Oscars rehash: ’08, Year of Perfection

This movie was so good, you almost wanted something else to win Best Picture so you could feel that familiar sense of righteous indignation.Sometimes everything works out. The best picture won Best Picture; all the acting awards went to strong, risky performances from actors who are outside the Hollywood mainstream -- Daniel Day Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Javier Bardem and Tilda Swinton; Best Original Song went to the sweet ballad from Once rather than any of the trio nominated from Enchanted; Best Original Score went to Atonement, where the music was a nearly breathing character itself; even three of the technical awards went not to the biggest, loudest, brightest action movie of the year, Tranformers, but to a quality thriller in The Bourne Ultimatum, which won both sound awards and editing.

What should have won: What problems I have with Atonement have more to do with my love and Ian McEwan's book and the slight -- so slight, possibly perceived only by me -- difference between the book and the movie. The little twist at the end -- which in the movie feels more twisty than in the book -- is that a writer is using her words to assuage her guilt over something awful she did as a child, adding fiction to make her own reality more livable. That writers actually do this should be no secret, but as it plays out in the book the guilt is oppressive for the girl; she never has and never will forgive herself, so her only recourse is to try to convince herself that something else happened, or at least could have happened. As it plays out in the movie, she seems less bothered by her guilt and changes the ending for the story's lovers as if she felt they deserved a better ending, not her. That is such a minor difference and it happens in a minute of voiceover at the end, but it is so key to the story. The book openly admits that writers are selfish and makes few apologies for it. The movie tries to justify the act as selflessness.

There Will Be Blood is strong indication of which direction P.T. Anderson is going to take his career. It is a harsh, darkly funny movie with a story often as discordant as the soundtrack, so harsh that is totally inaccessible to many people. It made me think of Robert Altman, whose movies some people loved and praised endlessly, but he neither cared nor tried to find an audience any larger than he needed to keep making movies. Daniel Day-Lewis was justly rewarded for a performance that will be replayed in movie montages during Oscar broadcasts for decades to come.

Michael Clayton is the sort of movie Sydney Pollack and Sidney Lumet used to make, mainstream stories about Something, but really stories about people and the bad things they do while taking the path of least resistance. If it had been made in the ’80s, it would have starred Paul Newman instead of George Clooney. It has a timeless quality to it; the story could have taken place and been made at nearly any point in time. Maybe that means it's generic, but it's at least reassuring that smart, thoughtful movies are being made as well as smart, thoughtful films.

No Country for Old Men is a perfect movie, or as perfect as it possible to get. The Coens adapted Cormac McCarthy's book rather than working for their own material, and the decision to do so seems to have freed them from their quirkiness. It is brutal, unforgiving and scary. It is about exactly what it set out to be about: the remorse an old sheriff feels for not having done enough to save the world from bad people.

Juno was a refreshingly honest story about teenage pregnancy presented as neither tragedy nor fable, just reality, but seriously, it was just happy to be nominated.

Better movies that screwed:I'm Not There ranks with Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould as one of the most inventive biopics. For any Bob Dylan fan, it felt instantly familiar and it was a relief to see this approach rather than taken with Walk the Line and Ray. Zodiac is one of those movies that lingers with you longer after you've seen it. Ratatouille was a refreshing return to greatness from Pixar after the puzzling Cars experience. I hesitate to give Ben Affleck too much credit for directing Gone Baby Gone, but it came out of nowhere and showed that his younger brother is the far superior actor. Into the Wild nearly got it all right, but whereas in the book, the impending tragedy always felt so close at hand, a mystery to be unraveled -- aided in part by Jon Krakauer's digressions from his own life -- in the movie it seems both inevitable and distant until it happens. Away From Her was such an effective, devastating movie, I don't think I can ever watch it again.

Worst award: Sometimes, everything goes right, or nearly so. I have a minor quibble with Diablo Cody winning Best Original Screenplay for Juno. The dialogue was often cute to the point of being ridiculously unnatural, even as hard as Ellen Page worked to sound natural saying things like, "Can I use the facilities? Because being pregnant makes me pee like Seabiscuit!" Michael Clayton or Ratatouille would have been slightly better choices.