When the Oscar nominations were announced, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen didn’t make the Visual Effects category like I had predicted earlier.  (Avatar, District 9, and Star Trek were the three nominees.)  But it did manage to grab one nomination, for Sound Mixing, which it will compete for at the ceremony on Sunday, March 7th.

Unfortunately, it faces stiff competition: The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Star Trek, and Avatar are all also competing in the category.  And all four of those movies also showed up in the Sound Editing category, where Transformers was replaced by Pixar’s Up.

That doesn’t exactly give it the best chances.  In all likelihood, the award will go to Avatar in a sweep of technical awards.

But hey, it’s the Academy Awards — surprises happen.

Michael Bay has been posting some brief updates on Tranformers 3 on his official “Shoot for the Edit” site lately and he’s dropped a handful of hints:

Busy scouting - Chicago, Detroit, and Washington D.C. for Transformers last week. Things are going well. The script is feeling very different from the other two.

And, in quoting an L.A. Times article:

“There will be a nice crescendo ending,” Bay said. “It gets much more into the robot character. The last time you kind of met a few of the robots; this time you’re gonna get a much cooler landscape.”

Considering how disappointing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was, it’s nice to hear that the script is feeling “very different.”  Maybe this time they’re actually bothering to fashion a coherent film before filming begins.

We’re just a week and a half or so away from the announcement of this year’s Oscar nominations, but there’s already some word on which technical awards Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen might have a shot at.

It’s one of the seven movies in the running for Best Visual Effects, a category which will eventually have three nominees.  Its competition includes Avatar, District 9, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Star Trek, Terminator Salvation, and 2012.

If I had to guess, it’ll make the list with Avatar and District 9, with 2012 as a potential spoiler.

Additionally, ROTF was just nominated for the Cinema Audio Society’s awards, which usually match up pretty closely with Best Sound Mixing nominees.  Other contenders in that field include Avatar, District 9, Star Trek, and The Hurt Locker.

Since it’s in consideration for Sound Mixing, a Sound Editing nomination probably isn’t far off.  And finally, its song “New Divide” is one of the dozens in consideration for Best Song.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made the most money out of any movie in the 2009 calendar year.  So that means it’s the #1 movie of the year, right?  Well, sort of.

If you’re counting by what made the most money out of any movie released in 2009, Transformers 2 drops down to #2, replaced by — you guessed it — Avatar.  James Cameron’s flick is currently at $513 and rising, versus Transformers 2’s distant $402 million.  The third spot goes to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, with $301 million.  After that, there’s a good five movies ranging from $229-293 million.

But within the calendar year?  Avatar had only made $284 million by December 31st, so Transformers 2 still has it.

Empire Online got their hands on a clip from one of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’s special features, a breakdown of the Decepticon attack on a fleet of battleships and aircraft carriers.

In the clip, the narrator reveals that they actually did research to check how fast boats of that size can actually sink. Turns out it’s surprisingly fast — under twenty minutes for some. Check out the clip here.

Considering Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is one of the worst-reviewed movies of the year (not a judgment, just an observation), it takes a certain amount of sheer nerve to try to get it nominated for Oscars.

Not just Visual Effects or Sound Editing, mind you.  It’ll probably be nominated for awards like that.  I’m talking the big guns: Best Picture and Best Director.  Yes, Paramount Pictures is suggesting that Michael Bay get an Oscar nomination.  Check it out for yourself at ParamountScreenings.com.

Why are they doing this?  I like to think it’s because Michael Bay sincerely believes that he deserves it.

In an article on The Playlist, they even show some For Your Consideration art:

I’m not sure if that’s fake or not.  It looks like a screen-capture of the Paramount Screenings site, but the artwork is from a fan-made poster.  Maybe they had it up originally but took it down when they realized.

The Scream Awards were held a couple of weeks ago in L.A., but they’re not airing until tonight.  If you want to catch Megan Fox and Isabel Lucas — both in attendance — check it out on Spike TV at 10 p.m.

As we reported the day after the event, Fox won Best Sci-Fi Actress and Lucas won Best Breakthrough Female Performance.  I hope that doesn’t ruin any surprises.

The good folks at How it Should Have Ended finally turned their sights on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and the result is a three-minute video featuring a number of alternate scenes and ending possibilities.  I can’t say it’s the funniest HISHE video out there — I’m personally partial to the Superman one and the Star Wars one — but this is pretty good.

The segment starting at the two minute mark is my favorite.

The only problem with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen selling two million copies in 24 hours is that it’s October, and it’ll be hard for the holidays to live up to that standard without a huge release like that.  But, of course, Transformers is a franchise, and Hasbro will continue to sell toys and comic books and animated movies and 3rd grade school folders and everything you can possibly think of that is Transformers-related.

Covering all the ancillary material is pretty much impossible: there’s just way too much of it.  But there’s this Bumblebee-centric Transformers comic book coming out for the holidays that seemed kind of cool.  I don’t know, maybe it’s because Bumblebee was the only Transformer in the movie who knew how to shut up.  (If only he taught Mudflap and Skids…)

Here’s an excerpt from the press release from Hasbro and IDW Publishing:

After the huge success of this summer’s blockbuster Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen movie from DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures, in association with Hasbro, IDW continues the excitement with TRANSFORMERS:BUMBLEBEE, an all-new, four-issue miniseries. Under license from Hasbro, IDW expands this fan-favorite character, as BUMBLEBEE finds himself between a rock and a hard place with his own friends.

Written by Zander Cannon with art by Chee, TRANSFORMERS: BUMBLEBEE spins out of events in the new ongoing TRANSFORMERS series. The miniseries picks up with BUMBLEBEE finding himself in an unfamiliar position after the CYBERTRON-shattering events of TRANSFORMERS #1. Chee and Guido Guidi will provide the covers.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will finally drop on DVD this Tuesday, October 20th, after its massive $400 million box office run in the U.S.

It’s still the #1 film of the year by a margin of about $100 million; second is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with $300 million.

In an interview for the DVD release, screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (who are sitting out Transformers 3) talked about the film’s love-it-or-hate-it reactions:

Question: Did you expect the Transformers Sequel to be so divisive? People seemed to love it or hate it.

Orci: Yeah… Sequels are easy targets, and the film was undertaken under the pressure of the writer’s strike, it was bigger louder and longer than the first one.

Kurtzman: It’s very hard to gauge what’s going to work with people and what’s not going to work. Because what one person says is way too long, but my 12 year old cousin would say “I wish it was longer!” And so that totally confuses me, so I think that at the end of the day, Mchael (Bay – Director) has his rhythm and his pace and he can determine in the editing how long he wants the movie to be.

The two-disc special edition is available on Amazon for $22.99 — read all about the special features here.