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.
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.
A trio of films from last year's batch (Nowhere Boy, Never Let Me Go and The Debt) that effectively received a greenlight, and are now in the can, and in the list's inaugural year, Grant Heslov's Men Who Stare at Goats was the top vote-getter.
Apart from the world premiere of Michael Cuesta's Tell-Tale and one more festival screening and chance to shine for Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking, the selections are comprised of unknown projects, New York-based film productions that were completed in the last year, a bunch of films that receive a May theatrical release anyways and a batch of better than average films that were showcased at Sundance.
With Geoffrey Gilmore in the portrait (his work will only be felt next year), Tribeca is making another great decision in shedding some of that baby fat. At eight years of age, the cuts make the festival leaner, less desperate for films and "more precise" in its programming. Scaling back to a sound number of 86, today's batch of 38 fill up the World Narrative and Documentary Comp selections and Discovery sections. Today's announcements demonstrates that relationships with filmmakers continue to flourish (I noticed a couple of names from the previous years).