How does a flawless movie go almost completely ignored then win Best Picture? Forget it, it's Hollywood.

A few arguments for why it really was Best Picture:
– It’s a war movie about the war itself and not propaganda either for or against it. Such movies are surprisingly rare. Even the best filmmakers cannot help themselves from making a comment about War when talking about a war.
– It’s a flawless movie.
– It’s an excellent argument for using awards to expand the audience of a quality movie. How many people weren’t moved to see this movie until it started showing up on year-end lists? It should have been seen by more people earlier, myself included.
– It represented a breakthrough moment in Oscar history. Kathryn Bigelow’s win for both Best Director and Best Picture is huge for many reasons, but I think primarily because she is a director not some subspecies of female director that Hollywood only feels capable of making costume dramas or romantic comedies. She makes movies adrenaline junkies like the Scott brothers and her ex-husband usually line up for. It’s a crime that it has taken this long, but with so much attention focused when someone would be the First Female Best Director, she is the right sort of director to break through. She defies the stereotype and might actually open the door for women directors to regularly make a more diverse selection of movies.

A few rguments for why it really wasn’t Best Picture:
– Almost nobody saw it. I’m generally not a fan of the most successful movies; the more money a movie makes is usually a sign of its middling (or worse) quality. But at least average box office success is a legitimate factor in determining Best Picture. As many Top 10 lists had Up in the Air — which won nothing — and Inglourious Basterds — which won just a single acting award — as the best film of the year. Real students of film will dig for movies that even fewer people saw like The White Ribbon or Liverpool or Goodbye Solo. The point is that the definition of “Best Picture” is highly subjective based on taste, background and mood. Even the best Best Pictures are often seen as deeply flawed by people who study them, rather than watch them. What a large number of people choose to see in a given year is, while not the primary qualification, a valid assessment of a film’s perceived quality to a diverse audience.
– I look at the list of 10 Best Picture nominees, and I’ve already seen Up twice, will certainly buy Up in the Air, Inglourious Basterds and A Serious Man on DVD. Two of those movies — Basterds and A Serious Man — I will need to watch mostly by myself for the rest of my life as my wife doesn’t think as highly of Tarantino as I do and was bored by A Serious Man while I found it thrilling. Another part of the definition of Best Picture — also highly subjective — is what movies resonate not just in a given year, but over time. What movies do you want to see over and over and over again? I have seen The Godfather or parts of it at least 60 times because it still plays regularly on cable on Saturday afternoons, and I have never tired of it. Even Titanic, when I pass it on TNT, will make me stop and watch a few minutes while I continue the now decade-long internal debate about whether I actually like the movie or not. No Country For Old Men, Goodfellas (not a winner), The Constant Gardener (not a winner), Traffic (not a winner), Syriana (not a winner), Pulp Fiction (not a winner), The Quiet American (not a winner), Talk To Her (not a winner), Sideways (not a winner), WALL-E (not a winner): these are the movies that linger with me, that I will see over and over and over again and not get tired of them. Personal resonance and a collective historic resonance matter. It not only took me (and many, many others) months to finally see The Hurt Locker, only finally persuaded by its year-end performance, it will be a while before I see it again. It seems like a movie I will pass on cable and watch and marvel at, but never be in the mood to see again. Maybe I’m wrong about that; only time will tell.

What should have won: So what will we think of these movies 10 years from now?

Avatar, thanks to its encouragingly poor showing — just three wins, all technical, and not even a sweep of its technical nominations — seems likely to be relegated to its proper place in history. A huge, ambitious, but deeply, deeply flawed box office success. Given the money it’s made and that James Cameron has already talked about it, a sequel or two seems inevitable. Maybe it’s too much to hope that Cameron will understand why his movie went from Oscar favorite to feeling blue and actually bring in a screenwriter to work with him on any follow-ups.

Up in the Air did not get the credit it deserved. It was lost in the battle between Avatar and The Hurt Locker and overshadowed by high-concept brilliance like Inglourious Basterds. It resonates with audiences because it tells the story of our time. But it doesn’t resonate in quite the same way in Hollywood, where unemployment — while real and a way of life for young actors and screenwriters — is really just time waiting for the first or next gig. So maybe the people who vote on these awards missed the significance of it. How the movie works when/if the economy turns around will be its real test. Does it become an intimate historic document or a quaint fable.

A Serious Man is another example of the what the mature, rejuvenated Coen brothers are doing these days, and a complete mystery to a lot of people. It will not be a cult movie like Big Lebowski or a true Best Picture like No Country For Old Men, but one a favorite of those of us who love their movies, along the lines of Miller’s Crossing or Barton Fink. No one will want to watch it with us, but we’ll watch it again and again.

Precious seems likely to fade from as an Important Movie, but its two Oscar wins are hard to ignore. District 9, Up, The Blind Side and An Education were nominated as a result of the expanded field. Up ranks as one of the best Pixar movies yet and will linger accordingly. The Blind Side will sell a ton of DVD copies to the same people who saw in a theaters, and be seen by almost no one else. The others — while quality movies — are more likely to be seen as novelties a few years from now, while Star Trek and The Hangover will be seen again and again.

What will become of Inglourious Basterds and The Hurt Locker? Two movies about war with two very different approaches (and two very different wars). Basterds is the Anti-World War II movie about World War II. Storming-the-beach and Holocaust movies have become an Oscar cliche, but Basterds revisits the war with anger, revenge and even humor. Because there isn’t much left to say, World War II has now entered the realm of revenge fantasy in Hollywood. Pulp Fiction is probably the most accessible among Tarantino’s movies, but Kill Bill and Basterds are the sort of virtuoso epics his first movies promised. Basterds may be his best movie, but also the hardest for some people to watch because the cinematic World War II cliche has become so pervasive that it is difficult, if not impossible, for many people to see history through the eyes of revisionist history.

And The Hurt Locker? The book has just opened on this war and this period in our history. A handful of early movies about the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars — Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah — felt like efforts to end them. But The Hurt Locker — along with The Messenger and the upcoming Green Zone — seem to view the war in the past tense or at least are viewed by audiences that way. Bigelow’s movie is a good place to start when trying to assess the past decade. It shows us the war, it shows us the people who fight the war, but it leaves it up to us to make judgments about the war. Maybe some of us won’t seek out the movie again, but we will see many other movies that were influenced by it. In the end, that will be its resonance.

Better movies that got screwed: (500) Days of Summer. Not nominated for anything. A crime.

Worst award: I admit I liked Sandra Bullock’s acceptance speech for Best Actress and briefly remembered why she didn’t annoy me way back when. She’s normal. She’s funny. She’s gracious. When she talks, she’s nothing like Julia Roberts. She doesn’t appear to take herself too seriously (even though she probably does). But is this really a performance that ranks with the best ever or, more to the point, anything Meryl Streep has ever done?

Who wants to be millionaire? Apparently not as many people as wanted to be the Dark Knight or an environmentally aware robot.

The original five were all worthy of the larger list, even The Reader and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, both of which seemed nominated based on reputation, expectation or marketing. Along with those two plus Milk, Frost/Nixon and eventual winner Slumdog Millionaire, add these:

WALL-E: The best Pixar movie and possibly the best animated movie ever. Daring and smart, the sort of animated movie that actually talks to its audience instead of looking down on it.

The Visitor: Richard Jenkins was at least nominated for Best Actor, but this movie should have been among the original five.

The Dark Knight: The sort of movie for which the expanded list was created. It made a ton of money and was still respected by most critics. A perfect movie? No, and personally I was distracted by the alleged Gotham setting that was obviously and recognizably Chicago, but it is the sort of big budget, event movie that should be rewarded somehow so that more like it and fewer like Transformers are made.

In Bruges: Takes the place on the list that An Education holds this year, the small, well-acted British movie that more people should have seen.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: Tough call. Maybe Gran Torino would have gotten in based on Clint Eastwood’s recent Oscar history. Or maybe Synedoche, New York, for its ambition, but my bet would be on acknowledgment of a rejuvenated Woody Allen, who found new life (Scoop, notwithstanding) with Scarlett Johansson as his muse and a new troupe of actors and yet another new setting.

What should have won: Frost/Nixon was well acted and intriguing, but it was revisionist history. As many people consider the Frost interviews a farce as consider them revelatory. At best, Frost got Nixon to admit something everyone already knew. At worst, Nixon actually managed to duck Frost in a way he wouldn’t have been able to duck, say, Mike Wallace. In any case, good movie, not Best Picture material.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button felt as excruciatingly long as the life of said Mr. Button.

So Slumdog Millionaire, despite its independentish pedigree and budget, is more movie than film, so what?

Milk, like Michael Mann’s Ali, is a lesson in how to make a traditional biopic without taking a stale, simple approach. Both movies tell stories not just of their chosen character but of the time in which they lived. Movies like Ray and Walk the Line try to tell chronological stories of their characters, but nearly anyone worthy of an entire movie about their lives must also be a significant part of the times in which they lived. To ignore that, or to dismiss it with some retro clothing and vintage cars parked along the street, misses the point of what makes these figures culturally and historically significant. I have no problem with Slumdog having won Best Picture, but Milk is the more powerful film.

Even though there is precious little to be happy about in the movie, The Reader was just happy to be nominated. Kate Winslet was justly rewarded for her performance, but the movie seemed to dodge all the issues it was intended to confront.

Better movies that got screwed: WALL-E. This was the movie we had been waiting from Pixar, a perfect blend of inventiveness and magic in a movie that acknowledges its filmmaking roots. It’s bold — nearly silent for the first third; imaginative — most of the dialogue consists of just two words, WALL-E and Eve, spoken with different intonations throughout the movie; and visually stunning — the moment where WALL-E sticks his robot hand up into stardust is maybe the most visually perfect moment in all the Pixar movies. WALL-E was the moment where the genre of computer animation merged with film as a whole.

Worst award: Nothing too tragic stands out, but Slumdog’s “Jai Ho” seems more anthem than song, while Peter Gabriel deserves some credit for taking over what had once been the traditional Randy Newman Pixar song and replacing it with something beautiful and poignant with “Down to Earth.”

This movie was so good, you almost wanted something else to win Best Picture so you could feel that familiar sense of righteous indignation.

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.

After losing to Robert Redford, Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood, it's a good thing for Martin Scorsese that Russell Crowe didn't decide to direct a movie.

1981 nominated for Raging Bull: Robert Redford won for Ordinary People, a slightly above ordinary drama. It was a fine movie that has weathered a little better than Timothy Hutton’s acting skills, but certainly not a better movie than Raging Bull. Redford, who won primarily because he was Redford, Hollywood’s Golden Boy directing his first movie, directed a few more good movies in The Milagro Beanfield War, A River Runs Through It and Quiz Show before beginning a steady decline into the sappy and dull. If it feels like he directed An Unfinished Life — he actually didn’t; that was Lasse Hallstrom’s fault — it’s only because it’s EXACTLY the kind of movie he would have directed right then.

1989 nominated for The Last Temptation of Christ: Barry Levinson won for Rain Man, a slightly above ordinary drama. Levinson is certainly no slouch as a director having contributed great movies like Diner, Bugsy, Avalon and Wag the Dog, all of which were better than the movie for which he won, and so-so movies like Good Morning Vietnam and The Natural that have been remembered far longer than they deserved to be. Still, The Last Temptation of Christ isn’t the easiest movie to wrap your arms around, so Scorsese’s loss isn’t as tragic here.

1991 nominated for Goodfellas: Kevin Costner won for Dances With Wolves, a slightly above ordinary Western. For years I defended this choice, because a) I was born in South Dakota, and b) I saw it while in high school. It was an interesting film and certainly refreshing take on Westerns, but it was too long, too Important, too everything. As a director, Costner developed a fondness for unintentional disaster movies, creating two of the worst movies ever made in Waterworld and The Postman, which of course, only make Dances look like a miracle by comparison. But this was biggest screw job for Scorsese.

2003 nominated for Gangs of New York: Roman Polanski, to the great relief of anyone who actually saw Scorsese’s opus, won for The Pianist. Polanski, who could also claim to have been screwed in 1981 when Ordinary People beat out Polanski’s Tess, doesn’t make many movies given his whole fugitive/exile lifestyle, but he makes his few offerings count.

2005 nominated for The Aviator: Clint Eastwood won for Million Dollar Baby. This one is certainly debatable, but Eastwood was in the middle of an epic run that produced Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby and his companion World War II pieces, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima in the span of four years. It’s hard to argue with him winning even if in retrospect, The Aviator looks like the better film. At the very least, it’s difficult to feel much outrage for The Aviator not winning. It was good, but it wasn’t that good.

What should have won: Everything Crash wasn’t, Babel was: layered, complex and nuanced. But it was also a very cold movie full of cold characters.

The Queen is an example of what has been happening in British storytelling — or at least which British exports are getting the biggest play in the U.S. — since about the late-90s. Movies like Remains of the Day, Howard’s End, A Room With the View or really anything from the Merchant-Ivory canon no longer stand for British Cinema. Instead, complex stories about crime and politics like The Deal and The Queen — companion pieces featuring Michael Sheen as Tony Blair — or television miniseries like State of Play rule the day now. If only an Oscar could be given to British filmmakers as a whole for not turning their back on complexity. Still, the The Queen, while deserving, was not quite the Best Picture.

If it were possible to honor Clint Eastwood for both of his World War II movies — Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo JIma — at once, then he should have won this award. Flags on its own feels like a pretty straightforward World War II movie. Letters on its own, is too quiet and harsh in its judgment of Americans. Together, they make perfect companion stories about war by taking a very basic approach: show both sides. Seen separately one honors and one doubts. Taken together, they do both as one story. Unfortunately, they cannot he awarded together.

Martin Scorsese finally got his award for Best Picture and Best Director with The Departed. It’s not a perfect movie and it’s not his best movie. But by returning to his crime roots and relocating from New York to Boston, Scorsese was able to make a movie that felt both reassuringly familiar and new at the same time. While it’s far less substantial than some of his work, it’s fun in the way Goodfellas was fun and was more worthy of this award than his other recent close calls, Gangs of New York and The Aviator.

Little Miss Sunshine was just happy to nominated.

Better movies that got screwed:Alejandro Inarritu’s friends Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron made better movies than he did with Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men, but weren’t nominated for Best Picture. Half Nelson manages to come face-to-face with every movie cliche about drug addicts, but each time turns abruptly the other way. Robert Altman made a sad epilogue for storytelling his final movie with A Prairie Home Companion; not his best movie, but a surprisingly lean and effective final statement. More: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Volver, The Lives of Others and Bubble.

Worst award: Nothing stands out as a horrible miscarriage of Oscar justice. Alan Arkin won Best Supporting Actor for being high then dying in an overrated movie, but it’s not the worst award ever. Djimon Hounsou in Blood Diamond and Mark Wahlberg in The Departed were marginally better and Jackie Earle Haley in Little Children was too unsettling in his comeback. Curiously, if Eddie Murphy, who had been a favorite to win this award for Dreamgirls, had won, that might have been the worst award.

The question for the ages is which version of Crash is worse: The 2006 Best Picture winner or David Cronenberg's 1996 paraphiliac fetish fest?

Much better and in-depth arguments can be found here.

What should have won: Brokeback Mountain was better than Crash, but it was a better character study than it was a love story. There is not enough chemistry between Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, who’s sort of irritating in the movie, to qualify the movie as an epic love story. The real power is in the loneliness of Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar. It is an imperfect movie, but it is far, far more worthy of Best Picture than Crash.

Munich has lingered with me much longer than I thought it would. Over the years, I have come to distrust Spielberg’s serious movies for the reasons noted here. Much of this movie is revisionist history. The assassins in question had little or no remorse for what they did in retribution for the kidnapping and killing of Israeli athletes, but Spielberg gives them serious crises of conscience. But that works in explaining the larger history of Israeli-Palestinian relations. In the end, Spielberg and writers Tony Kushner and Eric Roth link the Olympic tragedy to 9/11, which at the time seemed a huge leap of logic to address in the final minute. But Spielberg does it with uncharacteristic subtlety, and it’s really not that far off the mark. The two events are at least bookends to a particular moment in history. Good film, not the best film, but far, far more worthy of Best Picture than Crash.

Capote is a solid movie carried by the performances of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener. It’s engrossing, memorable and far, far more worthy of Best Picture than Crash.

Good Night and Good Luck was the best of the movies given the political situation when the movie was released. George Clooney did his best Clint Eastwood impression, and made a lean, mean movie with almost no fat that works well on two levels. It is a captivating retelling of the history of Joe McCarthy and how public opinion shifted away from his red baiting. But it is also a reminder of how often the media can be wrong for so long and complicit in the worst things that happen in our society. Few in the media dared speak the obvious — this was a witch hunt by a drunk seeking to amplify his own profile — until many, if not most Americans, had ceased being moved by his posturing. Edward R. Murrow, in this instance standing in for all mainstream media then and now, only dares speak the truth when it is safe to do so. It was especially poignant when it was released in 2005, when we confronted two wars and a fierce Republican propaganda machine and the media was again failing to report the obvious out of either fear or laziness. It was also far, far more worthy of Best Picture than Crash.

Crash, ironically, was just happy to be nominated.

Better movies that got screwed: Clooney had a big year. He won Best Supporting Actor for Syriana, a confusing, twisting exploration of shifting loyalties in global geopolitics that requires multiple viewings to fully sort out but it is also dead-on accurate when finally pieced together. The Constant Gardener was beautiful and sad and manages to be about people first while also being about Something. The Squid and the Whale was bitter but remained sweet. Batman Begins, King Kong and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire were all flawed popcorn movies, but served with the richest butter available. A few smaller movies: Cache, Grizzly Man, Joyeux Noel, Paradise Now, Dear Frankie, Millions, and The Ballad of Jack and Rose. Woody’s Allen’s Match Point — following one almost no one liked Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, but it worked for me — was a lesson for the director to stop casting people as avatars for himself. He moved the story out of New York to England, cast young people he had never worked with before and made a dark, unforgiving movie. It was at times very similar to Crimes and Misdemeanors, but it felt completely new. All in all, maybe it wasn’t the best year in movies, but it was one of the smartest ever.

Worst award: Crash, obviously.

Maybe Million Dollar baby wasn't good enough for Best Picture, but it could have been worse. It could have been directed by Christopher Columbus.

Before Sunset: Stick to what people love about your movie. Before Sunrise didn’t resonate because it was a great love story, but because people enjoyed two smart people flirt the way people flirt. So fewer moments of consequence, more meandering, thoughtful dialogue which still builds to a final, moment of consequence.

Spider-man 2: Ask the experts. How much Michael Chabon really had to do with the second movie in this series is debatable, but the effort to include him in the story’s creation — and his subsequent screen story credit — emphasizes a basic rule of comic book movies: When you need help, turn to someone who has read comic books, which is almost no one in Hollywood.

The Bourne Supremacy: Keep an audience on its toes. For instance, try killing off your primary, lovely, well-liked female character in the first few minutes just to remind people that anything goes.

Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban: Do not let Christopher Columbus direct the movie. Alfonso Cuaron opens up a wondrous world, and the scope of Potter’s existence broadens to include misty days and wooden bridges and lakes and sunlight through trees on a fall afternoon. Cuaron directs a movie with colors and moods reminiscent of what childhood actually looks and feels like.

What should have won: Million Dollar Baby was a lean, mean, movie machine, but its winning was a makeup for Mystic River getting rolled over by Lord of the Rings the previous year.

Ray, like Walk the Line a couple years later, was a pure formula biopic. Compared to something really inventive like Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould or something that doesn’t try to tell the whole story but focuses grandly on one part of a life like Ali, Ray was pretty blah and uninspiring movie with good music.

As a biopic, The Aviator was more complex and ambitious than Ray. If not for Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese might have won the Oscar for this movie, but after that disaster and its shameful nomination, Hollywood was on the lookout for holes in anything he did. The Aviator was a little too obvious Oscar bait and Leo wasn’t quite up to the weight of the movie, but it is a much better film in the long run than Million Dollar Baby and probably should have won.

Sideways. Such a sweet, sad movie that understands its characters so well. Alexander Payne’s strength is to create interesting and complex characters, put them in an impossible situation and see what happens. Was it Best Picture? Probably not. It’s too intimate for such accolades. It doesn’t resonate in film history, just with the people who see it. It is the movie that most feels like a book among these five, something can be read/watched and studied over and over not for its technique but to better understand why people do the things people do.

Finding Neverland, was a fine movie, but really, it was just happy to be nominated.

Better movies that got screwed: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was one of the most inventive and educational movies about romance ever made, at once depressing as a relationship is deconstructed to its essence and reassuring because it reminds us that it is the essence that matters, not all the other crap that happens on the way. The Incredibles is very nearly a perfect animated movie that only becomes a little familiar in the last third. Dash discovering that he is running across water and saying nothing, only giggling is a lesson for modern animators in how not to clutter up a movie with too much dialogue. Also: The Sea Inside, A Very Long Engagement, Hotel Rwanda, Maria Full of Grace, Closer, Shaun of the Dead and Enduring Love (which suffered from the totally nondescript name of its great source material). Garden State was the best argument since Pulp Fiction for adding a Best Soundtrack Oscar.

Worst award: Two awards were given to actors doing impressions of more famous people. Jamie Foxx was fine in Ray, but really, was he better than Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda or Paul Giamatti, who wasn’t even nominated for Sideways? Cate Blanchett’s Supporting Actress award for The Aviator was really for Elizabeth, Veronica Guerin, The Shipping News, Pushing Tin and every other role in which she had to create a character mostly from scratch instead of mimicking the speech patterns of another famous actress. She was fine in The Aviator, but so much better in so many other movies. Take your pick of the other nominees: a grown-up Natalie Portman who stole Closer, Sophie Okendo, Laura Linney or Virginia Madsen.

When adapting a much-loved book into movie, it's best to follow the Peter Jackson's approach: make the movie so long that by the time it's over, most people will have forgotten any liberties you took with the source material.

In the Hollywood version of this story, Inman and Ada are destined lovers torn asunder, and the war — rather than amplifying their perception of love gets in the way. So much of Anthony Minghella’s movie version is right — the slog and chaos of a war that too often is portrayed as orderly and destined, full of battles, not doubt — but getting the entire point of the story wrong negated whatever good he managed. In the end, I was left trying to puzzle over the likelihood that any man, having escaped this ware and been chased by all manner of pursuer on his odyssey home would make one of his first acts upon seeing his previously torn-asunder lover is to shave his beard. With an open blade. Dry. In the cold.

Not a chance. If it really was a destined love, she wouldn’t find a little scruff.

That Cold Mountain did not even get nominated for Best Picture remains proof that while Hollywood’s Oscar taste is often so bad (see again: Crash), it is not blind.

What should have won: There were better films and some overlooked films, but all five Best Picture candidates were more or less worthy of a nomination. No one was just happy to be nominated, a rare occurrence during the hay days of Miramax’s absurd Oscar campaigns.

Lost in Translation belongs in the class of movies that awkwardly get marketed as romantic comedies rather than romantic dramas and live to tell about, proving — as (500) Days of Summer did again this past year — that someone, somewhere can still make movies about romance and find no need for Matthew McConaughey or Kate Hudson. Translation is also the only movie up for Best Picture that came from an original screenplay.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World had a terrible name but it was, even with its nomination, an underrated movie and again defied whatever expectations anyone might have had for Russell Crowe’s taste or career choices.

Seabiscuit felt at times like a big-screen version of something Ken Burns would have made for PBS and was very close to just being happy to be nominated. If one movie should have been bumped in place of something bolder — like 21 Grams, City of God or In America — this would be it. But Jeff Bridges was good enough that it was possible to ignore the fact that Tobey Maguire looked nothing like a jockey. And if more historical dramas felt a little closer to Ken Burns than, say, Michael Bay, Hollywood would be a much better place.

Clint Eastwood would get a makeup award the next year when Million Dollar Baby won. In any other year, Mystic River would have been pretty much a no-brainer, but not in the final hurrah of the hobbits.

The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King won this award more than a year earlier when the release of the second movie in the series proved that Peter Jackson had done something remarkable in bringing Tolkein’s epic to the screen. The third movie is my favorite of the three, and I may be one of the few people who saw the movie and liked the epilogue of pseudo-endings and was not bothered that the original ending of the third book — the battle at the Shire — was changed.

Better movies that got screwed: Despite being sullied by later sequels that were less entertaining and less surprising, Pirates of the Caribbean was pure fun, a popcorn movie with real butter, and featured one of the greatest character introductions in history. Finding Nemo was stunning visually, but felt a little more Disney than Pixar by the time it was done. City of God was good enough to earn a Best Director nomination, but was screwed out of the Best Picture race. In America, 21 Grams, The Barbarian Invasions and American Splendor all would have been worthy Best Picture nominees. If Kill Bill Vol. 1 had been released as one movie with Kill Bill Vol. 2, it would have been a very long movie but might have received the credit it deserved. Whale Rider, A Mighty Wind, The Good Thief and Love Actually all had their moments.

Worst award: Renee Zellweger is a fine actress, and that this is a terrible award has more to do with the writing of her part than her performance. Her character in the book was a binding force that held together a sometimes confusing narrative and kept it from slipping into melodrama. Her character in the movie was comic relief and almost completely without nuance. She won for Acting rather than acting. Rather than honor Zellweger for Bridget Jones’ Diary and Chicago with an award for Cold Mountain, how nice would it have been to see Patricia Clarkson get some credit for Pieces of April? Also, Charlize Theron was fine and all in Monster, but Naomi Watts and Samantha Morton were better and didn’t have to put on a fat suit to be convincing.

Clearly, Chicago had a better year than New York.

Chicago: The eventual winner from the original five.

Gangs of New York: Not even remotely Martin Scorsese’s best work and unworthy of being among the 10 movies, let alone the original five as it was. But with the Weinsteins stumping for it, there’s no removing it from the list and it stands even then as a convincing argument for expanding the pool of movies. Any time an unworthy movie (See: Cider House Rules, Chocolat, Life is Beautiful) is nominated, a good movie misses a chance at finding a wider audience.

The Hours: Another of the original five. Small movie with big stars and a prosthetic nose.

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Epic in scale, epic in length.

The Pianist: The best of the original five and winner of two big awards — Best Actor and Best Director — but not the biggest.

The Quiet American: The first runner-up and first addition to an expanded list. It was far more worthy of the Best Picture slot than Gangs, but was screwed and nearly buried in in the aftermath of 9/11.

Minority Report: Steven Spielberg had a couple options to choose from this year, and at the time, this was considered the better movie. Maybe it still is. In any case, Hollywood can’t expand a list of Best Picture nominees and not include Spielberg if he has something remotely worthy.

Talk to Her: The token foreign entry for which Pedro Almodovar received a Best Director nomination and Best Original Screenplay win. Worthy of its spot, but not the best option for a token foreign entry on this list. But given its success in other categories, it’s a no-brainer that it would have been nominated.

About Schmidt: Jack Nicholson’s first major attempt at playing someone other than himself after a few years. Alexander Payne made a movie that is sad and rich, and with Nicholson it sneaks onto the list in place of a couple movies that did better at the box office.

Far From Heaven: The push for The Pianist pushed this movie aside, but an expanded list would like have found room for it.

This expanded list of 10 still would leave out Catch Me If You Can, Spielberg’s other, more entertaining entry of the year; The Bourne Identity, a movie that, while not as good as its two sequels, changed the nature of action movies and forced the James Bond series to get serious; Y Tu Mama Tambien, which could easily have been the token foreign entry in any other year; and the Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour, a much better movie about violence and crime in New York than Gangs of New York. It was a good year for movies.

What should have won: Chicago was fine. I avoid musicals at all nearly all costs — unless it involves Cartman, of course — but when I finally saw Chicago, I enjoyed it. It was lavish, it was funny, it was fine. Not remotely my favorite movie of the year, but as far as Best Picture goes it’s a lot easier to understand and accept in retrospect than, say, Shakespeare in Love, which seems like a fluke of marketing.

Watching The Hours, I felt at times like I had returned to Contemporary American Lit class in college, but it’s a quality movie with good acting. Had it won, it might have seemed like another of those marketing flukes, but it’s a good movie.

The second Lord of the Rings movie was much longer and much broader than the first, its scale was greater and we begin to see the vastness of the world Tolkien created realized on the screen. But with another movie still to come, it was too early to do anything more than nominate this movie. But it did help cement the next year’s winner — the final Rings movie only had to not suck in order to win.

The Pianist was a stunning reminder that Roman Polanski was more than fugitive, he was still an active and brilliant filmmaker. The best of those nominated, it was duly award for its acting and directing.

Gangs of New York was just happy to be nominated.

Better movies that got screwed: The Quiet American was a beautiful, sad and haunting movie that was nearly buried by post-9/11 kneejerk patriotism that nearly made it treason to admit that America hasn’t always been the shining city on the hill. Michael Caine, so cloying and obvious in The Cider House Rules, was dark and restrained, and the movie captured the spirit of one of Graham Greene’s more prescient works. About Schmidt was such an unexpected departure for Nicholson, who had grown comfortable playing himself in movies. Almodovar’s Talk to Her was devastating. Solaris was hated by so many people, which was more a reaction to the difference between what people expected the movie to be and what it was. Produced by James Cameron, starring George Clooney and directed by Steven Soderbergh, some people were expecting a visionary sci-fi movie, something along the lines of The Abyss, only better. But it was really a meditation on sadness, suicide and love, a haunting movie that just happened to be set in deep space. Y Tu Mama Tambien, The Good Girl, Lovely & Amazing, Roger Dodger, About a Boy, Kissing Jessica Stein, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Insomnia, One Hour Photo and Gerry proved it was still possible to make small, entertaining or interesting films that weren’t obvious Oscar bait like The Hours.

Worst award: Martin Scorsese didn’t win, but the fact that he was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director for a movie that was a mess is the best example of how Miramax manipulated the Oscars with marketing. Scorsese should have won for Raging Bull and Goodfellas. His other work — Taxi Driver, After Hours, King of Comedy, Mean Streets, Age of Innocence — should not have led to him sitting in the audience, looking like an expectant sixth-grader waiting his turn in the spelling bee, when Roman Polanski won the director award. It was not becoming of Scorsese and it was Miramax’s fault. Marty would eventually win his award for a movie that was just fun to watch and not — like Gangs and The Aviator — put into production for the primary purpose of winning Scorsese and Oscar.

A lesson for aspiring directors who want to win an Oscar: Forget creativity and boldness, set aside grand visions. Bore us or tug relentlessly at our heartstrings or, even better, do a little of both.

While some tried and seemingly true formulas fell flat — Julia Roberts in romantic comedy? Gold. Angelina Jolie running around in tight clothing and a bad British accent? Can’t miss. Disney in a magical underwater world? Jackpot. David Spade in a mullet? Genius — we learned some very important lessons in what turned out to be an educational year in audience taste and a very blah for year Best Picture. A few of those lessons:

Ocean’s Eleven: Popcorn movies can be fun and fulfilling, as long as they are served with real butter.

The Lord of the Rings: Take the big-budget, adapted-from-much-loved-books fantasy movies and make them as far away from Hollywood as possible to keep them away from too many prying eyes, hands and editors and people with “helpful” notes until it’s too late for them to do anything. If this had been made on the backlot at Warner Brothers it would have looked like something directed by Chris Columbus.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone: Speaking of . . . Never, ever let Chris Columbus near anything remotely inventive. He will drain ever ounce of wonder from the most wondrous thing.

Swordfish: John Travolta should have quit while he was ahead with Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty.

Pearl Harbor: As much as we can prepare to rip Michael Bay for making another awful movie with too many explosions, too many emotions and too many of everything, as giddy as we can get having such outstanding proof of his total ineptitude as a filmmaker right there on the screen with a big summer release date for all the world to see, we cannot prepare for Bay making a movie so bad we almost feel sorry for hm. Also, that there are times when the trailer should be released rather than the movie.

The Mummy Returns: Hollywood executives are simply running out of ideas for new movies. Does anybody have any fresh ideas?

Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles: Any little old fresh idea out there will do.

Dr. Doolittle 2: Hello?

Scary Movie 2, American Pie 2, Rush Hour 2, Planet of the Apes, Pokemon The Movie 3, Hannibal: Anyone?

Jurassic Park III: No, seriously does anybody out there have anything original to say?

Shrek: Oh, wait, whew. Someone has made something new and fresh. Quick: get a sequel into production ready now.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: Angelina Jolie really is built like a cartoon character, but even that barely qualifies as entertainment.

Shallow Hal: Gwynnie in a fat suit is still Gwynnie.

Sidewalks of New York: Someone should have stopped Ed Burns before he killed again.

The Affair of the Necklace: It really is possible for a movie to be as boring as it sounds.

Glitter: Watching an uber-celebrity’s whole celebrityness begin to totally implode on the big screen isn’t nearly as fun as we thought it would be.

Monster’s Inc: Pixar, unlike Disney, can do no wrong.

The Shipping News: Miramax can do very, very wrong. Didn’t we learn this lesson with The Cider House Rules? Just keep good books away from the Weinsteins and Lasse Hallstrom. Also, the Hallstrom who made My Life As a Dog and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape must have died at some point in the mid-90s.

What should have won: A Beautiful Mind was so underwhelming, such a safe attempt at mid-brow drama from the safest of safe directors, so blah I am unable to even muster enough passion about it to call its win a travesty. It was simply what you would expect from Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, not bad, not brilliant, just sort of there, lurking, waiting to be watched and overpraised.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings was just a taste of what was to come in the series, and Hollywood seems reluctant to honor the early movies in a series just in case the rest of the series sucks. In any case, the first movie in LOTR series — also the shortest — was the least dramatic and least worthy of this award.

In The Bedroom looks at first like that Miramax movie that each year gets far more praise and comes closer to winning awards than it rightfully should (See: The Cider House Rules, Life is Beautiful, Chocolat, Il Postino); in other words the movie that is just happy to be nominated. But this one was the real deal, an acting showcase that Miramax’s aggressive marketing helped uncover rather than create. That said, there were better movies that didn’t get nominated.

Gosford Park is a beautifully mannered movie with a different tone that Robert Altman’s work at the time like The Player, Short Cuts and Pret a Porter. Of those nominated, this would have been my choice, but it is still not Nashville or even Short Cuts.

Moulin Rouge! was just so happy to be nominated it decided to use an exclamation point. (So, for some this is more than a happy-to-be-nominated film; it is the better movie that got screwed. But the appeal of Baz Luhrmann eludes me to this day.)

Better movies that got screwed: Michael Mann’s Ali remains my favorite of his films — bio pics are difficult to do well, even more so when the subject is one of the most well-known, well-documented personalities in history. Will Smith does an admirable impression of Ali, but unlike lesser biopics like Ray and even The Aviator, Mann’s movie isn’t about how much like the real person the actor playing him or her sounds or looks. Smith captures the essence of Ali while Mann recreates a period in Ali’s life that has been extensively documented but it is poorly understood, the repercussions of his transformation from Clay to Ali. Also, it’s a bit of a shame that such a safe movie like A Beautiful Mind was honored in a year that produced some daring and really inventive, if not entirely perfect, movies like The Royal Tenenbaums, Ghost World, Memento, Waking Life, Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive, Amores Perros, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Center of the World and The Deep End. Tilda Swinton’s performance in The Deep End is the sort of role that almost never gets noticed come Oscar time, and, true to form, the Academy whiffed.

Worst award: Maybe it is just that every time I see Jennifer Connelly in a movie, I feel like she has added no range in the years since Career Opportunities. Her performance, like the whole movie, is just sort of blah and any of the other women nominated for Best Supporting Actress would have been better choices.

What we do in life echoes in eternity? We thought it was the tagline for Gladiator, but really it was Ridley Scott warning Michael Bay to stop making crap.

One of the richest years of movies in recent history, the year some of my favorite filmmakers did some of their best work — Cameron Crowe with Almost Famous, the Coen brothers with O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, Steven Soderbergh with Traffic, Curtis Hanson with Wonder Boys, David Mamet with State and Main, M. Night Shyamalan with Unbreakable (alas, it was also the year Woody Allen made Small Time Crooks, so not everyone was perfect) — and the year when former stalwarts of the new independent film like Soderbergh and Ang Lee began to bring art to the mainstream, this is also the year of one of the most frustratingly illogical movie moments.

First off, I more or less enjoyed Fed Ex: The Movie, sometimes known as Cast Away. Tom Hanks was as good as he has been in anything; very few actors are watchable on screen alone for as long as Hanks was. Yes, Wilson, the volleyball with a heart of gold and a face of blood, was a needless contrivance placed in the movie by a director who didn’t trust his audience to sit still while Hanks said nothing. (As Wall-E later proved, just watching a near-silent main character is enough if the movie is rich enough, and Cast Away’s on-island sequences were that.) But, I am willing to forgive all of Wilson, even the overwrought parting scene between Hanks and his synthetic, product-placed friend, for the sake of watching Hanks’ character dig deep into his Boy Scout youth to remember how to make fire without a match, learning with each mistake, Fed Ex Man taking his place alongside Cro Magnon Man, evolution in fast forward. I am even nearly willing to forgive the distracting product placement itself, Wilson and Jeep and Fed Ex, even Fed Ex Man’s final act in the movie of delivering a package — product placement is so common that it’s easy to ignore (at least consciously). Until, that is, it gets in the way of the plot.

Fed Ex Man is willing to open every package that washes up on his deserted island except one. He finds conveniently helpful things in each package, netting and blades and things that make his life livable on this island, allowing him to catch fish, light his fires, extract teeth and even make rope to hang himself when he considers that route off the island. Yet he stops just short and leaves one package unopened. Why? It has a cool logo? He just had a feeling? He was a Fed Ex Man to the end and felt that if he had even one package to deliver he would stay motivated to leave the island? Given his luck with other packages — ice skates? — it would seem worth taking a chance on that last package just in case it’s, you know, a satellite phone. How pissed would Fed Ex Man have been if he delivered that package, stuck around to see it opened (that’s another problem: wouldn’t you want to see what was in there if you had brought it all the way back from from a deserted fucking island?) and find out that if he had just opened it himself he might have gotten off the island a year earlier and avoided some do-it-yourself dentistry? Just saying.

What should have won: As summer blockbusters go, Gladiator was a significant step up from crap like Godzilla and Armageddon and stumbled dangerously close to actual filmmaking. But Best Picture? No.

Steven Soderbergh at least took home Best Director for Traffic. But he cost himself another award by making another Best Picture nominee,  Erin Brokovich, a movie nearly totally free of the complicated hopelessness as Traffic. Brokovich was much easier for people in Hollywood to understand. After all, Julie Roberts was in it, looking all indignant saving the day, making lawyers richer, some other rich people slightly less rich and some poor people into new rich people. Point is, Soderbergh’s more mainstream movie stole votes from his opus and let Gladiator win.

Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, had the vast epicness with deserts and forests and love torn asunder that under normal circumstances the Academy loves. But it also had subtitles, and asking your average Oscar voter to not just watch a movie, but read it, too, is just too much. But it’s notable that Lee, like Soderbergh one of the last filmmakers to emerge from independent film when independent film was still, more or less independent, emerged with box office and Oscar recognition around the same time.

Chocolat was just happy to be nominated.

Better movies that got screwed: Cameron Crowe was recognized for Almost Famous with a win for original screenplay but deserved more. Throw in You Can Count on Me, Best in Show, Wonder Boys, High Fidelity, O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, Pollock and State and Main and you have a group of smart, well-made movies sans pretentious French pronunciation.

Worst award: Both lead acting awards went to people for work that was less than their best. Russell Crowe could have reasonably won the year before for The Insider, so winning for Gladiator could have been a makeup award. Julia Roberts won not so much for acting but for being Julia Roberts going by someone else’s name, in this case, Erin Brokovich. Oh, sure, she wore skimpier clothes as Erin, and was all sassy and smart-mouthy when she had to be, but it was still pretty much Julia up there on the screen. Ellen Burstyn (Requiem for a Dream), Laura Linney (You Can Count on Me) and Joan Allen (The Contender) were all more interesting.