The 'Arrival' Best Picture Nomination is a Boon for Brainy Sci-Fi

Among the “Best Picture” nominations for the 89th Academy Awards announced Tuesday was Arrival, the only science fiction movie to be nominated for the top award. What’s more, it was one of eight nominations for the movie.

About a linguist (Amy Adams) tasked with learning how to communicate with aliens that suddenly descended on Earth, Arrival is up for Oscars in these categories:

• Adapted Screenplay

• Best Director

• Cinematography

• Editing

• Production Design

• Sound Editing

• Sound Mixing

• Best Picture

Arrival has a serious shot at taking home the top prize if not making its mark in the other categories as well. Director Denis Villeneuve’s nomination for best director should definitely give a boost to his next project, the sequel to Blade Runner, as should the cinematography nod for director of photography Bradford Young. He’s shooting the standalone Han Solo Star Wars movie, set for a release in 2019.

Eric Heisserer’s adapted screenplay will she light on Ted Chiang’s source material (his 1998 short story Story of Your Life) and might just nudge similar cerebral sci-fi projects into production. Also, Sylvain Bellemare’s sound editing and Bernard Gariepy Strobl and Claude La Haye’s sound mixing can prove the audible details in award-worthy movies arent just for blockbusters.

But to catch up on Arrival, take a look below:

• Read up on the alien language invented just for the film and how scientists are already trying to figure out how to talk to little green men in real life.

• Check out how the screenplay poses the messy politics of the humans as the real threat of the movie and how the movie’s fictional representation of the situation reflects real-life politics.

• Learn how the movie deals with time travel in a perfectly subtle way.

See if Arrival will brin home Oscar hardware when the 89th Academy Awards airs on February 26.