This is hardly a new or even a profound thought, but everyone seems to overlook the fundamental current driving the end-of- the-year superlatives, and particularly the Oscar-contender positioning. Arguing or lobbying for this or that movie as the best is not, in the final analysis, about this or that movie or even the awards that may result, but about certain visions, themes, philosophies and capturings contained in these films.
It’s not an insipid thing to recognize, salute and/or champion certain values or spiritual poems that matter to some of us in this day and age — films that express and reflect who and what we feel we are deep down. This, for me and (I suspect) many others, is what all the end-of-the-year horseshit is really about.
Just as cigarettes are “a delivery device for nicotine” (a term coined by The Insider‘s Jeffrey Wigand), good movies — the ones that are about more than craven emotional button-pushing or EED (extraordinary eyeball diversion) — are delivery devices for visions, dreams, philosophies…ways of thinking, feeling, being.
The Departed is not just a package of high-octane Scorsese flash but an idea, an immersion, a Boston street-crime theology of sorts — something that most of us were moved to let inside and reflect upon after seeing it, apart from its obvious cinematic razzle-dazzle. Ditto The Good Shepherd, The Lives of Others, Little Miss Sunshine, Children of Men…reflections and summations of what life is, might be, used to be, ought to be, inevitably is.
When The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil enthuses over Dreamgirls, he’s really saying “it’s the movie, of course, but more to the point, this is a world and a spirit that moves me…that I want to live in and share and spread around.” Substitute any Oscar prognosticator and film and the same equation applies.

Would you believe a brand-new computer developing a serious sound-drive glitch and being unable to generate any sound after two weeks of use? I have no choice in the matter. Hence my tardiness in getting stuff up for the next few hours, being at the total mercy of the Geek Squad at the Best Buy on lower Broadway.

Bryan Reesman‘s 12.17 N.Y. Times piece considers the tribulations of “Oscar Hell” week — i.e., Academy members having to see every last film in a relatively short space of time (mid November to late December, although they have until early January), and, apparently for a majority of Academy members, mainly on DVD screeners. The reality is that a lot of films — the lower-budgeted indies without big stars — simply don’t get seen.
“You’d be amazed how many smaller movies don’t even get the cellophane cracked by academy members, because they’re into looking at the higher-profile films first,” says publicist Murray Weissman. “They just don’t have time.”
Motion Picture Academy officials, Reesman writes, “claim indifference to the frenzy that they have unleashed by compressing the Oscar season.” AMPAS spokesperson John Pavlik says that Academy members “should have been seeing the films throughout the year, not waiting until the week after Christmas to start watching movies.” And Pandemonium Films honcho Bill Mechanic (who’s also a former member of the academy’s board of governors), says, “There’s probably a greater volume in December than there used to be, but if you’re a caring member of the academy, you do your work.”
Just as a relatively modest percentage of kids in your high-school English class did their reading and turned in their homework with absolute regularity, so goes the Academy’s approach to “doing the work.” Most of them do it catch as catch can; some are outright slackers.