What a difference a few weeks makes. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced last summer that it would move this year’s Oscars ceremony from the doldrums of March to the high-profile TV sweeps month of February, few could have predicted the staggering impact that the move would have on this year’s slate of Oscar nominees. In the days before this year’s nominations, network pundits were predicting big things for high-profile December openers like Cold Mountain and The Last Samurai.  But when the nominees were revealed on January 27, both movies fared poorly, leaving the likes of Pat O’Brien sputtering over the snubs of Samurai’s Tom Cruise and Cold Mountain’s Nicole Kidman.

Over at Miramax, which touted Cold Mountain as its main Oscar contender this year, company co-chairman Harvey Weinstein told several news outlets that his movie’s late release date was the reason for its being passed over in the Picture, Director, Actress, and Screenplay categories.  Weinstein told the New York Observer that “the biggest reason I think Cold Mountain had problems this year was the fact that we released at Christmas . . . We were the last to send out cassettes. It was an early schedule this year. I don’t think people knew exactly when to get their ballots in.”

It hasn’t always been this way. In the past two years, nine of the ten Best Picture nominees weren’t released until the second half of December (the exception was summer sleeper Moulin Rouge).  With a few extra weeks of campaigning time between the end of the year and the Oscar nominations, studios could afford to hold their best films until the holidays and then deluge Variety and The Hollywood Reporter with flashy “For Your Consideration” ads throughout the first month of the year. As awards season battles between the studios intensified in recent years, Miramax became known as one of the fiercest Oscar campaigners, successfully driving dubious fare like Gangs of New York, Chocolat, and The Cider House Rules to Best Picture nominations.

But this year, Miramax only had about three weeks between Cold Mountain’s December 25 release and the January 17 deadline for Oscar nomination ballots—not enough of a window for the studio’s post-holiday campaigning to make the needed impact on the psyches of Oscar voters.

Other December releases fared just as poorly: besides The Last Samurai, holiday big shots like Big Fish, Something’s Gotta Give, and Girl with a Pearl Earring were largely ignored when the Oscar nominations were released.  And this year’s Best Picture category is a reverse image of its recent self, with four out of this year’s five nominees in theaters by November. Only the endlessly hyped The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, whose Best Picture nomination had been a given for months, premiered during the holidays.

In retrospect, it seems predictable that Academy voters would largely ignore the year’s holiday releases.  At the same time, the nominees that the voters selected to replace these spurned December brides were utterly unpredictable. In a normal year, there are only one or two major surprises in a slate of Oscar nominees—think Robert Forster for Jackie Brown, Pedro Almodovar for Talk to Her, or Ethan Hawke for Training Day. 

But this year, I counted no less than seven certified jaw-droppers in the big categories: Director and Screenplay nominations for City of God, an obscure Brazilian film released back in January 2003; a Screenplay nom for The Barbarian Invasions, a French-language movie from Canada; two Acting nominationss and a Screenplay nod for In America, a small film with no star wattage; and a freak Best Actress nomination for 13-year-old Whale Rider star Keisha Castle-Hughes, who became the youngest nominee in the category’s history.

What can we make of this startling list of nominations?  Will the Oscars become fertile ground for small, word-of-mouth films like these?

Not likely; if you look at this year’s Best Picture nominees, they’re mostly drawn from the same old strain of Oscar bait: there are gritty epics (The Return of the King and Master and Commander), lacquered period pieces (Seabiscuit), and scenery-chewing dramas (Mystic River).  The Academy’s voting deadline may have changed, but their tastes have stayed the same.