Here's a roundup of the Great Pretenders (with one reality check thrown in at the end):

“The best thing is that it was my best friend from New York who called and told me. She was so happy, she was crying and I’m like, ‘What has happened?”
— Marisa Tomei, supporting actress, The Wrestler

“It’s delightfully surprising. I had no expectations. A very close friend called me, as I had no idea it was televised."
— Melissa Leo, actress, Frozen River

“It’s weird, a big surprise. You learn not to have expectations. My son-in-law called and then the phone started ringing."
— Richard Jenkins, actor, The Visitor

“I was at a midnight screening last night here at Sundance and was up until 3 a.m. I was sound asleep and then a little shell-shocked when the calls started coming in."
— Michael Shannon, supporting actor, Revolutionary Road

“I was sleeping, because that’s my technique, and I just got it on my phone when I turned it on.”
— Gus Van Sant, director, Milk

“I was awoken by the news. I’m in New York, but a late riser.”
— Martin McDonagh, original screenplay, In Bruges

"I'm a nocturnal worker so because of that I go to sleep with all my phones turned off. I saw a text message saying `congratulations' and I wrote back asking `for what?' True to form for me, I thought the Oscar nominations were tomorrow.''
— Danny Elfman, original score, Milk

"Why wouldn't I be good? Anybody who tells you they were sleeping is a liar."
— Eric Roth, adapted screenplay, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

• Reactions from the Oscar nominees [THR]

• Reactions to the Oscar nominations [Variety]

Moreover, the voters he hasn't alienated over the years will crawl over each other to be a part of Rourke's comeback story. Fox Searchlight is packaging it as we speak, and Rourke himself was candidly — maybe too candidly — selling its prototype at a press conference following today's screening.

"I mean, if I knew it would take me 15 years to get back in the saddle and work again because of the way I handled things, I really would have handled things differently," he told the crowd. "I just didn't have the tools. I'm doing things differently this time around — understanding what it is to be a professional, be responsible and to be consistent. Those are things that weren't in my vocabulary back then. Change for me didn't come easy; I didn't wanna change until I lost everything until I realized that you better change, or, you know, blow your fucking brains out. Either you change and go on with life, or you're just a piece of shit.

"Everything I felt was that I would be weak — that it was a weakness to change, for the armor that I put on my whole life. I was too proud to change, because my strength at the time was a weakness. I'm all right with it now, and yeah, it took me 15, 16, 17 years out of the game. But it's really nice, because I get to come back and work with these people here."

He gestured to his left, where Aronofsky, Tomei and co-producer Scott Franklin were seated alongside him at the dais. They're probably short-listers, too, along with screenwriter Robert Siegel, likely the first Onion alumnus to be considered for an Academy Award. Really, that's the story we can't wait to write, but we'll take this in the meantime.

Cusack, in the latest of a seemingly endless (and psychologically curious) string of hitman roles, plays Hauser, a typically troubled assassin whose inner psyche is so dead that he resorts to downing shot glasses of hot sauce in order to feel anything. His latest mission, at the behest of Tamerlane — a Halliburton-type corporation run by a Dick Cheney-like former vice president (Dan Aykroyd) — is to assassinate a Middle Eastern oil minister named Omar Sharif (an example of the film's humor) who is threatening to undercut their plans to build an oil pipeline in the wartorn country of Turaqistan. — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter

He also encounters a reporter for The Nation (Marisa Tomei!), a Central European pop tart named Yonica Babyyeah (Hillary Duff) who drops a scorpion down her pants and a hysterical double-agent (played by Cusack's real-life sister Joan running the trade show that serves as Cusack's cover — featuring a chorus line of amputees with high-tech prosthetic limbs. And I haven't mentioned Sir Ben Kingsley, sporting another one of his eccentric American accents, as a Big Brother-like character. — Lou Lumenick, NY Post

Films like this and Redacted and Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? exist to make their makers feel good about their own political correctness, and content that their razor-thin world views are accurate and viable, when in fact they represent a tiny fraction of the bigger picture. This is not activism—this is self-congratulation. — Karina Longworth, Spout Blog

It gets worse from there, but again, we'd prefer to think of Cusack as we remember him: a tasteful man whose recent lapses into treacle and trash (Martian Child, John? Really?) warrant a Sure Thing sequel or, better yet, the prompt franchising of Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything Else. It's not like Cameron Crowe couldn't use the boost himself.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]