When the Academy Does the Right Thing : Oscars: This year’s nominees include pictures and performances that most would have said didn’t have a chance.

The negative surprises in the Academy Award nominations receive a lot of early attention from Oscar-watchers. Rightly so, the attention is a kind of last tip of the hat to excellent work that may remain in memory but didn’t make it on to the honor roll.

Tips of the hat, for example, are due to a confounding number of supporting performances. I think of Norman Lloyd as the villainous headmaster in “Dead Poets Society,” Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis as the world-wise observers in “Do the Right Thing,” Jerry Ohrbach as Martin Landau’s brother in “‘Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But the list is long as the final crawl on an epic.

Yet there’s also a list, somewhat shorter, of the positive surprises among the academy nominations: the pictures and the work you’d have said didn’t have a chance or were at laughably long odds but that made it.

Who’d have guessed that a low-budget reworking of a play nearly 400 years old would get nominations as best director and best actor for a young man almost totally unknown to the voters only a year ago. But Kenneth Branagh and his “Henry V” made it, despite the fact that the film was playing (though for a long time) at essentially one small, multiplex cinema.

Charges of cultural snobbery can be leveled at the voters, but I choose to believe that Branagh is simply perceived as a man as thoroughly in charge of his crafts as another Wunderkind, Orson Welles, was a half-century earlier.

Excellence is the only explanation for the honoring of “My Left Foot,” another small film (made for less than $3 million) that is a large and hugely artful celebration of the unconquerable human spirit. Daniel Day-Lewis’ nomination as best actor had the ring of inevitability about it (either that or there is no justice in the world at all). But the best picture nomination is a happy proof of the voters’ openness.

And not least among Oscar’s positive surprises was the nomination for best supporting actress of Brenda Fricker, who plays Daniel Day-Lewis’ mother. (The voters historically have shown a preference, approaching obsession, for honoring the living rather than the lately departed. Ray McAnally, who played the father, died just after completing the film, but his performance, in his blustery course from rejection of his crippled son to celebration, was academy quality.)

Another of the pleasing surprises, and as surprising as any, was the honoring of “Field of Dreams” not only for script and score but as one of the five options for best picture.

A reading of the nominations suggests that the academy voters can take box-office success or leave it alone. The list of heavy-grossing hits that were entirely or largely ignored by the voters is long, and headed by “Batman.”

The voters may have their collective myopias, mostly toward downbeat or difficult material (the cool and unemphatic although hardly supportive view of the drug culture in “Drugstore Cowboy” is a conspicuous example). But the nominations do not quite hold up as a popularity contest. There are too many exceptions both ways.

Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation of “Field of Dreams” from the W. P. Kinsella novel has been an unquestioned box-office hit, somewhat surprisingly since films about baseball have tended historically to foul out no matter how many stars were on base.

Then again, I suspect that “Field of Dreams” was being honored, and patronized, much less as a movie about baseball than as about the possibility of reconciliations between fathers and sons, and as a fanciful suggestion that dreams can come true if you are willing to invest in them.

The academy voters, many of them, are undoubtedly also aware that nothing in film is harder to bring off than fantasy. Movies have a way of being steadfastly literal. Fantasy is a little easier in musicals but in straight drama, it’s the devil’s own to make the make-believe believable. Another film maker, who sticks to reality, was heard to say, “that fantasy is unprintably hard stuff to do.”

The secret, presuming there is one, is simply to proceed as if what we have here is not fantasy at all but only a kind of uncommon reality. At that level fantasy can touch those childhood recollections of the moon-cast shadow of a branch on a bedroom wall that became a monster (this when the fantasies are themselves powerfully dark). When the fantasies are cheerful, the links may be to the childhood acceptance of the tooth fairy or Santa Claus and the moment when, in daydreams, the schoolyard bully begs for your mercy. Who can honestly say what magic, black or white, may not lurk in a cornfield taller than a man’s head?

Robinson, who never let on that his ghostly game was anything but real, has said that the least of his mail about “Field of Dreams” has been from baseball fans, although the Shoeless Joe Jackson Assn., dedicated to unstaining his name 70 years after the Black Sox scandal, has expressed its delight with the film.

But more often the letters have talked very personally about estrangements between fathers and sons: sometimes healed, the reconciliations triggered by seeing the film, sometimes beyond healing, although the writers found solace in the film.

Upbeat, now as ever, is the direction the academy voters prefer to any other, and this year’s five nominees are all singularly but fundamentally upbeat. Even “Born on the Fourth of July,” for all the preceding horrors and angers, is at last noisily, triumphantly upbeat. “Driving Miss Daisy,” its last moments a melancholy glimpse of the infirmities of great age, is nonetheless guaranteed to leave no heart unwarmed, no eye dry.

“Dead Poets Society” (surely another of the voters’ admirable surprises) is at last a vindication for a compassionate, free-spirited and inspiring teacher over the mind-binding forces of oppressive rote-learning. And “My Left Foot” leaves Christy Brown at the most exultant moment in his life.

What with that ballgame going on out there where the cornfield was, the voters will have a lot of upbeat to choose from on that final ballot for best picture, and what I don’t think there is at the moment is a sure thing.