The noms are in folks (see full list below) and apart from the love that The Blind Side has received (the backlash has officially began around 9 eastern this morning), there are very little surprises -- which only means status quo on films and people that officially received the cold shoulder months ago.

Soderbergh is turning to his vault and re-teaming not with any Ocean's films players, but Traffic stars Michael Douglas and Dennis Quaid. He'll also have one of the U.K. biggest new talents in Michael Fassbender (who was genius in Hunger and the upcoming Fish Tank) and completing the foursome is Ewan McGregor - someone in need of some juicier supporting roles.

This year's nominees have been announced with Kathryn Bigelow being the clear favorite among a field of noms that also include: James Cameron for Avatar; Lee Daniels for Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire; Jason Reitman for Up in the Air; and Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds.

Olivier Assayas' The Summer Hours beat The Hurt Locker and A Serious Man by a nose as the Best Picture of the Year, and a film that took me a couple of tries to acknowledge it as genius in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive was claimed tops of the 00's over my favorite of the decade, WKW's In the Mood for Love.

As I mentioned before, Sundance is a place where female filmmakers get to shine, and the festival has just announced that a trio in Gurinder Chadha, Galt Niederhoffer and Lisa Cholodenko (which I had placed high in my predictions for the upcoming edition) will be added to the line-up in the Premieres section. Honestly I'm surprised to see The Romantics get a slot, because I could have sworn I just looked at some pics from the set -- it'll be a made dash in the editing room for sure for the first time filmmaker and vet Plum Pictures producer.

Similar to the Golden Globes because it is a foreign group of film journalists who conduct the voting (though I'm sure they have no mandate to prefer films loaded in stars), this year's the 15th Lumiere Awards has a pair of films in the top tier that recently that duked it out for the Louis Delluc award. Philippe Lioret's Welcome (which just got picked up by Film Movement this week) and Jacques Audiard's A Prophet (a SPC release next February) received five and four noms respectively.

I usually begin these type of "Sundance Institute" updates by stating that these are the future names to watch out for on the indie film scene or in future editions of the festival, but the truth of the matter is, this year's batch of twelve are names we already mention on this site. Filmmakers such as Craig Zobel and Cherien Dabis are returning with their latest screenplays-in-progress and folks such as Lance Weiler, Sean Durkin (producer of Afterschool) and Edwin (multiple fest winner Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly) are making this an 2010 group to watch out for.

While A Serious Man appears to be making no blips on any critic group's radar (a real shame that it's not even claiming any of these "ensemble acting" prizes either), Up in the Air and Precious aren't fairing that well either, as The Hurt Locker assault this weekend (tops on a couple of critic groups on both coasts) has indeed placed the film from 'dark horse' status to Oscar 'front-runner'. It's the dream scenario for Summit Ent. who tried their best in promoting the picture this summer, but ultimately failed to reach the larger segment of the population who might not read newspapers but are willing to see the next Vin Diesel film.

With only Alain Resnais’ Les Herbes Folles and Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch as possible upset win scenario's, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet was the logical winner for France’s Louis Delluc prize of best French film of the year.

This year, voting members will have to cover 69 picks, and slim it down to a neat five nominations and among the titles worth mentioning that didn't receive a possibility at an Oscar nomination we have City Of Life And Death and Lebanon. Unfortunately, even this list is imperfect as there is no mention of titles that were big with critics such as Women Without Men, I am Love, Hadewijch.

Wedged between Sundance and Berlin is the extremely important Rotterdam film festival. Rotterdam functions as Europe's first major film fest of the year, but it seconds as a premiere destination for filmmakers such as Andrei Zvyagintsev (The Return), Amat Escalante (Sangre) and Juraj Lehotsky (Blind Loves) who make the kind of films that need a "helping hand". This list is of obvious interest because we'll be talking about this projects-turned-into-films down the road - we only need to look at Venice/TIFF for recent examples such as Samuel Maoz's Lebanon and Shirin Neshat's Women without Men to see the quality of films that got their start here.

One look at the filmmaker names below, and it appears as if the Sundance alumni have come out in droves. We find a known variety of filmmakers such as Spike Jonze (Being John Malcovich), Ira Sachs (Married Life), Nicholas Jasenovec (Paper Hearts), James Franco and the Zellner bros. who have dabbled this year in the short form while working in between their feature film projects.

Something tells me I'll be indulging in the NF section with a quota of at least three works. Dammit, I'm already breaking out in hives with the monstrous task ahead of me of covering the festival from top to bottom.

You can always count on Park City at Midnight section to deliver one groundbreaking film. It's hard to predict which one, but I'd go with "concept" over such things as cast, aesthetics or production budget. This theory isn't off the charts when you consider Black Dynamite, The Blair Witch Project and Saw got their starts in this section. Of the 8 selected below, I'm familiar with Rodrigo Cortes's Buried (which reminds me of the torment that the Dutch film The Vanishing caused me) and Vincent Natali's Splice which I believe received its world preem at Sitges.

The Spotlight section (replacing the awkward Spectrum sidebar) is a place where the festival will showcase some great finds on the festival circuit. And let me tell you, there is some great stuff here especially with TIFF/Venice titles such as I am Love, Lourdes, Mother & Child, A Prophet and Women Without Men.

Tons of Park City alumni are bringing their latest films, but I'm a bit surprised that March-pegged releases of The Weinstein's All Good Things and Focus Features' Greenberg aren't getting a Park City push. Instead, as expected, Sony Pictures Classics will show up and they get to showcase Get Low and A Prophet (Spotlight section) once again, and they'll preem Holofcener's Please Give. Overture will introduce Philip Seymour Hoffman's directing debut (Jack Goes Boating) and Fox Searchlight will preem Duplass Bros.' untitled comedy, which I'm calling Center of Attention - because its a great title considering the subject matter.

The lucky inaugural eight include: Habib Azar's Armless, Linas Philips's Bass Ackwards, Sultan Sharrief's Bilal’s Stand, Katie Aselton's The Freebie, Barnes Bros' Homewrecker, Adam Bowers's New Low, Michael Mohan's One Too Many Mornings and Eyad Zahra's The Taqwacores - which has nothing to do with the docu film Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam: (same subject, different film).

As we wait for tomorrow's selections in the non-competitive categories, I figured I'd further explore/familiarize myself with the sixteen titles (Blue Valentine, Douchebag, The Dry Land, Happythankyoumoreplease, Hesher, Holy Rollers, Howl, The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, Lovers of Hate, Night Catches Us, Obselidia, Skateland, Sympathy for Delicious, 3 Backyards, Welcome to the Rileys and Winter's Bone) selected for the U.S Dramatic Competition.

Perhaps one of the festival's least popular sections, among the twelve selected titles in 2010's Sundance World Cinema Documentary Competition, we have seven world premieres including Jose Padiha's latest and the U.S premiere of Lixin Fan's Last Train Home - winner of the 22nd International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).

With filmmakers from Iraq, Bolivia, India and out of all places, Greenland, it's no wonder that many of the filmmaker names selected in Sundance's 2010 edition World Cinema Dramatic Competition are drawing a blank stare. Among those that we do know we find Taika Waititi returning to the festival (after the little seen charmer Eagle vs. Shark) with a set in the 80's pic called Boy, and David Michod will be coming to the festival as the scribe for Hesher, and as the the writer-director of Animal Kingdom starring Guy Pearce.

Judging by names like Gibney, Blitz, Poitras, Guggenheim, Stern/Sundberg and Grady/Ewing, 2010's Sundance Documentary Competition will be stellar edition with so many return Sundance filmmakers clogging up the section.

The good news is that a handful of films that I predicted that would be at the fest and that I wanted to see (Blue Valentine, Happythankyoumoreplease, Hesher, Howl, Sympathy for Delicious and Winter's Bone) have indeed been selected.

The film which received no love at the Gothams tied for 1st in total amount of noms with Telluride's The Last Station (Michael Hoffman). Lee Daniel's Precious received noms in the Best Feature, Director, First Screenplay, Best Femle Lead and the most logical nomination and most deserving of them all: Best Supporting Female.

If this year's Gotham Awards winner is any indication, A Serious Man might be in serious trouble with its Oscar chances as Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker appears to be the "preferred" independent film of the year.

While I've yet to see the doc myself (I reference Claire Denis' White Material when I think of what the film might hold narratively), when the Cinema Eye Honor Noms were released I was surprised to see that, despite the positive buzz, Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson's Mugabe and the White African only manage to grab one nomination. Clearly the film is a favorite for the 2009 edition of the IDA Awards - it picked up three nominations in the Feature Documentary, ABCNews VideoSource Award an the Pare Lorentz Award categories.

With the film eligibility dates covering portions of two years, the 2009 European Film Awards finds itself in an awkward mode of having a clear favorites from circa 2008 (Slumdog Millionaire, Let the Right One In) go up against cream of the crop from Cannes 2009 (A Prophet, The White Ribbon and Fish Tank).

The Cinema Eye Honors, my favorite awards ceremony after the Indie Spirits, has released the nominations in eleven categories with Louie Psihoyos’ The Cove racking up a total of seven nominations .

Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross' The Shock Doctrine (which was presented as an unfinished cut at Berlin) will be the lead off film and the keeping with the idea of films that "spur debate", I don't think that the other films to participate in Sundance Film Festival U.S.A initiative will be heavyweight fiction titles, but we can expect to see a good number of doc features that need the attention.

No surprises here with the noms for the 12th British Independent Film Awards as the overwhelming favorite Fish Tank grabbed a total of eight nominations, while a sci-fi film that looks big budget but was closer to shoestring in Duncan Jones' Moon placed second best in the noms tally with a total of seven.

I'm glad that the organization, (now in year three I believe?) has a set in stone manner in which to evaluate the best of the best in doc films, something in which the Oscars have proved to be inadequate in acknowledging.

Opening the fest is the North American premiere of Emmanuel Mouret's French sex comedy Please Please Me! (which I think should logically be picked up for the U.S. market - see trailer here) and the ten day fest will be closing with the North American premiere of Radu Mihaileanu's The Concert - a Weinstein Co. title starring Melanie Laurent that will most likely open sometime early in 2010.