Remember all that talk about how The Dark Knight should be given an Oscar nomination for Best Picture?

Yeah, it didn’t happen. The Oscar nominations have just been announced and, while The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button has managed to rack up 13 nominations, The Dark Knight has been comprehensively snubbed.

Shut out of the Best Picture and Best Director categories, the only real hope that The Dark Knight has of winning an Oscar in a big category now is with Heath Ledger‘s Best Supporting Actor nomination. And even if he does win, his acceptance speech is bound to be crap.

Yesterday there was all kinds of speculation that The Dark Knight would be nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars. A nomination, it was claimed, would be a shot in the arm for the ceremony itself – by our calculations it’s been about a decade since anyone won an Oscar for a film that a member of the public even knew existed, and so giving a Best Picture nomination to The Dark Knight would motivate the potential Oscars audience much more than, say, Hugh Jackman flapping around the stage in a flowery blouse ever would.

But that hasn’t happened. The Oscar nominations have been announced and it looks as though The Dark Knight will have to make do with all its People’s Choice awards, even though that’s basically the awards season equivalent of the Waggiest Tail rosette at a dog show for animals with dangerously concussed owners.

And The Dark Knight hasn’t just been ignored in the Best Picture category – Christopher Nolan didn’t get a Best Director nod despite his groundbreaking work with the Imax equipment. Hans Zimmer didn’t get a Best Soundtrack nod even after all the kerfuffle over whether it was eligible or not. And Christian Bale was locked out of both the Silliest Voice By A Main Actor and the Most Hilarious Arrest Over An Alleged Assault Of An Actor’s Clown Mother categories.

It’s disappointing, but we’ll still be rooting for Heath Ledger in the Best Supporting Actor category and whoever it is who did the sound mixing for The Dark Knight. We might even make a banner for the last one.

But if The Dark Knight isn’t going to win all the Oscars now, what is? Well, if the Oscar nominations are any indication The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button might do quite well. It’s picked up 13 nominations, for everything from Best Actor for Brad Pitt to Best Picture to Best Director for David Fincher to Best Adapted Screenplay to Best Supporting Actress for Taraji P. Henson.

And The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button would have probably got even more Oscar nominations, too, if only the academy had listened to our requests to introduce categories for Best Forrest Gump Rip-Off, Best Lead Character Who’s Infuriatingly Unable To Complete Entire Sentences and Picture Most Likely To Give You Full-Blown Deep-Vein Thrombosis.

Which other movies got Oscar nominations this year? We’re not exaggerating when we say all the movies you expected to. But if you really must know, Fox has got a complete list for you.

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This week is just too exciting for our liking – first Barack Obama gets inaugurated and now the Oscar nominations?

We literally can’t control our bowels. Literally. And, if anything, the Oscar nominations are even more exciting than the new president. Because, when they happen tomorrow, we’ll find out if The Dark Knight will get a Best Picture nod or not. Oscar hype over The Dark Knight has been steadily building for months now, and the repercussions of a nomination would be huge.

But we’ll have to explain them in a minute, after we’ve changed our pants. We really did mean literally.

For years now, Oscar audiences have been dwindling. And the Oscar board totally knows why. Is it that watching seven hours of preening millionaires trot up and down a carpet talking to Ryan Seacrest with their cheeks sucked in actually makes people so furious that they end up wanting to shit blood? Well, to be fair, yes it is. But that’s not the Oscar board’s opinion.

They’ve given the matter some thought, and have come up with two completely obvious ideas:

1) People don’t like watching clever people be funny, and

2) People don’t like it when boring films about sad people doing depressing things win awards.

And, to give them credit, the Oscar board have done something about it. First, they’ve decided to switch hosts, with Jon Stewart‘s intelligent barbs being replaced by Hugh Jackman wanking around in a pair of shiny spandex trousers. And secondly, there’s a very good chance that The Dark Knight will be given a Best Picture nomination tomorrow.

We all know how well-loved The Dark Knight is. The second-highest grossing movie of all time, The Dark Knight made a posthumous megastar out of Heath Ledger, incorporated groundbreaking cinematic and musical techniques into a complex story that refused to underestimate its audience and is probably the best film ever to have a lead character with a ridiculous growly voice that made him sound like a poorly Ray Winstone straining for a poo while having an asthma attack.

But if The Dark Knight did get an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, it’d change everything. The other movies likely to get a nod tomorrow are all barely-watched movies about either real-life politicians or sort of weird Billy Elliott rip-offs, but a nomination for The Dark Knight might even do the impossible and make people want to watch the Oscars. As the USA Today reports, Steven Spielberg seems like he’s up for it:

“I am really happy to see that The Dark Knight is making a last-minute run at recognition,” he said after the Golden Globes. “I was very happy with the Heath (Golden Globe) win and am looking forward to some more Dark Knight momentum. … That balances things out.”

Personally we’re with Steven Spielberg here. For too long The Oscars have been out of touch with popular tastes, and a nomination for The Dark Knight would give the ceremony a real shot in the arm. And we’re not just saying that because we’re bitter about everyone hating Indiana Jones 4 like Spielberg is, either.

No, we’re saying that because we want to see a world where commercial success and critical acclaim are not mutually exclusive. We want, in short, to see Hotel For Dogs win Best Picture at the Oscars. Oh, what a world that would be.

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