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OSCARS DEATH RACE: HUGO

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Fearless Sarah D. Bunting of Tomatonation.com is making it her mission to watch every single film nominated for an Oscar before the Academy Awards Ceremony on February 26, 2012. She is calling this journey her Oscars Death Race. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here. And you can follow Sarah through this quixotic journey here.]

Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) lives in a fairy tale, in both senses of that word. He's not troubled with real-life adolescent bagatelles like homework, and he lives unsupervised in the clock tower of a Parisian train station, where he's in charge of keeping the clocks running.

But Hugo is unsupervised because his parents have both died. (…I believe? I'm not entirely clear on what has become of his mother; his father, played by Jude Law, is consumed by a fiery backdraft in flashback, and this is not explained either.) Hugo's druncle Claude (Ray Winstone) takes custody of the boy, sticks around long enough for Hugo to learn the station-clock trade, then goes on walkabout, and Hugo is left to fend for himself. Fortunately, he's gifted at fixing things, so he keeps the clocks running in the hopes that nobody will notice Claude has gone missing, and dodges the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), an orphan-phobe with a mechanical leg and an equally hostile Doberman. Hugo nicks pastries from bakeries, and spare parts from Georges, the sour proprietor of a toy stall (Ben Kingsley), because on top of keeping the time and staying out of the boys' home, Hugo has a third job: trying to fix an old automaton repatriated by his father from a museum, in the hope that the machine will send him one last message from beyond the grave. And it does, in more ways than one.

Hugo is beautiful entirely aside from the thoughtful 3D effects. Snow looks real, and cold; clock gears look real, and old; the characters frequently compare movies to dreams, and the visual style has a heightened, almost Burton-y dreaminess, in the small touches almost more than the big showy bits (the bishop's sarcophagus; the weave of Hugo's sweater). The characters, and the way they're shot, contribute to the fable feeling; Hugo shortly finds an ally in Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), Georges's goddaughter, a girl who loves libraries and big words and longs for one of the adventures she's enjoyed within them, and her ally is the peerless Christopher Lee as bookseller Monsieur Labisse. Labisse is usually shot from an angle that emphasizes his towering size, which both intimidates and protects.

The mythological story — the labors to earn back the notebook, the redemption of the warrior of the past who now toils in heartbroken obscurity — might not seem like an intuitive choice for Martin Scorsese. But the story is a love letter to film, and to the "indoorsy kids" through the ages who, confined to quarters, learned the world through the stories of others. That sort of elegy could pall quickly, and the speeches about the magic of cinema are…just that, but they're also relatively short, utterly sincere, and backed by Scorsese's voluminous knowledge. I liked The Artist well enough, but Hugo makes it look even gimmickier by comparison.

The superstitions of children that aren't just children's; Law, examining the automaton and recalling the company he kept in AI; Isabelle's horrified "DON'T YOU LIKE BOOKS?!" and Georges's defeated "Please, just — go away" — there is a bittersweet current running through Hugo that makes it much more than its technical achievements, and a wonderful note to hit for Scorsese. I love the man's work, but he can present at times as alienated from the concept that movies are by and about human beings. Here, he's operating from that idea's lap, and that shift shows up all over the movie; just when you feel like you've had enough of the glowering station agent and the gags with his leg locking on him, Cohen delivers this line from the depths of a sinking chest: "Yes, I was injured in the war and it will never heal, good day mademoiselle." And there's the character in three dimensions, no special glasses required.

Sarah D. Bunting co-founded Television Without Pity.com, and has written for Seventeen, New York Magazine, MSNBC.com, Salon, Yahoo!, and others. She's the chief cook and bottle-washer at TomatoNation.com. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here.

OSCARS DEATH RACE: Surveying the race for Best Supporting Actress?

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Sarah D. Bunting of Tomatonation.com is watching every single film nominated for an Oscar before the Academy Awards Ceremony on February 26, 2012. She is calling this journey her Oscars Death Race. She has completed the category for Best Supporting Actress and now surveys the competition. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here. And you can follow Sarah through this quixotic journey here.]

Picking the winners in Oscar categories reminds me a lot of the arguments about the MVP in baseball, and how we should define "valuable" — is it the guy with the best stats? is it the guy who made the biggest difference to an otherwise mediocre team? a combination?

I'll compare almost anything to baseball, given a chance, but the MVP-argument parallel is apt in many of Oscar's acting categories this year, where several of the nominees represent not just a notable achievement in acting, but also the only thing worth a damn in the film in which it appeared.

The nominees

Bérénice Bejo (The Artist): I liked her well enough, but I wouldn't say she put a stamp on the role, more than anyone else would have.

Jessica Chastain (The Help): Adorable in this part. Absolutely sold me on a movie I expected to loathe with her sheer delight in shaking the chicken.

Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids): I like McCarthy, I like the idea of that character, but the writing of it seemed like a man's notes on a woman's guess at what a real person like that character would act like, if that makes any sense at all. Points for the effort, but it's too broad, and the nom reads like the Academy trying to show that it doesn't discriminate against comedies.

Janet McTeer (Albert Nobbs): Here's where the MVP conversation comes into play. McTeer keeps an inconsistent and overworked script on the right side of twee whenever she's onscreen. It's a steady and inviting performance, not too studied, and it would get my vote.

Octavia Spencer (The Help): The oddsmaker's pick, as of this writing. Another nomination for an above-average rendering of too-broad writing.

Who shouldn't be here: Bejo probably got filed in Best Supporting so she wouldn't run into the twin buzzsaws of Viola Davis and Meryl Streep in Best Actress, but I think her role's too big for this category.

Who should be here, but isn't: I wouldn't have minded seeing Robin Wright get a nod here for Rampart; she really raised her game in 2011. Ditto Amy Ryan in Win Win, which also threw a shutout at the Oscars. Hat tip to members of the Bridesmaids and The Help casts (Rose Byrne; Sissy Spacek) who could just as easily have slotted in here.

Who should win: McTeer.

Who will win: It's not impossible that voters give Davis Best Actress, then decide to share some wealth to Bejo in Best Supporting. (You could argue that two actresses from The Help might split the vote; I don't see Chastain figuring in this one, though.) But Spencer is the safe pick.

OSCARS DEATH RACE: RIO

A serviceable but obvious animated tale about a blue macaw named Blu (Jesse Eisenberg, typecast even in avian-cartoon form) who reluctantly returns to his roots in Brazil, then finds love…and his wings. Awww! But also, kind of zzzz! Rio's most striking visuals and renderings of animal physicality will only remind you of How To Train Your Dragon, a smarter and more thoughtful film across the board, which you will then want to watch instead!

You've seen it done before, and better, but Rio is not terrible. It has flashes of wit, like the monkey text-message exchange, and it does right by chase scenes and fight sequences; the birds-versus-monkeys rumble in the bird nightclub is fun. The voice acting is fine, screeches and strains less than you might expect, and George Lopez is enjoyably low-key as Rafael the toucan, despite the damp counsel and one-liners he's tasked with disgorging. Casting Bebel Gilberto as Rafael's wife is a clever touch, but it's a pity Gilberto wasn't tapped to write or perform the nominated song. Instead, it's a loud, generic pastiche that should prompt a conversation at the Academy about what the Original Song category is trying to do in the twenty-first century. Assuming that "not suck" is an action item, perhaps it's not necessary to award this Oscar when the "selection" is as thin as this year's.

That the Academy has failed to acknowledge changing times isn't Rio's fault. Yeah, the movie's version of Brazilian culture makes Epcot look like a grad seminar, but it's for kids, and basically it's unobjectionable — more than I can say for some of jalopies double-parked in the Best Picture lane. I just don't know what it's doing here; Brahms could have written that song, it wouldn't beat the Muppets.

OSCARS DEATH RACE: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

A disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), is called to the home of aging magnate Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to investigate an ancient crime in the magnate's family — the disappearance and presumed death of Vanger's niece, Harriet, decades ago. Parked in a drafty cabin on the island where many of the Vangers still live (and back-bite), Blomkvist looks into the locked-room mystery, and as matters become more complex, he requires a research assistant — the same researcher, it turns out, who dug into him at Henrik Vanger's request. This researcher is, of course, the eponymous Girl, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara): pierced, bony, rendered by turns mute and blunt by traumas past and present.

(Spoilers ahead.)

It takes about 45 minutes for their paths to converge, but the time is enjoyable. The entire movie is enjoyable, even when it's difficult (That Scene) (also, That Other Scene), or predictable (you can throw as much Stellan Skarsgard at the trope as you want, but it's still a Talking Killer), or disappointing (it's not a travesty that Mikael and Lisbeth start Doing It or anything, and it leads to a couple of good lines, but Craig and Mara had such sparky and fun partner chemistry that that subplot came off lazy). I hadn't read the books or seen the previous version of the filmed story, so I had no preconceptions about Fincher's version — except that I would only spend two and a half hours plus with that material because of Fincher.

I should warn you now that I'm one of Those Zodiac Cultists who bangs on about how the Academy jobbed that movie, Downey is awesome in it, blah blah blah, and I'll skip the bulk of the harangue, but that film showcases what I liked about Dragon Tattoo: the little moments in longtime/working relationships. Fincher's good with a credits sequence (Panic Room) and good with a tricksy time lapse (Zodiac), he varies his shots in their angles and lengths and his cutting team keeps things interesting and on pace. But my favorite Fincher thing is how he lets his actors work with each other, letting gallows humor percolate up, waiting for that exchanged eye-roll. There's an understanding that the characters have interior lives, opinions about sushi and double-parking, entirely outside of the film's plot. Some of that proceeds from the scripting, obviously, but it's seldom the same writer on each movie, and that wouldn't explain the seemingly uniform respect the films have for the partnership vibe. Nobody gets better play on an actor's face when his/her character is struggling not to call a higher-up a fucking moron than David Fincher. Probably not what he wants on his tombstone, but it's nice for Rooney Mara under the circumstances.

Mara's very good; she doesn't take shortcuts where many actors would, and her stoniness isn't uniform — sometimes it's just stony, blank, but at other times her face wavers, and you can see the effort of control and how tightly the lid is clamped. She lets us know Lisbeth as who she is, not just what we get to see her do. That nuancing is one of those "if you don't notice it, that's how you know it's good" things, so it's nice to see it recognized by the Academy even if the performance functionally can't win. Mara works fantastically with Craig, too; at the end of the movie, I was bummed, not because of the lonely-hearts twist (that was merely annoying) but because I wanted to keep watching them hang out together. I felt the same way at the end of Zodiac — can't Downey and Jake Gyllenhaal get a TV show and solve cases together while wearing terrible '70s scarves? One that airs every day? At…my house? Kudos to Fincher for getting these performances, and also to his casting director(s), who always set him up nice. (Robin Wright, usually not my jam, turns in the second textured performance of the year that I loved and nobody else noticed. And yes, I am also That Guy Who Won't Shut Up About Rampart.)

Probably the best possible treatment of the material, based on what I know of it; solidly captivating and nice to look at. Hard to say why it didn't get a Best Director nod, but it wouldn't have won that anyway, and it likely won't win anything else. Still, as my man Joe Reid says, it's a good sit.

GREY MATTERS: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN is disjointed and brilliant and baffling

Nothing gets a horror fan more ticked off than a director with airs claiming her new film isn’t really horror but actually a character study exploring the deep psychological recesses of blah blah blah. In the case of We Need to Talk About Kevin director Lynne Ramsay, you’ve got a fancy Scot arthouse filmmaker (Morvern Callar) big on New Wave affect who probably doesn’t think she’s making a horror movie. Lionel Shriver, author of the book the film is based upon, probably thought that, by mentioning horror movies frequently, she could escape the fact that she was blending multiple horror narratives to make one very good horror novel that wasn’t really just a genre effort.

Put the in-denial text and film together, multiply by the accumulated subtexts, carry over the pretenses and, um, wait – is this an algebra equation?

It’s at least a tripartite genre denial, but that’s just one of a panoply of self-imposed avoidances that define the annoyingly interesting We Need to Talk to Kevin. It’s a film where there’s very little to be even slightly certain about, and not in a satisfying, Don’t Look Now/Nicholas Roeg way.

Ramsay’s film fascinates like Goldfrapp’s radical, downcast remix of Lady Gaga’s “Judas” fascinates: as a remix more than an adaptation. Goldfrapp took Gaga’s pop-club banger, cut it to half time and deconstructed it to almost unrecognizable effect. It was creepy, scary, strange, way cool, but not a touch on the original, and is ultimately mainly interesting in relation to its source. In a similar way, Kevin is big on its own abstractions and its relation to the original text, but mainly, I think back on it going, “Why?”

Like the book, Ramsay’s film is about motherhood as living hell – as Job times pi – as suffered by Eva (Tilda Swinton). But Ramsay’s dumped Shriver’s brilliant, flux-y mix of liberalism-critique-meets-Alien-meets-Frankenstein-meets-The Omen-meets-absolution (whew!) in favor of, well, I’ve no idea, really.

Instead, in Goldfrappian manner, Ramsay cuts and pastes bits and pieces of Shriver’s Eva – the cold yuppie, terrified victim, asshole liberal, terrified boomer, Accepting Woman of Eternal Suffering (there are really old blues songs to hammer this in) – and insists that Swinton perform all of them at disconnected junctures. The result is what it might feel like flipping through two twins’ life-long photo album with no captions, with years cut out in between, the pages flipping randomly, and nobody around to tell you what’s what. Could lead to serious WTF. Either that, or Ramsay wants Swinton to “do” archetypes instead of characters. Or something.

But Ramsay’s a fantastic maker of cinema. As much as I was baffled/dazzled by her super-skilled disjointedness, color-coded segues (tomato red never worked so hard) and brilliant dreamtime flow, I was still happy to go with it at the time. But still.

Here, let me tell the original story so some of this starts to make some sense.

In the book, which is told as a series of letters to her all-American/Republican husband Franklin (played in the film by John C. Reilly as a generic Dad), we meet Eva, a pushing-40, self-centered, unbearably obnoxious Manhattan woman who probably reads Mary Gaitskill, Paul Bowles and Jane Austen in equal measure and occasionally sounds like all of them. Her empire of travel books has made her wealthy but also wanting. Maybe a baby is the answer!

Against the background of the 2000 presidential recount nightmare and the end of the Clinton prosperity age (all deleted in Ramsay and Rory Stewart Kinnear’s screenplay), we watch Eva grow aghast as her pregnant body bloats and she name-checks horror films like Alien and Mimic as references for motherhood. It’s a dark joke that the baby turns out to be another sort of monster – a joke Ramsay leaves out, because Ramsay doesn’t do funny. It’s an art-film thing.

When that baby is born, he refuses to breastfeed. The scene’s replayed in the film but there’s no sadness or horror since there’s not really any build-up of body horror, because Ramsay is busy using edits that make you go, “Cool edits,” to super-foreshadow what will happen years later.

Which is – no spoiler – that the grown-up child (the Kevin of the title, of course) will stage a Columbine-esque massacre in his high school, locking up a bunch of kids in a gym and shooting arrows into their bodies. This is something the film fragments in Goldfrappian style because, well, that’s what the movie does: it fragments.

The book, it flashes back and forth in ways that are motivated by theme, emotion and event. You know, literary shit. Neat literary shit that allows Eva to be a Cronenbergian post-feminist Doctor Frankenstein as her misconceived creation, as always in these archetypal tales, becomes a mess – angry, unable to communicate, howling, increasingly sociopathic, and not 4 years old yet.

In the book, the tone and mode and Eva herself flip on a dime, and everything becomes The Omen as Kevin becomes more terrifyingly, more unbeatably Evil (people keep citing The Bad Seed as parallel but I think this kid is far more lowercase hell-sent, as in an inexplicable brand of utter secular badness.) The book’s Kevin likes nothing, hates existing, loves hurting another Frankenstein project that turns out poorly – a weak, pitiable sister named Celia – and in an unbelievably disturbing bit of barely off-stage Grand Guignol, pours Liquid Plumr into her eye, burning the socket dry. But hey, it’s not horror or anything.

And yes, I’m almost sighing as I note that Ramsay, knowing how horrific this business of the missing eye is, starts abstracting it in the first reel of the film in the hope, one assumes, that we’ll be so inured to the concept that by the time Kevin eyes that bottle of Plumr, the worst the audience will feel is an ironic titter. Or something.

Every few chapters, Eva meets post-massacre Kevin (played in the film by Ezra Miller), now an inmate at a youth correctional facility. These are the film’s most engaging moments, but not for the reasons Ramsay would like. They show that all the cool filmmaking in the world is kind of no big deal when compared to a still camera recording two fantastic actors working at the top of their games.

The book’s grandest achievement is how it both accuses Eva as complicit in making a monster and then forgives her; how it takes a thoroughly unlikeable woman and evolves her into someone with a hard self-awareness we have to respect. The film? Ultimately, we’re back to the remix analogy, but without Goldfrapp’s unity of purpose – even if there isn’t much of one.

Two revealing examples of Ramsay’s enforced vagueness:

There’s a shot – a single shot! – where we see Eva standing in front of a large staff of people in some kind of office; I assume it’s her travel book agency. People who’ve not read the book will, of course, have no idea why this shot is in the film. Why rob Eva of her accomplishment, of becoming an entrepreneur, of the life she could have had if she hadn’t had this demon baby? Is this an anti-capitalist gesture? Beats me.

Apropos of nothing and never once followed through, we get the Eva of Shriver’s book – the obnoxious, stereotypical, America-bashing Manhattan liberal – taking Kevin on a trip to a miniature golf course and cawing through an anti-populist rant. If you read the book, this makes sense. I would think that for casual filmgoers, though, this would seem like she was suffering a Truthdig-influenced sort of Tourette’s. Meaningless and, if you excuse the pun, out of left field.

Deal is, I always thought the New Wave was about deleting excess syntax so you could get to the heart of cinema. Ramsay uses some of its disjunctive tropes brilliantly so she never has to commit to anything but Swinton’s pursed grimace.

When she’s not doing that, she loves to have her camera sit still so we can watch Swinton do nothing, and then moves her camera a great deal when Swinton’s doing lots, so that we don’t know for certain what’s actually going on in the agitated frame. It’s like creating secrets, which, I suppose, could be a way of externalizing what Eva is doing with herself.

But see? Here we are, trying to fill in Ramsay’s gaps. Maybe that’s her idea, or mode, or style, or whatever. We Need to Talk About Kevin should perhaps be more accurately titled We Need to Talk About Ramsay. And here we are.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. His column "Grey Matters" runs every week at Press Play. To read another piece about Drive, with analysis of common themes and images in all of Refn's films, click here.

OSCARS REVISITED, 1981: CHARIOTS OF FIRE

[EDITOR'S NOTE: In a yearly feature titled "Oscars Revisited," Press Play takes a look back at the Academy Awards race from earlier eras. Our inaugural series focuses on the five Best Picture nominees from calendar year 1981: Reds, Atlantic City, On Golden Pond, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Chariots of Fire.]

When Bud Greenspan loosed his 22-part documentary TV series The Olympiad on the world in 1976, he created a template by which all future Olympic-related works would be judged. Scoring the title sequence with Charpentier’s Te Deum, he signaled the godlike grandeur of the Olympian with Baroque pomp. Chariots of Fire, influenced by Greenspan in its lofty view of pure athletics and idealized, Oscar-winning score by Vangelis, is typical of the kind of Anglophile, prestige ﬁlm the Academy favors. It is also a rare, accurate biopic with an above-average script (it won the best screenplay Oscar as well). This inspirational 1981 ﬁlm tells the true story of the track team Britain sent to the Paris Olympics in 1924. Tellingly, it concentrates on two runners who stand apart from the upper-crust Cambridge men who comprise a major chunk of the team. The ﬁrst is Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), a hard-driving Jewish law student at Cambridge who uses winning races as a cudgel against anti-Semitism. The second is Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), the son of a Scottish missionary who intends to follow in his fatherʼs footsteps, but has earned the nickname “The Flying Scotsman” for his prowess as a rugby player and sprinter.

A turning point for Abrahams comes when he watches Liddell run. Not only does he see that his unbroken winning streak can be threatened by the awkward but fast Liddell, but he also meets Sam Massabini (Ian Holm), a professional track coach who has tried unsuccessfully to recruit Liddell. Abrahams persuades Massabini to come see him run, and Massabini agrees to coach him, an arrangement that displeases two Cambridge dons (Sir John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson) with a strong commitment to the notion of amateurism. Abrahams ignores their protest, gives them a tongue lashing for trying to impede progress, and starts to train for the Olympics with Massabini, who becomes something of a surrogate father to him.

Liddell faces resistance as well when his sister Jennie (Cheryl Campbell) worries that his Olympic dream will tear him away from what is truly important—God and his ministry. While admitting that he has let running crowd out other aspects of his life, he tells Jennie, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.” He also has to endure pressure from the Prince of Wales himself for refusing to run a qualifying heat in Paris on the sabbath.

Chariots of Fire takes few liberties with the facts, but screenwriter Colin Welland and director Hugh Hudson arrange them in such a way as to make the underlying story a conflict between mortal men and God. Indeed, the very title of the film quotes from a very pertinent book of the Torah, Kings, and is requoted in the hymn that closes the film “Jerusalem.” The film toggles between holy churches and earthly temples—in one scene, Hudson’s camera lingers amusingly on the figures of stained-glass cricket players adorning a Cambridge restaurant where Abrahams dines.

Abrahams, a fully assimilated, nonpracticing Jew, is always on the outside looking in. Surrounded by the Christianity of his country, he can only stand silently by as choirs praise the name of Jesus at his welcome to Cambridge and dramatically prefers to slip back to England unnoticed rather than face the ecstatic crowds that welcome Liddell and the others home at the boat train. His fiancée Sybil (Alice Krige) and a small sign calling him the toast of England comprise his hero’s welcome, the latter likely a true-to-life sentiment that has the unfortunate effect of seeming to be a bone thrown to the character. The film rather heavy-handedly has Gielgud and Anderson give voice to the anti-Semitism Abrahams faced, a convenient device to keep audiences from turning on his very WASP teammates who likely held similar views. In real life, Abrahams converted to Roman Catholicism, rather perversely still an outsider to English Protestantism; the film doesn’t wish to open that kettle of fish, but does allude to it by opening and closing the film at a present-day church memorial service to the recently deceased Abrahams.

The clear hero of the story is Liddell, a man who might have been handed a white feather of cowardice had he been a conscientious objector during World War I. Instead, he is judged to run for the right reason—to honor God— and sends down a chilling indictment of kings and men who put their own vanity and self-interest above God’s in a sermon delivered at a church somewhere in Paris on the very day he refused to run. This sermon is intercut with his teammates falling short in their races, more affirmation of who’s really the boss.

When Liddell finally prepares to run, he is handed a note containing the Bible quote “Those who honor me I will honor.” The film takes liberties with this true incident by affixing the unsigned note with American runner Jackson Scholz’s signature, a move certain to please an ascendant religious population in the United States. During the race, the reason for his flailing running style is revealed. When a voiceover of his remark to Jennie culminates on the words “His pleasure,” the perfectly cast Charleson throws his head back as if in orgasm, the embodiment of religious ecstasy, and easily wins the race.

Although the final words spoken in the film honor Abrahams (“He did it. He ran them off their feet.”), “Jerusalem” gives the final glory to God:

And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountain green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the countenance divine shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here among those dark satanic mills?

Marilyn Ferdinand is founder and a principal of Ferdy on Films and cofounder and a principal of For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, a unique fundraising blogathon now entering its third year. Marilyn has contributed film criticism to Fandor, Time Out Chicago, Wonders in the Dark, and Bright Lights Film Journal. She is a member of the Online Film Critics Society. A Chicago native and lifer, she carries on in the grand journalistic tradition of columnists in her city by using a headshot that reflects a reality long past.

OSCARS DEATH RACE: REAL STEEL

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Fearless Sarah D. Bunting of Tomatonation.com is making it her mission to watch every single film nominated for an Oscar before the Academy Awards Ceremony on February 26, 2012. She is calling this journey the Oscars Death Race. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here. And you can follow Sarah through this quixotic journey here.]

Real Steel is one of those trailers that makes you turn to your movie-going companion and say, "You know, I really like [above-the-title star who's talented, attractive, and doesn't take himself too seriously but apparently just hit some kind of alimony balloon payment]. He's a nice man. I want him to make lots of money. Are you telling me there's no better way for him to do that than to star in the robot-boxing version of that infernal arm-wrestling Stallone movie from the '80s?"

I actually never saw the infernal arm-wrestling Stallone movie from the '80s, although I saw the hateful Kenny Loggins video from same approximately 17,000 times — but I'm pretty sure Real Steel is the same shit (but with, you know, robot boxing). Robot-boxing impresario/dillweed Charlie (Hugh Jackman) is down on his luck and behind on his rent when he finds out that an ex-girlfriend has died, leaving him in custody of a son, Max, he's never seen (Dakota Koyo). The ex's sister, Debra (Hope Davis), wants t– you know what, who cares. Robots box; the flimsy backstory excuse for Jackman to develop those magnificently ridonk biceps is totally justified; everything works out.

And the movie is pretty fun, despite going on too long, co-starring Evangeline Lilly, and trading cynically on the deep love some of us have for Iron Giant. Four things to like about Real Steel:

1. The robot boxing is fairly rad. It didn't blow my mind or anything, but I bet it looked amazing on an IMAX screen, and they get some cool shots out of it (one early fight features a disturbing visual of a robot with its leg blown off). The country-fight scene gives off a basement-cockfight vibe, and the title fight has a robot ring girl, so it's clear the visual-design team paid attention to little things.

2. The film is totally committed to the fiction that its story capital-M Matters: soaring strings, 12-o'clock camera positions of Max in the rain, old newspaper clippings of Charlie's (people-)boxing career.

3. Koyo is quite good as the kid, despite the character as written bearing Hollywood's customary tenuous resemblance to an actual fifth-grader — and when he gets old enough for this comment not to be a felony, he's going to be really cute.

4. Lilly is fine! I had a bitchy crack all ready to go about how I understand that the Liv Tyler we already have is barely serviceable but it doesn't mean we need a second one, but then Lilly went and turned in a nice performance. I'm-a say it anyway because this is a Death Race and you take your shots where you can, but she's likeable and un-Kate-like in a thankless role. She could put on a bra now and then, though. So…I guess that's really five things to like about Real Steel for you gents, and ladies who like ladies, out there. …Wait. Six. Seven if you count the "I've got her Real Steel right here IN MY PANTS" joke I just handed y'all.

Anyhow! The Oscars. Real Steel got a nod for Visual Effects, and as deeply as I've come to resent the tech categories for horking up hairballs like this, and Tron, and the 654 hours of Harry Potter and the Masterpiece-Theatre Reunion I've sat through, now and then you get a fluffy, crunchy thing like Real Steel. No shot at a statue, but I'm not mad at it.

OSCARS REVISITED, 1981: RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

For years after the release of his box-office breakthrough Jaws, Steven Spielberg fantasized about directing a James Bond picture. He got his chance, sort of, with Raiders of the Lost Ark, his first team-up with his longtime friend and fellow "movie brat" George Lucas. The two were on vacation in Hawaii in 1977 after the release of Lucas' own career-redefining blockbuster Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope but before the release of Spielberg's next movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg told Lucas of his desire to make a Bond film; Lucas replied that he had a better idea, and Spielberg instantly seized on it as "James Bond without the gadgets." It was about Indiana Smith, an archaeologist who travelled the world unearthing buried treasure, fighting bad guys and witnessing supernatural events; Lucas envisioned it as an homage to the World War II-era cliffhanger serials that he, Spielberg and other '50s kids used to watch in reruns on local TV, only in color and CinemaScope and in Dolby stereo. Spielberg liked the concept but suggested changing the hero's last name from Smith to Jones.

Four years and a $18 million worth of Paramount's money later, Spielberg and Lucas released Raiders of the Lost Ark, featuring up-and-coming action hero Harrison Ford — Han Solo in Lucas' Star Wars franchise — as the whip-cracking archaeology professor trying to keep the Lost Ark of the Covenant out of Hitler's hands. As scripted by Lawrence Kasdan, who rewrote the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, Indy was a rumpled, unshaven, refreshingly human hero, surly but decent, less like a Bond-style sexy sociopath than a Gary Cooper character in a bad mood. The combination of Ford's casual fearlessness, Lucas' gee-whiz sensibility, Spielberg's kinetic precision and costar Karen Allen's tomboy sass made the film into the year's biggest hit, a sleeper that rolled into multiplexes opposite Superman II and the latest James Bond entry For Your Eyes Only and stole their box office thunder. Raiders grossed $209 million in North America and took the "So popular that we can't ignore it" spot in the following year's Best Picture lineup. It also inspired knockoffs, including the network TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey and Bring 'Em Back Alive and the movies High Road to China, Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile.

Spielberg didn't stint on the violent action; this was probably one the first PG movies in which a lone hero singlehandedly and bloodily eliminated scores of foes, and definitely the first in which the power of God made Nazis' heads melt, implode and detonate, spewing meat chunks into the camera. Three summers later, the even more extreme violence of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the Spielberg-produced Gremlins inspired the creation of a new MPAA rating, PG-13. But the film's real draw was its mastery of pacing and tone. For a large production shot in several countries, Raiders was light on its feet, zipping through scenes without a wasted frame. And it managed the same neat trick as Spielberg and Lucas' earlier films in managing to seem at once self-aware and innocent. The duo plundered recent and past film history like kleptomaniacs on a prowl through Macy's. The deranged finale evoked Brian De Palma's Carrie and The Fury; Indy's wild escape beneath the carriage of a hijacked truck echoed a similar stunt in John Ford's Stagecoach; the final shot in which the Ark of the Covenant, recently recovered from Hitler's minions, is wheeled into a gigantic warehouse was filched from Citizen Kane. The transitional sequences depicting the global progress of Jones and company via cross-dissolved travel footage and maps festooned with animated red lines was so brazenly old-fashioned that it made the circa-1981 audiences that I saw it with laugh and applaud. (As I recounted in a piece about Raiders for The House Next Door, this was the first film that made me realize that movies could be expressions of a singular sensibility — that they were directed.)

Raiders was a career-redefining entry on the resumes of its major players. Ford stepped into the lead after CBS refused to release the filmmakers' first choice, Magnum, P.I. star Tom Selleck, from his TV contract, and proved he could sell tickets without a laser pistol in his hand; the film's success marked the start of a 20-year run as one of Hollywood's highest-paid actors. Ford's regular employer Lucas showed the studios that he wasn't just the Star Wars guy. The movie also revived Spielberg's career momentum after the box-office flop of 1941 (1979), an epically overscaled bit of period slapstick that in retrospect feels like a dry run for Raiders, an immense physical comedy that owed as much to Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton as it did to poverty row cliffhangers, with a stalwart hero taking on armies. The film and its sequels went on to comprise one of the most financially successful and stylistically influential series ever made. With their superficial awareness of the texture of certain periods and places, Jones' pre-World War II shenaningans felt like a precocious schoolboy's fantasy — flip books scrawled in the margins of a history text. Lucas, Spielberg, Ford and their collaborators pushed this sensibility further in the film's sequels, which saw Indy cheat death in pre-war Shanghai, British colonial India, Nazi-occupied Austria and Germany (where Indy ends up getting his father's Grail diary autographed by Hitler at a book burning!), and an atomic testing site in 1950s Roswell, New Mexico, (which gave prankish new meaning to the phrase "nuclear family"). Although mainstream critics and general audiences enjoyed the series (except for the long-delayed fourth film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which some fans viewed as a personal affront) Indy's adventures had their detractors. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael complained that Raiders lacked the human touch of Spielberg's earlier hits and was lukewarm on The Last Crusade — although with typically Kaelian perversity, she adored The Temple of Doom. Alternative press critics pointed out — correctly, but without much impact — that Indy's adventures had an ahistorical and oddly pre-sexual vibe, and that Lucas and Spielberg's depiction of "foreign" cultures was cluless at best, racist at worst; for a long time, Indy's second adventure Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom was banned in India. For a brief period in the late '80s and early '90s, Lucas brought Indy to TV. His youthful adventures were bracketed with segments narrated by a geriatric Indy, a craggy-faced, one-eyed icon whose appearance was inspired by documentary footage of the old John Ford.

The Indy films do have a personal sensibility, although it's admittedly obscured by gunshots, explosions and supernatural maimings. The films feel like daydreams, not product, and their fusion of spectacle, mayhem, slapstick, banter and miracles has no equivalent elsewhere in cinema. And the saga does have an implied narrative that's more knowing and gentle than Spielberg and Lucas' detractors care to admit. Over the course of four films, the arrested adolescent Indy grows up, taking responsibllity for a surrogate family in The Temple of Doom (a prequel that feels like a sequel), reconciling with his estranged dad in The Last Crusade, then coming to terms with mortality and reconnecting with Marion and the son he didn't know he had in Crystal Skull. There's something to be said for Indy's brand of resourcefulness; it's earthbound and useful, rooted in emotional reality and ultimately touching. He's a superheroic everyman, surly and self-effacing — James Bond as Yankee prole. "I'm going after that truck," Indy tells his buddy Sallah, before throwing himself into the movie's most raucous action setpiece. "How?" Sallah asks. "I don't know," Indy replies, pushing his hat down tight on his head. "I'm just making this up as I go."

A critic, journalist and filmmaker, Matt Zoller Seitz is the staff TV columnist for New York Magazine and the founder of Press Play.

OSCARS REVISITED, 1981: ON GOLDEN POND

Of the five films nominated for Best Picture of 1981, On Golden Pond is greeted with the most derision – dismissed as the Academy falling for cheap sentiment as an excuse to honor their own. Raiders of the Lost Ark set the template for the modern blockbuster, its popularity and influence so immediate that recognition could not be denied it. Atlantic City had an almost European attitude toward character and sexuality while providing a wonderful showcase for Burt Lancaster. Reds was a mix of sweeping historical romance and vanity project. And the winner, Chariots of Fire, had just the right combination of underdog scrappiness and rarefied air of repressed British passion that wins over voters. But what about On Golden Pond?

At the time of the Academy Awards, the film's box office take was closing in on $80 million. It was obviously hitting a chord with audiences, but the critical response was mixed at best. The positive notices seemed to be written under duress. The rest of the mixed-to-negative reviews rang of hardened resistance to being moved at the sight of two old geezers puttering about and saying the damnedest things. (I know one critic who at the time referred to the movie as On Golden Shower.) Some critics and younger film buffs scoffed at a movie they perceived as appealing to middlebrow tastes – i.e., conservative older moviegoers who probably say things like, “Why don’t they make more movies like that?” On Golden Pond was one of the first big Reagan-era dramas, the anti-Ordinary People. The pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda bridged opposing ends of Hollywood’s political spectrum – the brassy liberal and the stern all-American traditionalist. And the sight of Hanoi Jane making nice with her dad now seems like one of the first examples of what turned out to be a major trope in 1980s American cinema, the sight of '60s kids reconciling with their parents.

Seen today, the film version of Ernest Thompson’s Broadway hit looks shockingly small-scale, quaint even. If it weren’t for the star power, it might not have been a hit. Seeing Hepburn and Fonda portray Ethel and Norman Thayer stirs all kinds of emotions. We are at once watching the characters and the actors. The simplicity of the story is crucial to us connecting with the Thayer family. A more complex story would be pointless. Fonda was 76 years old and Hepburn was 74 years old at the time of filming. They no longer had to get into character. They were the characters.

If you didn’t know the movie was based on a play it wasn't hard to figure out, and not just because the story takes place in and around one location. Thompson’s dialogue has, at times, an overly-written cleverness. Unlike the worst of Neil Simon, where characters talk in two-liners, Ethel and Norman speak to each other in quips. What keeps their exchanges from being intolerable is that we feel as if they’ve been talking like this for their entire lives.

The story’s structure is at times quite rickety, but it is also curiously comforting. The opening scene sets the tone perfectly as the Thayers arrive at their summer home and Ethel quickly gets out of the car and calls for Norman to listen to the loons. It’s a classic Kate moment as she says, “The looons, the looons.” (Norman claims he can’t hear anything.) The opening scenes have a stagy busyness that only pros like Hepburn and Fonda can keep from being grating. (The bit where Norman calls the operator so they can call him is quite funny.) The opening passages show the Thayers puttering around, taking their boat to town to pick up supplies, making small talk with Charlie the mailman (William Lanteau). These scenes are finely executed but feel frankly quite twee. Then, Norman has an episode where he can’t remember the route of the road in the woods he’s taken thousands of times to town. He momentarily lets his guard down and tells Ethel he’s scared. Ethel comforts him by saying, “Listen to me, mister, you’re my knight in shining armor.” Up to this point Hepburn has spoken in her trademark New England braying bellow. (Seeing and hearing her again made me realize just how astonishing Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Hepburn was in The Aviator.) But when she comforts Norman she lowers her voice, almost whispering. It’s a great piece of acting that only someone as experienced as Hepburn could make look easy. The scene hooks us and we’re on Norman and Ethel’s side for the rest of the movie.

Not much happens during the summer. Well, not exactly. What happen are the kind of small compromises and accommodations that sometimes occur in families. The Thayers’ wayward daughter Chelsea writes and says she wants to visit for Norman’s 80th birthday. She says she’s bringing her latest boyfriend and his 13-year-old son from a previous marriage. The scene where Norman and Ethel wait for Chelsea to arrive surprises us because an unexpected tension starts to mount. Through inferences we learn that Norman and Chelsea have a friction-filled relationship that they tiptoe around; of course there’s also tension because we know real-life conflict existed between Jane Fonda and her dad. That’s what makes their first on-screen scene together so good. We sense things could explode at any moment. Henry Fonda’s admiration of his daughter’s acting registers as Norman’s distant nature as the old man tries in his own way to get along with her.

(Watching Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, I was struck at how son Peter Fonda’s career-capping performance in Ulee’s Gold is like the dark side of Norman Thayer; the younger Fonda is playing both his dad and Ulee Jackson.)

The middle section of the movie consists of the Thayers looking after Billy Ray (Doug McKeon), son to Bill Ray (Dabney Coleman), who is taking Chelsea to Europe for a month. Coleman’s big scene with Henry Fonda is a real gem. At first he is intimidated by Norman and comes off as almost condescending towards him. Norman senses this and refuses to give him a break. The way Bill calls Norman out on trying to push his buttons is startling to both us and Norman. Norman decides he’s good enough for his daughter. McKeon, iffy in the early scenes, eventually grows on you. He matches up nicely with Fonda as they develop a winning comic rhythm. We need to feel their affection for one another so that the sequence where their lives are danger doesn’t feel like a manipulation of the plot.

Norman, Ethel and Billy make a fun trio as we sense they’re getting right as surrogate grandparents what they got wrong as parents. There’s a feeling that tragedy could occur at any moment. It doesn’t, really. The big scene in the movie is when Norman and Billy attempt to navigate their boat through a rocky cove. They hit a rock and Norman falls overboard. The highlight of the sequence comes when Ethel goes looking for them and comes upon their boat. When she sees Norman and Billy hanging onto a rock she immediately dives into the water and swims toward them. What gives the scene a swelling emotional power is that Hepburn’s stunt is done in one unbroken shot. She really jumps into the water.

Jane Fonda’s interactions with Hepburn and her father demonstrate her skill at being able to adapt to differing acting styles. Her scenes with Hepburn have a loose give-and-take feel. There’s a remarkable scene where mother and daughter go skinny-dipping at night. Seeing their heads poking above the water at night, we register that it is possible Jane could be the offspring of these two. Her sharp features and her quivering, clipped voice are just right. Her big scene with her father is one for the time capsule. The way her Strasberg-training acting style and his do-it-as-rehearsed strictness rub against each other beautifully illustrates the generational gap they are trying to close. The elder Fonda hated improvisation. He felt there was no need to change what was already on the page. This leads to a fleeting moment where the real world comes crashing into the movie. Chelsea tells Norman she wants to be his friend. When the camera switches to Henry Fonda’s side of the scene, Jane/Chelsea improvises a gesture and puts her hand on his arm. (You’ll miss it if you’re not looking for it.) This bit of business was not rehearsed and startled the elder Fonda. His fleeting reaction to this moment of affection is real. You see him turn, almost embarrassed by the intimacy of the moment. At the end of the movie, when Chelsea, who always refers to her father as “Norman,” calls him “Dad,” we can no longer separate the characters’ quiet acknowledgement of their love from seeing Jane and Henry finally connect with one another.

At the time of its success, On Golden Pond was mocked in some quarters as being some kind of big-screen therapy session for the Fondas. Seen today, removed from its zeitgeist moment, On Golden Pond reveals itself to be an enormously moving (if manipulative) story of familial reconciliation.

San Antonio-based film critic Aaron Aradillas is a contributor to The House Next Door, a contributor to Moving Image Source, and the host of “Back at Midnight,” an Internet radio program about film and television.

OSCARS 2012: PRESS PLAY contributors argue for their favorites

OSCARS 2012: PRESS PLAY’S staff picks their favorites

After last week’s announcement of this year’s Oscar nominees, a handful of Press Play contributors gathered together via email to discuss the highs and lows in some of the major award categories. Below are some of the highlights of the conversation, and as always, we encourage you to keep the discussion going. The site's consensus picks for the films and individuals that should win be announced next week, starting Monday.

Matt Zoller Seitz: Has anybody seen A Better Life, for which Demián Bichir was nominated as Best Actor? That seemed out of left field. I feel like Gary Oldman might be a lock for that one, what do you think?

Glenn Close and Rooney Mara nominated for Best Actress is interesting, too. Some thought Close's work was too stunt-y. Mara seems a total surprise for me, as her character is so not Academy-friendly (in terms of looks and demeanor), and Mara is not anywhere close to a known quantity.

Ali Arikan: Rooney Mara has been lauded by the critics and the industry, and the studio had been hyping her since the summer, so I'm not at all surprised that she got a nomination. Despite the fact that the Millennium books are terrible, people seem to love them, and Lisbeth Salander has become an iconic character. Plus, she also did sterling work in a solid film. What is interesting, however, is that either she or Glenn Close edged out Tilda Swinton for We Need to Talk About Rosemary's Omen. I thought she would be a lock.

I am happy about Moneyball, a film I thought I would hate, but ended up loving. I am one of the few in "our circles" who felt The Tree of Life was lacking, and I don't think it deserved a Best Picture nomination over Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Extremely Loud and The Help are just risible. The latter was always going to be in there, but I thought Bridesmaids might have snuck in instead of Extremely Loud. Either way, having nine nominees obviously shows that the field is still pretty wide open.

Matt: I like The Tree of Life best of the Best Picture nominees, though I know opinion in this thread is mixed. It's the most unconventional of any nominated film, so much so that I am pleasantly surprised that it became a sort of event when it hit theaters. I think more films that experimental should be made at the Hollywood level. There are not too many directors holding down the fort for that kind of experience, not even Malick's fellow '70s movie brats Spielberg and Scorsese.

Aaron Aradillas: I would argue that in their own ways, both Hugo and Tintin are experimental films. I mean, if it wasn't for their directors, I seriously doubt a studio would've rolled the dice on 'em.

Sarah D. Bunting: Margin Call got a Best Original Screenplay nod. Shut up, Oscars. Barf.

Ali: I also second Sarah's barf. Ewww.

My feelings about Melissa McCarthy mirror Scott Tobias' thoughts on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I disliked Bridesmaids, but I despised her performance.

Aaron: I've yet to fully grasp the dislike for her performance. I know it exists, but I don't get it. I don't remember anyone being offended when Kevin Kline won for making a mockery of being a dumb, sexist man.

Nick Nolte is terrific in Warrior, but it is clearly a great performance of something he does well. He makes look effortless what Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton huff and puff and make look so tiring. Besides, Nolte did a better version of this in Affliction.

Christopher Plummer gives his career performance. There's no fat on it. Unlike The Insider, where he's a hoot, Plummer doesn't push it in Beginners, and that's why he leaves such an impression on those of us who love the movie. The way he embraces life at such a late date is funny, touching and ultimately quite sad. Ewan McGregor's character never acknowledges it, but he learns his father's final lessons and that's what leads to the movie's astonishingly hopeful and romantic ending. He is finally his father's son. Plummer's presence is felt in every scene. It be McGregor's story, but it's Plummer's film.

I'm a fan of Midnight in Paris, but Woody Allen's screenplay is not entirely original. It's kind of a variation on The Purple Rose of Cairo. Margin Call is a script written about how we're living right now. It trumps Mamet by not getting all tangled up in being clever with its verbal scenes.

Mara's my second choice in the Best Actress category, but Viola Davis is the only lead actress who literally has to create a character from scratch. The other performances all have something already existing that they're working off of.

Ali: I am not basing my dislike of McCarthy's performance on a curve. It was too easy, without any nuance and did not add anything to a film that definitely needed some sort of a breakout-star factor to make it less boring (and, you know, funny). So, I'd love to hear the case for her.

Aaron: The beauty of McCarthy's performance is there isn't a trace of self-loathing or self-doubt that would probably get in a dozen other comedies with a character like hers. She is the most confident and aware person in the circle of Bridesmaids.

I'm willing to make a gentleman's bet that Meryl Streep will not win Best Actress. I think Viola Davis is going to "surprise" everyone and take it home.

Kevin B. Lee: If anything, Davis is the odd sober person surrounded by a carnival of sass, crass and crazy in The Help. Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain are like intrepid migrants from John Waters-land, while Davis anchors it in gravity and respectability ‒ she's the whipped cream atop the shit pie. I'm not sure whether she saves the movie or adds a layer of Oscar-mongering disingenuousness to what really should be an all-out camp farce. But her final scene standing up to Bryce Dallas Howard is a feat of acting gymnastics, going through a series of emotional states in lightning succession.

In contrast, The Iron Lady is pretty much all Meryl Streep (and everything that implies, good and bad). But it's an MVP performance; she actually made me like Margaret Thatcher for two hours.

Lisa Rosman: The Help is a tepid movie at best, offensive at worst, but as is so often the case, the performances far outstrip the film. Viola Davis never gives up an inch ‒ she may cater less as an actress than anyone else in Hollywood ‒ but so much goes on behind the eyes that she ignobles what could be a wretched role. And on that note, I love Rooney, but this is not the film for which she should win an Oscar. It's a one-trick-pony role and though she does it well, it doesn't have enough shades to win a golden naked man.

I hate hate hate hate the idea of McCarthy winning this. The role is not just unfunny; it's mean-spirited and she executes it more poorly than she's done anything else in her career. (Wherefore art thou, Sookie?) Nay, for me it's Janet McTeer, who does everything that Close herself fails to do in the otherwise craptacular and super outdated Albert Nobbs. It's a finely tuned performance that brings real pathos and humor and at least three dimensions to the kind of person that Hollywood always, always gets wrong.

The rest I am less adamant on. I love Malick but The Tree of Life is not legible in ways that actually matter to me. Scorsese should take Best Director for Hugo, but I can understand why others do not agree. Gary Oldman should, of course, take it; it's a terrific performance, and Tinker Tailor the Thief Cook should get Best Adapted Screenplay. I don't love any of the Best Picture nominees but think Moneyball comes closest to being what I want a big movie to be. And sorry for the barfers, but I love Margin Call for Best Original Screenplay.

Aaron: I'm for Brad Pitt. I think he gives a star turn and acting powerhouse at once. George Clooney is great (and I have no problem if he wins), but he was going deeper into a character he does best: the good-looking asshole who is brought up short by life.

There is real mystery to Pitt's take on Billy Beane. He loves the game, but knows the game is changing. He knows he has to get wins in order to keep his job and is more than willing to modernize for that reason. But he also knows there is something you can't calculate about the game of baseball. The scenes of Pitt driving to work or sitting in the locker room show a man who is constantly trying to figure out the odds and knowing deep down that there are some things you can't figure out. Also, Pitt is a great subtle comic performer in the scenes where he's making deals or bossing around others in the room. Like Jesse Eisenberg, he is a natural when it comes to Aaron Sorkin's writing.

Kevin: I think Pitt's performance falls under the same school of acting I endorse. (Clooney, on the other hand, is on autopilot).

Aaron: Clooney's not on auto, but I'll leave it at that. I do know Pitt is happy as can be to be nominated in the same category as Gary Oldman. His death scene in Fight Club is inspired by Oldman. Pitt says on that film’s commentary, "No one dies like Gary!" It should also be noted that Pitt gets a slight advantage in that his work in both Moneyball and The Tree of Life show how wide a range he truly has.

Lisa: I actually agree Clooney's not on auto, but I disliked the conceit of the casting of that film immensely. (Alexander Payne loves to get notoriously charismatic actors to play schlubs; it underscores his misanthropic view of "average people.")

Ali: I, too, am for Pitt, even though I liked Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Doo-Dah Doo-Dah more than any other American film this year. Goldman is magnificent as George Smiley, closer to John le Carré's vision than Alec Guinness' portrayal, and he explodes with understated pathos (paradoxically) the one time he shows his emotions (the incredible Soviet national anthem scene where he sees his wife having it on with Colin Firth).

That said, I have a problem with his voice and accent. He sounds like a constipated baboon trying to do an impression of Ian McKellen. It was but a minor quibble when I first saw the film, but after three times, it's just grating. (For what it's worth, Tom Hardy gives the best performance in that movie.)

As for Brad Pitt, first of all, his is an almost old-fashioned movie star performance. He's charming and cheeky and funny, and hella good looking. (Yes, I've just used "hella" ‒ I am a 14-year-old kid from 1998.) I have no idea who Beane is, so this is my estimation of the character as he is seen on the screen: as Aaron said, here is a person who decides to ride the waves of change. Pitt plays him as a nexus of frustration; he never made the big time, so he is trying to make up for that lost opportunity. He is clever, though. He knows that he is unable to see the forest for the trees (the final scene with Jonah Hill, the earlier conversation with his daughter, etc.), but that's what obsessive-compulsive people are like. They know what they're doing is irrational, but they have to keep doing it.

Also, the final shot shows him in full command of his face ‒ an incredibly important skill for a screen actor.

Matt: What about this Demián Bichir fellow? Nobody's really mentioned him as a contender….

Aaron: A Better Life is good, and he's really good, but not award-worthy, especially when you consider someone like, say, the criminally underrated Steve Carell or Kevin Spacey's triumphant return to good acting in Margin Call. If one is going to label his nomination the Indie Nod, I much prefer Michael Shannon. Take Shelter is far from perfect, but Shannon is amazing.

The biggest problem with A Better Life is the character of the 14-year-old son. The actor is pretty bad and the character, as written, is pretty thin. An old-school Mexican dad would not put up with half the shit this kid gives him. Compared to the father-son dynamic in A Bronx Tale, A Better Life comes up short.

Can I make my case for The Help one more time? If the best 9/11 movies are not explicitly about 9/11 (Zodiac, Munich), then why can't one of the best films about race today be a movie about recent history? The outcry from so-called open-minded liberals was telling in that just because the movie was supposedly playing it safe by telling a story we all can agree on that it wasn't also making people think about the here and now.

Race is the one truly unspoken-about issue in this country. When it is spoken about, it is in an obvious safe way. The Help is about the moment when an open discussion was needed in order for change to occur. What the movie also makes clear is that discussion needs to be ongoing. And that is simply not the case right now.

Just because the movie delivers its "message" in bawdy, emotional, mass-appeal entertainment doesn't make it unworthy of praise (or awards). The Help not only attempts to keep recent history fresh in our minds, but also old-fashioned awards-worthy entertainment alive as well.