Near the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, spiritual-documentary filmmaker Martin Doblmeier conducted a survey on his Web site (http://www.journeyfilms.com). He asked whether people supported constructing a "garden of forgiveness" at Ground Zero in New York City.

Thousands of votes later, the results were overwhelming: Roughly 95 percent of respondents said "no."

In 1989, area natives Kelly and Tammy Rundle moved to Los Angeles in the hopes of jump-starting their movie-making careers, armed with little more than a title for their nascent production company: Fourth Wall Films.

And in the spring of 2007, after the release of their first, mostly self-financed feature, and with a second film nearing completion, the married couple took the next logical step.

They moved back here.

Sunday night's Academy Awards telecast began spectacularly, with a priceless montage by documentarian Errol Morris, and ended even more spectacularly, with richly-merited awards bestowed upon Martin Scorsese and his film, The Departed.

So what the hell happened in the middle?

What, exactly, is going on this year?

When the Academy Award nominations were announced in January and Dreamgirls found itself shut out of the Best Picture race, the news was something of a surprise, as the film was widely considered a shoo-in. The bigger shock, though, came from realizing that the snubbed musical still received more nominations than any other film - eight in all - and the last time a film led in Oscar nominations without a corresponding Best Picture nod was ... well, never.

But the Oscar weirdness didn't end there.

The following are the nominations for the 2007 Academy Awards, scheduled to air on ABC affiliate WQAD-TV at 7 p.m. on Sunday, February 25. If all goes the way I think it will (ha ha!), the winner of the most Oscars - a whopping three - will, for the first time ever, be a foreign-language film, and the Best Picture winner will have received the same amount of Oscars as the Best Documentary Feature winner. (That this is even a possibility marks this as a zany-ass year.)