by Iain Blair

The Oscar noms came out this morning and the big winners are  “Juno” and Jason Reitman -  at least in terms of the surprise factor. I was chatting on the phone w. Jason just hours after the announcement, and he was still shell-shocked. In fact, many industry people were surprised that the much-talked about new Fox Searchlight movie “Juno” written by first-time screenwriter (and ex-stripper) Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman (“Thank you for Smoking”) scored two of the biggest nominations – Best Director and Best Picture. But maybe no one was more surprised than Reitman himself. “I never expected this,” he admits. “ And I totally never expected the Best Director nomination. That was a shock!  I thought I was making a charming little comedy about teen pregnancy for the film festival crowd – and I was hoping it’d gross the same as “Smoking.” And now it’s over $70 million!” And with an Oscar bump, a $100 mill gross doesn’t look that unlikely now.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 10:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.