 'verbal' expression

Plus, how many mainstream commercial movies would touch on such theoretical concepts like Fermat's Theory of Least Time and and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? The viewer is asked to look at the universe through the eyes (and mind) of an alien culture, and how it can alter not only how one communicates, but, how it effects one's POV of time itself. It's slow burner, but, it comes together so beautifully, that the journey is worth the deliberately paced passages. It's all of a piece, that is to be experienced as much as it is to be analyzed.