Begin with something nice, I always say. With that in mind, and the Blu-ray disc of 10,000 B.C. has the nicest of beginnings. Which is to say, when one loads the disc in the player, the movie actually begins playing right away. No really, it’s true. No trailers, no cable TV series promotions, no guy singing through his tracheotomy about the harms of tobacco, just the movie that you wanted to watch when you closed the drawer on the player. How refreshing. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy trailers. But hats off to the the handful of discs that let me decide to look at them later. (I probably will.) 
On the other end of the spectrum, there should be a special little circle of hell set aside for those responsible for the discs that are authored to prevent me from pressing the MENU button or skipping forward when the fluff starts to play. That constitutes digital imprisonment, in my opinion, and there should be a law forbidding it.
The introduction of the Blu-ray player amplifies the problem in that on many titles, played on all but the latest and most well-designed players, the disc takes so . . . damn . . . long to load. But here’s the kicker. On some Blu-ray discs, one must watch the long “loading . . .” sequence, then be subjected to trailers and other nonsense, and THEN go through another “loading . . .” sequence before getting to the entertainment that matches the label on the outside of the disc. Frankly, if I owned such a disc, I think I would send it back. Maybe there should be a class action suit. Anyone interested?
Of course, I haven’t said a thing about Roland Emmerich’s re-imagining of history, as told through the eyes of an essentially orphaned boy in a nomadic tribe who may be destined to free his people from the oppression of the “four-legged devils” (Egyptians on horseback). That is because, unless you are looking for a film in which the entertainment value is had by laughing at it, there isn’t really much of anything to say. If Emmerich (whose list long list of passable, effects laden films is too large to merit selecting a couple of titles here) really thinks that artistic license should permit his mildly-evolved protagonists to sport stylish facial hair and tweezed eyebrows, perhaps its time that his license is revoked. But since he didn’t force us to watch trailers, I guess we should let him off with a warning this time. Little good it is likely to do.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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