Oscars nominations' surprising director snubs: Affleck, Bigelow

(CBS News) Two of the biggest snubs in this year's Oscar nominations were directors Kathryn Bigelow for the terrorism film "Zero Dark Thirty," and Ben Affleck for his thriller about the Iran hostage crisis, "Argo."

"No Kathryn Bigelow, no Ben Affleck, that's really a huge pair of surprises," Huffington Post entertainment editor Michael Hogan said Thursday on "CBS This Morning."

On "Zero Dark Thirty" in particular, he noted, "I think that the controversy ... has been really damaging, the notion that this is a film that's easy on terrorism is not something that's going to go down well with the membership of the Academy. This is a pretty liberal group. This is a group that was not very pro-George W. Bush, but I think also the film is long and slightly odd and it's offbeat, so people may just not have loved it."

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But one movie that the Academy did seem to love is "Beasts of the Southern Wild," with four nominations, including Best Director for Benh Zeitlin and Adapted Screenplay.

Hogan called the film "the little movie that could." He recalled, "Nobody knew what the heck this movie was about, and immediately after the first screening (at the Sundance Film Festival) everybody came around and said, 'You've got to see this movie.' And it's been rolling since then, but I think it's really exceeded my hopes for that film, which I love."

Quvenzhané Wallis, the film's star, was also nominated. She's the youngest person -- at 9 years old -- ever to be nominated in the Best Actress category.

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For Hogan's full analysis, watch his entire "CBS This Morning" segment in the video above.