Movies

Martin Lawrence, still a name and face many non-black moviegoers only dimly recognize, solidified his reputation as a major box-office star with “Big Momma’s House,” the cross-dressing farce that defied dismissive reviews to bring home $114 million so far. Given the film’s modest budget, it might well turn out to be one of the year’s most profitable ventures. As expected, Eddie Murphy’s “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps” was also a big hit, and will probably end up outdrawing its 1996 predecessor.

That didn’t prepare anyone in Hollywood for “The Original Kings of Comedy.” This quick and dirty video documentary by Spike Lee, shot last February during a concert tour by four leading black comics, opened a week and a half ago on 847 screens and just about stopped traffic. (“The Cell,” by comparison, played on nearly 2,400.) Drawing a remarkable $13,000 per screen, “Kings” was last week’s second-biggest hit, leaving such carefully crafted mainstream entertainments as “Hollow Man” and “Space Cowboys” eating its dust.

But the real story, I think, is why the film has struck such a nerve. I caught up with it a week late to discover that it’s an extraordinary celebration of black culture, mostly hilarious, sometimes electrifying and occasionally angry. In terms of cinema, well, there isn’t any. “The Original Kings of Comedy” was shot on digital video with an eye toward cable TV broadcast, and it looks it. Colors are faded and unnatural, the light is dishwater-gray and the images lack crispness and definition.

Still, Lee knows what he’s doing; despite his prima donna reputation, I think he’s a supremely adaptable director. Seeing the film in a crowded theater is a lot more fun than watching it on TV would be, and the crappy, grainy look does create a sort of you-are-there immediacy. Anybody who’s interested in the direction of contemporary comedy, or in hearing some frank (and hysterically funny) African-American discourse on race and culture, shouldn’t miss this movie.

Journalist Joe Queenan once observed that Lee’s reputation (in some circles) as an anti-white racist was ludicrous because, as hard as the director might be on white people, he is much harder on blacks. You could say the same for all four of the Original Kings, whose ribbing of the smattering of whites in their Charlotte, N.C., audience is quite gentle compared to the abuse they dish out to black folks. In a sense, this is a declaration of independence. The attitude toward white people seems to be: We’re happy to have you here, but we’re not really concerned with you; this is our night. Any aggrieved whites who think blacks are a bunch of whiners who constantly complain about oppression and line up for government handouts will find a far more complicated self-image here.

Mac, whose liberated-id performance includes a description of how he started a fight with a 2-year-old girl and the motto for his planned day-care center (“I will fuck your kids up”), offers some mock-solicitous advice to whites in public places. “You might see three or four brothers at the mall or the bowling alley,” he explains. “You might hear the word ‘motherfucker’ 32 times and only two words of regular English.”

Cedric the Entertainer (a costar of Harvey’s WB show), a beefy, graceful absurdist who might be my favorite of these four, explains that white people like science fiction because they dream of escaping to other planets “and leaving our asses behind on Earth.” He shakes his head patiently. “Y’all know, if you goin’ to the moon we’ll be right behind you,” he intones. “In a space shuttle with a Cadillac grille, one headlight broke and the tags all wrong.”

If Mac is the angriest of these performers and Cedric perhaps the gentlest, D.L. Hughley (star of “The Hughleys” on ABC) is the most predictable, mining the familiar dirty-underwear and embarrassing-sex terrain of generations of black comics before him. Still, his timing and delivery are brilliantly honed and his material often has a political edge. Blacks, he says, avoid “extreme sports” because they have their own versions: “I’m gonna drive past the police and try not to get my ass whipped. I’m gonna fill out this loan application and lie about 50 times.”

For all the satire directed at black folkways (Cedric on ghetto nicknames: “I’m a grown-ass man. I ain’t gonna call no other dude ‘Delicious’”), “Original Kings” is most extraordinary when it transcends its gags in pursuit of something bigger. Acerbic host Harvey (of the eponymous WB show) himself provides a few scathing routines, as in his complaint about white people who nervously enumerate the blacks they’ve had over for dinner:

“If you know how many niggers been to your house, you racist like a motherfucker.” Hip-hop concerts, he says, involve too many instructions: Pump it up, wave your hands in the air, scream. “Motherfucker, for what? I paid $38.50. You scream!”

Harvey’s finest moment, however, comes in a lengthy tribute to old-school R&B, when he summons up the spirit of his 1974 Cleveland high school and gets an entire arena full of people on their feet to vintage hits by Lenny Williams, Teddy Pendergrass and Earth Wind & Fire. Suddenly it’s no longer an evening of comedy but an authentic emotional experience: a revival meeting, vaudeville show and house party, all in one. This seemingly artless movie becomes downright magical, and Lee half-accidentally finds something even his best films have struggled with: a portrait of black culture as a mature and highly complex world, comfortable enough with itself to talk some shit in public.

In fact, there are reportedly 157 members in the Academy’s documentary branch, which is about 2.5 percent of the total membership. Until recently that tiny group was seen as a bunch of hidebound conservatives, notoriously resistant to new aesthetic and narrative approaches to documentary film. There’s really no way to exaggerate the strangeness of this category over the years, or the number of important films that have been completely overlooked. The most famous non-nominees include “The Thin Blue Line,” “Roger & Me,” “28 Up,” “Hoop Dreams” and “Grizzly Man,” and it’s absolutely not coincidental that I’ve just cited films by Moore, Werner Herzog, Steve James and Errol Morris, all of them controversial figures whose work flies in the face of long-standing cinéma-vérité convention.

On the other side of the ledger, the list of winning and nominated features over the decades of the award’s history have an irresistibly random quality; as filmmaker and blogger AJ Schnack recently told me, the winners have included Jacques Cousteau, Walt Disney (twice apiece) and the Department of the Navy. Trying to pick the single most bizarre Oscar-winning documentary, one faces an embarrassment of riches. Is it “The Hellstrom Chronicle” (1971), which combines bogus science and genuine stop-motion photography to suggest that we’ll all be eaten by bugs? Is it Peter Watkins’ terrifying “The War Game” (1966), which depicts the effects of a hypothetical Soviet nuclear attack on Britain and can only be considered a documentary by stretching the term beyond all recognition? I’m going with “Design for Death,” an anti-Japanese agitprop film from 1947 that reportedly featured faked archival footage and was mostly written by Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss).

You can definitely discern streams or currents in the documentary category; most famously, between 1995 and 2000, five of the six Oscar-winning films were about Jewish and/or Holocaust-related topics. (Spike Lee got in trouble for observing that his 1997 film “4 Little Girls” had no chance up against “The Long Way Home,” a film about Jewish emigration to Israel. He was right.) In 1994, the year the Academy spurned “Hoop Dreams,” it awarded the Oscar to “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision,” a little-seen film made by Freida Lee Mock, who happened to be governor of the Academy’s documentary branch at the time.

In recent years, the documentary branch has veered from righteous political anger to a desire to reward films that reach out to broad, general audiences. So we get Oscars for Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side” (2007) and Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s “Murder on a Sunday Morning” (2001) — terrific films, both with very little box-office appeal — and also for “March of the Penguins,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Man on Wire.” One-time renegades Moore and Morris have come in from the cold, although arguably neither guy won for his best movie: Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” and Morris’ “The Fog of War.” One can definitely continue to kvetch about the omissions. I don’t know whose dog Steve James ran over, but it’s absolutely disgraceful that “The Interrupters,” his moving and dramatic film about ex-gang members trying to stop Chicago street violence, was left out this year. As for Asif Kapadia’s “Senna,” I guess it wasn’t groundbreaking in any way, but it’s still an exciting film that put a lot of ordinary people’s butts in the seats.

However, if the Academy’s documentary branch wants to reach across the partisan divide into red-state America, it has the perfect candidate this year in Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s “Undefeated,” a “Hoop Dreams”-style story about sports and society that inspired me and made me mad in about equal portions. (I’ll discuss the other nominees on another occasion, but here they are: Danfung Dennis’ war-veteran saga “Hell and Back Again,” Marshall Curry’s “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front,” Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” and Wim Wenders’ 3-D dance documentary, “Pina.”)

“Undefeated” is a tale of the 99 percent for sure, except that the young men who play for coach Bill Courtney’s Manassas High School Tigers, on the north side of Memphis, are a lot closer to the bottom 1 percent than the top. They live in a physically derelict and economically devastated neighborhood, where few households have two parents and few of those parents have full-time jobs. Before Courtney, a local businessman who lives in a luxurious suburban home, volunteered to coach the Manassas football team for no pay, they were a bedraggled program who’d gone almost 14 years without winning a single game. As he explains it, the school kept the team going by essentially renting it out as a sacrificial goat to suburban schools on a pay-for-play basis. The Manassas players would be bused out to some white neighborhood, take a whipping from some better-coached and better-organized team, and go home with a pizza and a check for a few thousand dollars. Courtney’s mission at Manassas is evangelical, in several senses of the word. He wants to create a winning football team, he wants to teach these boys self-respect and encourage them to pull themselves out of their dismal circumstances, and he wants to serve as surrogate father and mentor to young men with very few constructive role models.

If Courtney doesn’t officially want to serve as a spiritual guide, or spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, it’s probably fair to say that in the context of Southern high school football, that stuff just comes with the territory. This is an old-school, you-are-there documentary, completely free of judgment or extraneous commentary, and the pervasive quality of religious faith in the lives of Courtney and his team — along with the sense that team sports, and especially football, is itself a sort of spiritual quest — is just a given. Courtney stops just short of praying to God for victory before a big game, but when Manassas goes on an unlikely winning streak during the 2009 season, he doesn’t discourage the view that their comeback victories over bigger, richer and whiter schools might just be the will of the Big Guy.

I’ve already mentioned race more in this article than anyone does in the film, maybe because the racial dynamics of Manassas, and of Memphis and Tennessee and the United States, are so obvious to everyone involved. When Courtney tries to get his troubled defensive star, Chavis Daniels, to get in his car for a chat, he jokes, “You don’t like to ride with white people, Chavis? Is that it?” That might be the only time in “Undefeated” that anyone officially notices that Courtney has a different skin color than all the players on his team, and from virtually everyone on the Manassas campus.

To be honest, the whole idea that high school football is this almost mythological test of masculine character is profoundly alien to me. Still, there’s no disputing that Bill Courtney has touched and transformed his players’ lives, at absolutely no tangible benefit to himself. His brand of hyper-Christian caring and tough love — after one practice, he tells the team he must go home and pray for forgiveness for cursing so much — is hungrily embraced by these young men who’ve hardly ever had anyone treat them with dignity, let alone a wealthy white man who didn’t have to. Manassas’ unlikely 2009 run makes for great drama, as do the heartbreaking tales of the team’s three stars: Daniels, academic standout and undersized lineman Montrail “Money” Brown and O.C. Brown, a massive offensive lineman and genuine NCAA prospect.

But if O.C. and Money are getting out of north Memphis, partly through their own skill sets and partly because Courtney gave them a leg up at the right moment, what the hell is going to happen to the rest of the kids at Manassas? Should you have to be a football star — and one with a rich, white, well-connected coach — to have any shot of escaping from crime and poverty and a dismal, half-abandoned neighborhood? “Undefeated” is a genuine crowd-pleaser, a rousing and inspirational flowers-in-the-junkyard fable of hope and possibility in grim circumstances. But I can’t help thinking that if you step back from the immensely likable Bill Courtney and his football team, the bigger picture is of a screwed-up society that can offer no hope to millions, and is throwing away entire generations of young people.

“Undefeated” opens this week in Los Angeles and New York, with wider release to follow.

Oldman is a reflective, soft-spoken fellow who considers questions carefully before answering them, but he doesn’t have to think about this one. “It was greatly liberating, powerfully liberating, to play George Smiley,” he says. If he plays a character who’s called upon to cry, Oldman explains, “Those are Gary’s tears. They have to be real. I’ve had to feel that grief or that anger, and then the performance is contaminated by that emotion.” With Smiley, he goes on, he didn’t have to display that emotion on the outside; the character is a profoundly melancholy, even tragic figure, but all that emotion is bottled up inside, in the classic English style.

Oldman recently made a brief visit to New York, to talk about the first Oscar nomination of a circuitous acting career that has taken him from the British indie fringe of the mid-’80s to major Hollywood roles and video games. (He is most famous among the schoolmates of his teenage sons, he says, for supplying the voice of Sgt. Reznov in the “Call of Duty” series.) I got to spend some time with him in two different settings: First as the moderator of a question-and-answer session at Manhattan’s Sunshine Cinema, following a screening of “Tinker Tailor,” and then the next morning over coffee at Oldman’s Upper East Side hotel.

A performer of tremendous, almost chameleonic flexibility, and something of a cult figure for many younger actors and film fans, Oldman has never been in exactly the right spot for an Oscar to land on top of him. As the star of “Sid and Nancy” and “Prick Up Your Ears,” he was too edgy and too English. As a memorable character actor in Hollywood movies like “JFK” and “True Romance,” he perhaps seemed too damaged and disturbing. (Oldman explains that he settled on a key detail of the “True Romance” character after interviewing a Brooklyn teenager, who told him to replace the word “titties” with “breasteses.”) His ’90s roles as a leading man (“Immortal Beloved,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Lost in Space”) never clicked in quite the right way, although we should make an exception for Francis Ford Coppola’s flawed but gorgeous 1992 “Dracula.”

Now, at age 53, Oldman finds himself — as he ruefully puts it — almost an “elder statesman” of the film business. On “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” he says, he got to work with both John Hurt, an actor he has long idolized, and Tom Hardy, a younger actor who idolizes him. “I might like to think of Tom as a peer and a contemporary, but I’ve got almost 20 years on him,” Oldman says. “He’ll say to me, ‘Gary, I watched all your films when I was a kid.’”

As Oldman told the Sunshine audience, getting to play John le Carré’s legendary spymaster was an amazing opportunity, but one he approached with trepidation and nearly refused. He was “absolutely petrified” about taking a role so strongly identified with Alec Guinness, who played Smiley in the legendary BBC miniseries of the early ’80s. “You’ve got a knight of the realm, one of the most famous and most beloved British actors in our history. And if you asked almost anyone in the U.K., or at least anyone over a certain age, ‘Who is George Smiley?’ they’d say, ‘Oh, right, that’s Alec Guinness.’”

But just as director Tomas Alfredson’s chilly, modernist take on le Carré’s novel feels entirely different from the boxy claustrophobia of the TV series, Oldman’s Smiley is quite a different creation from Guinness’. “No doubt there are parts of the character where I wind up in the same place as Alec Guinness,” Oldman says, “but I’d like to think there are things in Smiley he didn’t find. Ultimately, I think his Smiley might be a bit more huggable. I think there’s a coldness, even a sadism to the character as I play him.”

Across these two conversations, I found Oldman to be an exceptionally thoughtful and gentlemanly person, much closer in manner to the quiet but deadly Smiley than to the unstable, violent or passionate characters he was known for in his youth. Oldman’s working-class London accent has been softened by nearly two decades in Los Angeles; he actually worked with an accent coach to make sure his performance as Smiley carried the correct upper-class Oxonian overtones. (“I was casting about a little bit to find his voice. And then I got to meet John le Carré, and said, ‘Thank you very much. I’ll take that.’”)

If anything, Oldman comes across as an intensely private person who isn’t terribly comfortable with the glare of celebrity, which may partly account for the fact that his leading-man career never quite took off and he’s never previously been nominated by the Academy. He talks about film, theater and literature with obvious passion and knowledge, and never seems to give rehearsed answers. For instance, he says he’s enjoyed playing Sirius Black in the “Harry Potter” series and Commissioner Gordon in the “Dark Knight” films, but also makes clear that those roles have been personally and financially beneficial. In the 2000s, he found himself raising two sons after a divorce, and didn’t want to be an absentee dad. “I didn’t want to be away from home all the time, and then I also didn’t want to be the kind of father who dragged them all over the world. Doing those kinds of roles in those kinds of movies, you’re making the most amount of money for the least amount of time.”

Oldman is a genuine movie lover, a connoisseur of cinematography, costuming and music — which makes him a particularly gratifying interview subject. While we were standing backstage waiting for the closing credits of “Tinker Tailor” to wind up, he talked about the piano theme, spreading his fingers on an imaginary keyboard: “Listen to that, so lovely. Then it goes all Russian!” When I meet him for coffee the next morning, we begin talking about the American movies of the 1970s that he likes best, starting with Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.”

You were talking last night about your relationship with Los Angeles, and it struck me that you don’t view the city as an outsider or a visitor, at least not anymore. It sounds like you love the place, and have complicated feelings toward it.

It’s a shame about California, and particularly about L.A., where they’ve demolished so many landmarks. It’s a bit of a disease there, where if anything is over 30 years old, they sort of knock it down and replace it. It’s a strange town, it’s this sprawling suburb, and then there’s a city, the old town. It’s as if someone wanted to build a New York or a Chicago, they got only so far and they gave up. They just abandoned it. I’ve lived there for 17 years, and I’ve grown rather fond of the place.

I’m guessing you must like “Chinatown,” both because it’s your kind of movie and also because it captures so much of that urge to destroy and rebuild.

Oh, yeah, “Chinatown.” Sometimes it takes an outsider. If you look at Schlesinger’s “Midnight Cowboy,” it’s such a microcosm of New York life at that time. He captured something about New York that was extraordinary. Polanski did much the same. Or a native can do it, a real native — Scorsese or Woody Allen with New York, P.T. Anderson with L.A. and the Valley.

Here’s another thing: These films, like “Chinatown” — these movies were mainstream! You try to say to a younger generation, who are watching these movies on DVD, and getting their sense of history through that: “The Conversation,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network,” “Chinatown,” “All the President’s Men,” “Marathon Man,” “Taxi Driver.” They were the movies you went to see at the cinema! They weren’t particularly art-house movies. They played everywhere.

Sure. I went to see “Taxi Driver” with my dad at the mall, in suburban California. It’s a little bit hard to imagine that particular movie playing there now.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s “Puss in Boots.”

I feel like the early part of your career, from the late ’80s to the early ’90s, almost belongs to that era of movie history. I can’t imagine Coppola’s “Dracula” being made now, or not the way you did it.

Well, I certainly think that — “Dracula,” for instance, it’s such a romantic movie. If you made it now, it would be a whole different animal. First of all, you’re competing against the market that has movies like “Paranormal Activity.” You’d have to deal with the scare factor. It was such a romantic take on the genre, and the book. This sort of tragic love story. I don’t know if people would want that now.

They could turn it into a “Twilight” movie. You guys were a couple of decades ahead of the curve on that one!

Right. I mean the people that write checks might not want it. I’m not talking about an audience. And then there was that slump in my career. People say to me, “Oh, there was a while where you disappeared.” There were many factors. I took a bit of a back seat, I had kids and I wanted to focus on them. There’s that period in the late ’90s, the early 2000s, where I didn’t do a great deal. People say, “Oh, you had a slump in your career.” And I say, “Really? Name me a movie. Name me a great movie from those years that I’d have wanted to be in.” That was a real strange seismic shift in the industry. That was when it all really started to change.

A great deal of it was being exported, suddenly, and the kind of movies that they were making was very different. I was lucky — I caught the very tail end of the indie thing, coming out of the late ’70s and going into the ’80s. With “Sid and Nancy” and “Prick Up Your Ears,” those were the last of that. Then there was the Merchant-Ivory phenomenon, that happened for a while. And then Tarantino, with that voice, that great marriage of action and dialogue, the like of which we’d never seen before.

But if you go back to those ’70s movies, you can’t imagine those being made today. I watched “Network” recently, funnily enough — I was on an Air New Zealand flight. Do you know there’s not a note of music in that film? Not a note. And it holds up. It just works. Those stunning performances from people, especially Robert Duvall, who is marvelous in it. You think of Finch, of course, and Faye Dunaway. But for me it was Robert Duvall and, of course, Ned Beatty. You remember him? When he gets him into the office, and they do that scene down that long table, gives him that speech?

I’m sure we could talk about ’70s films for a couple of hours, but why don’t you tell me about the moment when you found out you’d been nominated for the Oscar.

I was in Berlin, rather fittingly. I was in the middle of what I thought would be my last interview for “Tinker Tailor.” We were opening the movie there, and it was around 2:30 in the afternoon. My manager was watching the announcements in the hotel bar, and he came in looking flustered and a little teary-eyed, and said, “You’re an Academy Award nominee.”

We were already having anticipatory disappointment and anger. “Let’s just get angry early” — you know what I mean? Before we heard, I asked him, “Are you all right?” And he said, oh, he was just getting pissed off in advance. Tomas Alfredson, the director, went out for a walk. He couldn’t take it. So he was out walking around at the Brandenburg Gate. If one had taken the temperature for the last month, with the SAG Awards and the Globes, we weren’t part of it. So I wasn’t expecting anything. It was quite a shock.

I think I said this last night: You can let it overwhelm you and stress you out, give you anxiety. You can be cynical about it, or you can be, I think, overly modest — “I am not worthy,” that kind of thing. Or you can enjoy it. And I’m just having a great, great time, riding in the front cabin. It’s nice up there!

People in my position spend a lot of time fretting about whether the Oscars still mean anything to the culture at large, whether they mean what they used to, and so on. I wonder how that question looks to you. Do you feel like you’ve finally been accepted as a son and brother in Hollywood, after all these years?

I mean, I’ve never felt excluded, exactly. I am a participating member of the Academy and all that. But I think the answer is yes. You become an elder statesman, don’t you? A veteran. I’ve put the years in, I’ve got quite a body of work. And it’s particularly nice for me that it happened with this film and this character. I know some people who’ve been in this situation who have not had a good time. They get nominated, and they didn’t have a particularly good time on the movie, or they might not like the director. That’s got to be bittersweet, because you’re excited for yourself that you’ve been acknowledged, and yet you have a taste in your mouth from the experience.

This was a Rolls-Royce from the beginning, with Tim Bevan and Working Title, Robyn Slovo, the producer, Tomas Alfredson, the director — and this cast of actors! You know? So I’m very happy that it happened with this one. And we’ll see, who knows. It’s an achievement to make the top five.

And then, what you mentioned about the Oscar — where it is culturally, does it still mean the same thing, all of that. It certainly feels like it does from the inside, that’s for sure. It’s a big deal from where I’m sitting. What it means to the public — it’s a question I’ve never really asked anyone, you know? It’s never really come up. As an insider, you can take it or leave it, you can be cynical, you can dismiss it. It’s easy to be on the outside and criticize it. To me, the Golden Globes — that one is a puzzlement. There’s not one journalist I’ve spoken to who hasn’t had a comment or made a remark. Or rolled their eyes, as you are doing now. [Laughter.]

As you say, you’ve got quite a body of work, but this role feels quite distinct. Smiley is so quiet and calm, and you have a reputation for playing exaggerated, emotional characters. So much of the film is you being impassive, or at least seemingly impassive, underreacting rather than overreacting.

I’m excited and happy about the nomination precisely because of that. It’s not so showy, so extroverted. There’s a lot going on, but it’s like a simmer, isn’t it? It’s a small flame. It’s ironic, I suppose. There have been a few in the repertoire that have been more bombastic and showy, but I have to say this feels right. I don’t know — does that make sense? It’s a more mature piece of work.

I agree. I get such a powerful sense of depression or melancholy from Smiley. From the whole movie, actually, but especially from this tremendously still and quiet performance you give at the center of the movie. It’s like all the anxiety and sadness of post-war England compressed into one guy.

Well, he’s a romantic. A disenchanted romantic, one of the last. And he’s having to deal with these people, these new people in this new war, where it’s God versus Marx. There are suddenly all these questions, all these philosophies to deal with. I thought when I was working on it, “What would a psychiatrist, a therapist, say to Smiley in this day and age?” Look at that relationship [with his constantly unfaithful wife], it’s very dysfunctional, it’s very inappropriate. Someone might say to him, “Why don’t you feel that you deserve more than Ann? Why are you happy with scraps from the table, and not a full meal?” Those are the questions I asked myself; that’s what I was playing. That sadness that he carries around. I think, also, that he knows that the mole is Bill Hadon [played by Colin Firth] before I let you know it’s Hadon. So there’s this double betrayal.

When he talks about meeting Karla [the legendary KGB spymaster], and I have that monologue …

Yeah, about meeting Karla and figuring out his weakness. Which is such a great scene.

Smiley feels a little bit responsible for creating Karla, because he was the one person Smiley couldn’t crack, and he got away. And subsequently Karla became Karla — you see, I’m not being cuckolded by Bill Hadon, I’m being cuckolded by a man who’s thousands of miles away, this is how clever he is. But Smiley invites Peter Gwillam [Benedict Cumberbatch] up and they have whiskey, and then Smiley says to him, indirectly, don’t have a relationship. You want to be successful in this business? Don’t be involved. It’s his way of saying, I let him go, you see? Maybe you should tidy up your own affairs. [Long pause.] It’s fucking brutal, it gets me every time. The casualties of it.

I also found it chilling when Smiley says he has found Karla’s weakness, and that’s the fact that he’s a zealot, a true believer. Which raises the question of what Smiley believes in, or if he believes in anything. It’s the great mystery of the character.

Well, he’s become cynical, and the cynicism is there in the writing. I think it’s there in great writing. I think Arthur Miller has it, Tennessee Williams has it. I don’t even think great writers are even conscious of it, but there is that thing: Are we any better than you, when we think about it? Aren’t we really the same? What’s it all about?

Now we’re lucky. We look back at that period and we wonder: Should we have been as paranoid as we were? Perhaps not. What was all that about? But at the time, you know, it all felt very different. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing, a terrific creation. I’m very fortunate to have gotten to play it.

Still, you know what I’m talking about. Generally speaking, in recent years only certain kinds of movies have been serious candidates for the major Oscar categories, and in particular for best picture. While it’s impossible to lay out a precise description, it’s like Justice Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity: You know it when you see it. Earnest, middleweight dramas that teach life lessons and feature major emotional climaxes always leap to the forefront. They should make you laugh before they make you cry, or vice versa. Classic three-act structure; a major star playing slightly against type; at least one odd or gruesome or humorous supporting performance from a name actor. (Notice that I have just precisely described “The Descendants,” a tailor-made Oscar-winner if ever there was one, which for both extrinsic and intrinsic reasons is likely to fall short this year.)

Even Oscar winners that appear to violate some of these rules hew to the overall pattern. “No Country for Old Men” is an open-ended, nihilistic, ’70s-style American drama, but also one that alternates dark and light, features identifiable stars and a classic Western landscape. “The Hurt Locker” has no name actors, but offers an archetypal tale of courage in warfare that straddled the nation’s ideological divide. (It was also the least successful best-picture winner in history.) “Slumdog Millionaire” also had no stars and was set in a foreign country, but was essentially an old-time Hollywood drama filtered through India and then through canny stylemonger Danny Boyle.

I think we all understand that the 6,000-plus voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are a peculiar and self-selected group, and that they aren’t selecting the winners based on criteria that are important to anyone else. They aren’t picking movies the public likes. Indeed, over the last two decades the Academy’s taste has wandered increasingly far from that of the mass audience. And while artistic merit is an inherently nebulous and subjective concept, I don’t think that’s what they’re using either. Seriously, Academy members — let’s go out for coffee, and then you can sit there and look me in the eye and tell me that “War Horse” or “Midnight in Paris” or “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (for the love of Jesus!) is a better movie than “Melancholia” or “Take Shelter” or “Coriolanus” or “Drive” or about 30 other things I could come up with.

For that matter — and this one’s just as important — try to convince me that those nominated films are a better example of what Hollywood does best than such big, spectacular and hugely popular films as “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” or “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1″ or “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.” Sorry, but no. The thing is, Oscar voters are picking the movies that make people who work in the film industry feel better about what they do, for reasons that perhaps a highly-paid shrink could puzzle out. When we get involved in obsessive horse-race coverage of the Oscar campaign, we’re using voodoo and amateur psychology and meaningless statistics and other forms of hokum to try to get inside the heads of those 6,000 voters. I say the hell with it.

OK, I don’t quite say the hell with it. I’m as professionally interested in the outcome as anybody else who covers this business for a living, and as my editor recently observed, the Oscars are quite a bit like the Republican presidential contest. Just because the whole thing’s a charade doesn’t mean that nobody cares, or that we can ignore it. But my proposal for an Alternate-Dimension Oscars tries to imagine what the awards might be like if they didn’t disqualify, de facto, almost every kind of movie that people like to watch.

Believe it or not, I’m not envisioning an awards show geared toward the artsy-fartsy films that pointy-headed intellectuals like me tend to favor. If the best-picture race were between “Melancholia” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” and Nick Cave were getting ready to rip open that envelope and announce the winner, wouldn’t that have America on the edge of its sofa? Please, no. I think the “Dark Knight” problem is a much bigger one, by which I mean the Academy’s propensity to ignore large-scale, well-crafted, ambitious entertainments — the kind of movies at which Hollywood excels, like it or not — if they seem too violent or too pulpy or too fanboyish or too free of tedious message-delivery.

This isn’t exactly breaking news, but most popular genres of film are de facto ineligible for Oscar consideration: superhero movies, thrillers, crime dramas, romantic comedies and franchise pictures of any kind. On the other side of the coin, despite a recent reputation for indie-ness, the Academy largely steers away from the kinds of serious art-house dramas that play film festivals and keep upscale big-city audiences excited about the possibilities of the form. Instead, the real-life Oscars find themselves hopelessly trapped in the middle, endorsing calculated middlebrow pablum that everybody involved knows is a big pile of unmemorable meh. If the aim of the entire organization and its awards show is to present the best face of the American film industry to the world, then this whole situation is ridiculous and self-destructive.

Hence my proposal for an Alternate Universe Academy Awards, an unholy blend of the MTV Movie Awards and the Indiewire critics’ poll that will get people excited, lead to considerable fighting and weeping, and produce some genuinely unexpected moments on Oscar night. This is my alternate universe, at least for now, so I’m announcing the best-picture nominees. I hope you’ll play along, with your own lists, emendations and angry deletions. In recognition of the fact that there’s at least a little Venn-diagram overlap between my manufactured universe and the real one, I’ve kept the unlikeliest of this year’s Oscar nominees on the list.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 I’m not a big fan of the series, or the books, but that’s not what this is about. A tremendous technical accomplishment and a huge worldwide hit, managed with considerable dramatic chops and without selling out the source material.

The Lincoln Lawyer We can talk about the best-actor category later, where I think Matthew McConaughey’s underappreciated comeback role should be a strong contender. But from its ’70s-style L.A. noir vibe to its combination of sleaze, humor, emotion and violence, “Lincoln Lawyer” was arguably the year’s best Hollywood genre film.

Melancholia No need to repeat all the praise I and other critics have lavished on Lars von Trier’s hybrid of Chekhovian wedding comedy and apocalyptic masterpiece, with terrific performances from Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Cinematic accomplishment of the year.

Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol Tom Cruise back in his borderline creepy, control-freak comfort zone, and a dynamite live-action debut from director Brad Bird added up to an enormous hit and the year’s most satisfying action flick by far.

A Separation Yeah, it’s a real-world nominee in the foreign-language category, but Asghar Farhadi’s continually surprising Iranian domestic drama, with its hidden stories about class conflict and its tense, involving portrait of life inside the Islamic Republic, is the year’s best example of global realism.

Take Shelter For my money this apocalyptic weather thriller — or is it a private tale of madness? — captured the American national mood better than anything else I saw all year, with a shattering lead performance by Michael Shannon and terrific supporting work by Jessica Chastain.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Gary Oldman actually is nominated as best actor for his disturbing, ultra-quiet role as George Smiley, and deservingly so. But Tomas Alfredson’s chilly, modernist period piece is a witty and brilliant reimagining of John le Carré’s most famous spy novel.

The Tree of Life I was as surprised as anybody to see Terrence Malick’s long-brewing history of humanity and the universe on this year’s real-world best-picture list, and I think that’s largely due to the performances by Brad Pitt and Chastain in the more comprehensible Texas-childhood scenes. Given its reputation among critics (not necessarily including me) and Malick’s near-godhead status, it belongs here too.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 Go ahead and laugh, superior-minded Salon readers. Laugh, I tell you! This is a strongly crafted pulp movie, so pretty you want to bite it. Director Bill Condon fully satisfied the worldwide Twihard base while also hinting at some of the genuine perversity that underlies the saga. I won’t indulge my Twilight-vs.-Harry Potter riff right now, except to restate my view that the best of the former (this one) is probably superior to the worst of the latter.

Well, I’m here to tell you that the niche for “Chico & Rita” includes you, if you are interested in music or art or movies or love. Or, for that matter, in Havana or New York or Las Vegas or Hollywood or Paris, the cities captured with such verve, passion and style by Javier Mariscal, the well-known Spanish designer and artist who crafted this film’s visual universe. (Mariscal and Trueba co-directed “Chico & Rita” with Tono Errando, who is Mariscal’s brother.) Balancing the tropical primary colors of pre-revolutionary Cuba with a wintry, neon-flavored vision of bebop-era Manhattan, “Chico & Rita” is an ecstatic musical and visual celebration, taking its cues from Gauguin and Picasso in one direction, from Dizzy Gillespie and Tito Puente in another.

I should tell you straight out that “Chico & Rita” isn’t for kids, unless your kid is a sophisticated character who has the birds-&-bees stuff down, and a worldly view of human passions to boot. That’s almost too bad, because there’s so much 20th-century cultural history, and so much pure delight, packed into this 94-minute package. But this is an animated movie that features abundant nudity, sex, betrayal, moral cowardice and heartbreak, along with a supremely romantic conclusion that left me weeping in the dark. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone, because the press screening I attended broke into spontaneous applause during the closing credits (and that pretty much never happens).

There’s another creator of “Chico & Rita” who’s just as important as the three directors, and that’s Cuban pianist and bandleader Bebo Valdés, a major figure in Cuban pop and Latin jazz whose career was recently revived after a long exile from both music and his homeland. (His son, pianist Chucho Valdés, is arguably even more famous.) Still vigorous and still working at age 93, Valdés has composed and arranged a dynamic soundtrack that embraces the rhythmic Cuban pop music of his youth — especially the mambo and the batanga, which was his invention — and also the extraordinary moment of fusion when Afro-Cuban music entered the New York-centric, African-American world of jazz.

Valdés has made two previous films with Fernando Trueba, the Latin jazz documentary “Calle 54″ and the concert film “Blanco y Negro,” which captured Valdés’ collaboration with flamenco singer Diego El Cigala. It’s reasonable to assume that the character of Chico (voiced by Eman Xor Oña), whom we first meet as an elderly Havana shoeshine man who hasn’t played piano for years, is drawn from his biography. (Valdés has actually lived in Europe since the early ’60s, but only resumed his musical career in 1994.) From there we leap back to the late ’40s, when Chico is a brash and handsome young piano player from the hinterlands who arrives in Havana planning to set the town on fire. When Chico and his best friend Ramón (Mario Guerra) first lay eyes on fast-rising singer Rita (voiced by Limara Meneses) they understand right away that she’s the musical talent, as well as the eye candy, that they need to strike it rich. Chico is obviously smitten on a more personal level as well, but Rita — a city girl used to, um, “dating” visiting Yanks –wants nothing to do with this small-town hick. Until she hears him play.

Chico’s piano playing is handled by Valdés, of course, and Rita’s singing is done by the marvelous Cuban singer Idania Valdés (no relation, I believe), who turns the schmaltzy Mexican pop hit “Bésame mucho” into a smoldering torch song. Bebo Valdés really was the house bandleader at Havana’s swanky Tropicana Club during the years before the Cuban revolution, and I think we can assume that the wide open, musically fertile and almost Darwinian atmosphere captured in the film is true to life. The night when Chico and Rita become lovers is one of the steamiest, and most romantic, sequences in the history of animated cinema, and the pain of young love improperly nurtured is acute.

If the screenplay by Trueba and Ignacio Martínez de Pisón follows a familiar “Star Is Born” trajectory — boy gets girl, boy loses girl; their careers take off in different directions yet we know they will meet again — the images are so inventive and the music so magical that it all feels new. You certainly don’t have to be a jazz aficionado to appreciate “Chico & Rita,” but fans will find treasures inside treasures here: Jimmy Heath playing tenor sax “as” Ben Webster, Michael Philip Mossman playing Dizzy Gillespie, Germán Velazco playing Charlie Parker, Amadito Valdés as Tito Puente and Freddy Cole impersonating his far more famous brother, Nat.

Lured by the almighty Yankee dollar, and by the musical revolution known as bebop, Chico, Rita and Ramón all make their way from the vibrant, horizontal warmth of Havana to the forbidding, vertical and almost monochromatic landscape of New York. As famed percussionist Chano Pozo — whose recordings with Gillespie launched the Latin-jazz fusion — warns them, Cubans in New York faced a double whammy, being both blacks and Spanish-speaking immigrants. There were other hazards too; Pozo himself died in a Harlem bar fight in 1948, supposedly after buying a bag of low-grade marijuana from his assailant.

While Chico becomes a prominent pianist on the jazz circuit, Rita becomes something much bigger and less stable — a celebrity, a Latin bombshell packaged to the public as a star of Broadway and Hollywood and Vegas showrooms. (Like Sammy Davis Jr. and Harry Belafonte and other black stars of the period, Rita discovers that she can perform at the big Las Vegas hotels, but can’t stay in them.) How long can a black girl from Havana keep on driving pink Cadillacs and dating rich white guys? And when fate throws Chico and Rita back together, and they set a date for a Vegas wedding, why doesn’t he show up?

I don’t think Rita is based on any one real-life figure; it’s true that Valdés spent several years as pianist and arranger for Tropicana headliner Rita Montaner, but she was almost 20 years older than him, and died in 1958. Valdés emigrated from Cuba in 1960 along with singer Rolando La Serie, his friend and frequent collaborator, and married a Swedish woman after moving to Stockholm. Arguably the film’s Rita is a fantasy woman, but it’s a fantasy of the best and most beautiful kind, infused with the passion and tragedy of the Cuban experience. “Chico & Rita” is a big and glorious love story, with only a few glancing allusions to politics. But along the way it argues that Cubans have given the world — and American culture — so much, and have only suffered for it. Isn’t it long past time for Americans to end our bizarre policy toward that beautiful island?

“Chico & Rita” opens this week at the Angelika Film Center in New York, with wider national release to follow.

Mind you, Harrelson is one of those actors who frequently upstages his material. His performance as Justin Timberlake’s ferociously gay co-worker is the only thing I can remember about “Friends With Benefits.” In fact, that role deserves special mention in the pantheon of straight actors playing gay, because Harrelson makes no effort to score political points or deliver messages. It’s a Woody Harrelson character, a slouchy, funny, irresistible horndog dude who chases guys rather than girls. When Timberlake’s character awkwardly informs him that he’d be happy to go out drinking but he’s not actually gay, Harrelson shrugs it off with an eager grin: “Means more pipe for me!”

I could go on: “Zombieland,” “Transsiberian,” “North Country,” “She Hate Me” — all movies that have pretty much been erased from my memory, except for the oddly sticky Harrelson moments. “Rampart” is quite a different matter, because Harrelson is in every scene of the film, and indeed almost every shot. Co-written by director Moverman (who also made “The Messenger” with Harrelson) and L.A. noir novelist James Ellroy, this is an ambitious voyage into the heart of darkness, LAPD style, that suggests both Abel Ferrara’s “Bad Lieutenant” and the intense, semi-improvised character studies of John Cassavetes. Some of it’s brilliant and some of it set my teeth on edge, but Harrelson gives a moving, terrifying, titanic performance as the most compelling dirty cop since Denzel Washington in “Training Day.”

If you live in Southern California or have otherwise followed the Los Angeles Police Department’s extensive history of corruption and abuse, you may remember the Rampart scandal of the late ’90s, in which an entire anti-gang squad of 70-some cops was implicated in numerous kinds of misconduct. (Typically, no cops were convicted of anything, and only a handful were fired, but the city wound up paying out more than $125 million in the resulting civil suits.) This movie doesn’t even try to tell that story, but the Rampart Division and the scandal serves as backdrop to the tale of Officer Dave “Date Rape” Brown (Harrelson), an old-school LAPD warrior who enforces a “military occupation” (his term) on the black and brown streets of East L.A.

I won’t explain the origins of Dave’s cop “monicker,” except to say that it isn’t exactly what you’re thinking. (Could be better, could be worse; that’s up to you.) Dave breaks the law every day and doesn’t care, but hews closely to his own private version of the cop code: He’s doing the “people’s dirty work,” and if you’re a bad guy who crosses his path, you had it coming. His home life is a bewildering semi-bohemian mélange involving his current, somewhat estranged wife (Anne Heche), his ex-wife (Cynthia Nixon), who happens to be the first wife’s sister, and two daughters, one of them a righteously pissed-off teen lesbian played by Brie Larson. None of this stops him from randomly hooking up with women in bars, including a steamy liaison with Audra McDonald and an even steamier one with a lying, slutty, drunken lawyer played by Robin Wright. (“You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” Dave tells her — one, two, three — “in this bar.”)

As you can tell, Moverman has assembled a terrific ensemble (also included are Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty, Ben Foster, Ice Cube and Steve Buscemi), and the intimate, eye-level cinematography of Bobby Bukowski and staccato editing of Jay Rabinowitz create a seductive, threatening atmosphere that pushes right to the edge between realism and total head-trip. But what “Rampart” doesn’t really offer is a story worthy of its tremendous antihero, who almost convinces us of his essential honor, until we notice that he’s actually a sociopath inflicting pain on everyone around him. Dave gets dragged into some kind of murky, sub-”Chinatown” conspiracy, and may be the LAPD brass’ designated fall guy for the entire Rampart snafu, but that’s about all I understand.

But if Dave’s slide into alcohol and drug abuse and worsening criminality seems a bit foreordained, Harrelson remains mind-bendingly magnetic, so much so that you’ll keep rooting for Dave to straighten things out long after that’s become impossible. Harrelson himself, of course, is a noted left-wing activist who would probably despise Dave Brown in real life, but that doesn’t stop him from infusing the guy with unquenchable humanity and his own brand of Sinatra-style doomed dignity. Moverman is an intriguing talent who may yet make a great film; if this isn’t quite it, it’s still a memorable and distinctive showcase for one of our greatest actors.

“Rampart” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, and Feb. 17 in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, with wider release to follow.