Bryan Cranston Going ALL THE WAY to HBO with Steven Spielberg

HBO Films will be bringing a bit more Broadway to our televisions with Robert Schenkkan's All the Way, the Tony, Drama Desk and Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award winning play. Bryan Cranston, who won the Tony as Best Actor for his performance as Lyndon Johnson in the Broadway production of the play, will also star for HBO.

Deadline reported last month that Steven Spielberg had optioned the play for a possible miniseries, and now they've confirmed that the project has landed at HBO, which recently scored a major hit -- and a lot of Emmy nominations -- with the televised version of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart. That adaptation from stageplay to screenplay was made by the playwright, and All the Way will get the same treatment, with Schenkkan himself penning the adaptation. He has worked with Spielberg before, on the World War II miniseries The Pacific, which also aired on HBO.

All the Way was originally commissioned as part of the "American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle" project at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Characters like Hubert Humphrey, J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King, Jr. populate the landscape of the play, an exploration of how Lyndon Johnson came to power and how this "charismatic, conflicted Texan hurl[ed] himself into Civil Rights legislation, throwing the country into turmoil," as described by the ATCA judges when they decided the play was worthy of their top award. They called the play "an engrossing, epic" play and described Schenkkan's version of LBJ as "complex, obscene, brilliant and ruthless."

Before The Pacific or All the Way, Schenkkan had already shown he knew what to do with historical material -- he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Kentucky Cycle back in 1992.

On Broadway, All the Way featured University of Illinois alum Brandon Dirden as Martin Luther King Jr., Illinois State University alum Robert Petkoff as Hubert Humphrey, and This Is Spinal Tap alum Michael McKean as J. Edgar Hoover. No word yet on who will take the supporting roles for HBO, but it seems likely it will feature an all-star cast like the one in The Normal Heart. On Broadway, Joe Mantello played Ned Weeks, but that became Mark Ruffalo for the film, good-looking-in-a-regular-way John Benjamin Hickey turned into beautiful Matt Bomer, and Ellen Barkin's role was taken over by Julia Roberts, presumably for more box office appeal. Only TV star Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory) kept his role from stage to screen. That means we might expect everybody except Bryan Cranston to be replaced with actors who have bigger names or more star wattage. David Oyelowo, Nelsan Ellis and Malik Yoba have played King recently, while Leonardo DiCaprio tried on J. Edgar Hoover for size not that long ago. Humphreys are harder to find. So let's just keep the Broadway cast, shall we?

Oscar Nomination Surprises!

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had some surprises up its golden sleeves this morning, with no Oscar love for the guy in the iron lung in The Sessions and a whole lot of topsy turvy in the Best Director race.

There are nine nominees for Best Picture, with only Moonrise Kingdom left out from prognosticators' lists of likely nominees if it went that deep. Big favorite Lincoln is there, along with Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty. Along with Moonrise Kingdom, dark horses Skyfall and The Master didn't make the cut.

Best Director was supposed to be a horse race between Steven Spielberg and actor-turned-director Ben Affleck, but Affleck, whose Argo got a Best Picture nod, is out in the cold, as are expected nominees Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty and Tom Hooper for Les Miz. Only Ang Lee (Life of Pi) and Spielberg repeat from the Directors Guild nominations announced on Tuesday.

It's not that uncommon for the DGA to pick a different winner than the one who takes the prize on Oscar night, but the two groups sharing only two nominees out of five is a bit surprising. Michael Haneke, who directed Amour, Benh Zeitlin, from Beasts of the Southern Wild, and David O. Russell, who has appeared on a lot of Best of the Year lists for Silver Linings Playbook, benefited from the absence of Affleck, Bigelo and Hooper on the final slate.

The Best Actor competition comes down to Daniel Day-Lewis, who played Lincoln in Lincoln, Bradley Cooper as a bipolar man who moves back in with Mom and Dad in Silver Linings Playbook, Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, Denzel Washington as a heroic but flawed pilot in Flight, and Joaquin Phoenix as an unstable man who falls in with a cult in The Master. Because Phoenix took a swipe at awards season and the campaigning involved, many thought the Academy voters would snub him, but there he is. And John Hawkes, widely expected to be a contender for his role as a man in an iron lung who hires a sex therapist in The Sessions, is nowhere to be found.

Frontrunners Jessica Chastain (a CIA operative going after Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty) and Jennifer Lawrence (the quirky love interest who dances with Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook) are front and center in the Best Actress category, where they are joined by 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, who played a girl named Hushpuppy taking a journey to the end of the world in Beasts of the Southern Wild and 85-year-old Emmanuelle Riva, who played a retired music teacher whose health is failing in the French film Amour. Wallis and Riva represent the youngest and oldest nominees ever in the Best Actress category. Naomi Watts, a mother trying to find her son during a tsunami in The Impossible, rounds out the list of nominees. A likely contender left out was Marion Cotillard, whose performance as a whale trainer in Rust and Bone was overlooked. Let's give credit to IndieWire's Peter Knegt, who called this category perfectly.

The real Thaddeus Stevens (L) and Tommy Lee Jones in the role.

Supporting Actors nominated include veteran Alan Arkin for his work as a wily movie producer in Argo, Robert DeNiro as Bradley Cooper's OCD dad in Silver Linings Playbook, Philip Seymour Hoffman as the charismatic cult leader in The Master, Tommy Lee Jones as a fiery abolitionist in Lincoln, and Christoph Waltz as a bounty hunter* in Django Unchained.

Nominee Jacki Weaver

And the Supporting Actresses who got the call this morning are Amy Adams and Sally Field, playing wives to the title characters in The Master and Lincoln, Anne Hathaway as Fantine, arguably the most miserable character in Les Misérables, Helen Hunt as the helpful sex therapist in The Sessions, and  Australian actress Jacki Weaver, the mom in Silver Linings Playbook. There were a whole lot of names bandied about for that fifth spot, with actresses like Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Nicole Kidman considered more likely than Weaver. But her presence as the most stable member of the Silver Linings family won the day, giving Weaver an out-of-nowhere nomination.

If you'd like to see the complete list of Oscar nominations, head here to read 'em and weep. Or cheer. Lincoln leads in nominations overall with 12, with Life of Pi right behind with 11 and Silver Linings Playbook with 8. That's a bit better than experts predicted for Pi, so congrats to director Ang Lee, whose University of Illinois connection (he got a BFA there in 1980) makes him rootable in my book.

*I've corrected what I called the character in response to a comment, in case anyone wonders why he is suddenly a bounty hunter.