While Peter Jackson took a few well-placed liberties with the stories as he brought three much-loved books to the big screen, he stayed true to their spirit. Anthony Minghella brought another much-loved — if slightly less well known — book to the big screen and botched it by missing the point entirely.

In a few days, the Best Picture will be chosen from 10 movies rather than five. The move was made to try to include more movies the average moviegoer might have actually seen, but the end result — other than the inclusion of The Blind Side — was more movies like the original five. It’s a solid group, certainly varied in its subject matter, scale and intended audience, but it’s not the best collection of 10 movies one could imagine. If the Academy had been picking from 10 movies in 2003, the list would have been much more substantive even with the inclusion of Gangs of New York.

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.

One of the richest years of movies in recent history, the year when former stalwarts of the new independent film like Steven 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. No, not that Gladiator won Best Picture, but that was pretty bad, too.

For those of us who have grown increasingly appalled at the idea of Avatar winning Best Picture — pick your excuse: horrible dialogue, 2-D character development that is subordinate to the 3-D action, the truly discomforting idea that these big blue people are all fine and one with nature, but a white guy pretending to be one of them becomes their chosen one, or whatever he was — there is some good news.

The Sixth Sense got all of the attention for its surprise ending. But after a decade, the real surprise ending might be that in a year that brought some truly inventive movies by a new generation of filmmakers, the Best Picture, American Beauty, is in fact still the best picture.

Five movies about just two topics — Elizabethan England and World War II — could not have been more different from each other. As it turned out, the wrong movie with the queen won, and the wrong movie about World War II has been portrayed as the one that got shafted.