How in the world did this movie get so many nominations?

Rating: 3/10 (18 January 2014)

My wife and I watched this in what is supposed to be its best medium: 3D at an IMAX screen. At the end of the film, we both turned to one another and said, "What a stupid movie."
I'm struggling to figure out why so many people are going ga-ga over this. Can the flash really be that bright that no one can see the truly lousy script?
Spoilers coming!
Here's the plot: 2 good-looking astronauts and 1 not so good looking are playing in space. The not-so-good looking one gets creamed with debris, a whole punched through his face, as if to remind us, in relief, how good looking the other 2 are. The space shuttle is destroyed.
With no where to go, the 2 astronauts deiced to go visit the Russians, but the Russians aren't home, so the one remaining saunters over to the Chinese' house. No one can hear you knock in space, but that doesn't matter because they've left too. Oh my! in a seemingly unrelated coincidence, the Chinese pace station is being dragged back into earth's atmosphere and wow, wouldn't you know, despite all the controls being in Chinese, Sandra Bullock manages to push the right buttons after just 1 or 2 misses. (Ostensibly, she's trained on the Russian station and this is just like it. How convenient!)
Now, it;s my understanding that re-entry into the atmosphere is a very tricky thing - too steep and you burn like Joan of Arc. Which is what happens to almost every single piece of the Chinese Condo in space, except, of course, the piece that our heroine is in.
And then, wouldn't you know it, it lands in water, and it begins to sink, because it was designed to land on, well, land. Oh no! After all she's been through, will she have survived everything only to drown ironically in the end? Of course not - because as we learned previously in the film, she has found the will to live in the memory of her dead daughter. (Like that's not been used before.) But not only does she survive, she arises out of the primordial ooze like a Jungian woman, ready to go out and, presumably, breed again.
So if you can look past all of the house calls in space and the hackneyed plot in general, it DOES offer some pretty views of the planet. And of a couple of good looking people.