Oscars

Both films have broad social and environmental goals in view, but they’re very different in terms of style and tone (as well as in terms of box-office results). In “The Cove,” Psihoyos and dolphin trainer-turned-activist Ric O’Barry want to use one horrifying but seemingly minor and local issue — the annual roundup and slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan — as a key that unlocks a larger set of issues: our short-sighted and greedy stewardship of the oceans and our despotic relationship with the species that seems closest to us in intelligence. (Maybe dolphins aren’t as smart as they seem, though; how can they still be so friendly after everything we’ve done to them?) This metaphorical tale is framed, as Psihoyos has put it, as a mixture of Jacques Cousteau special and 1970s James Bond film.

Yet while the cinematic qualities of “The Cove” had critics (me included) falling all over themselves, it was the more didactic, informational, TV-style “Food, Inc.” that proved far more successful with audiences. (This is a topic for another time, but the critical truism that the public doesn’t like didactic, political message movies is almost 100 percent false. See also: Cameron, James, recent career of.) Crawling slowly around the country through every middle-size city and college town, “Food, Inc.” gradually accumulated a gross of about $4.5 million. That might not sound impressive — it’s about 0.6 percent of “Avatar’s” domestic take — but it looks good compared to “The Cove,” which has made less than $900,000.

“Food, Inc.” isn’t just a message movie, it’s a movement movie. And the social movement in question — the local-organic resistance to corporatized, industrial agriculture — is one that finds itself at an important germinal stage, just on the cusp of widespread acceptance. As Michael Pollan said in an interview before the film’s release, local-organic is about where environmentalism was just before the first Earth Day in 1970 — no longer freakish, but not mainstream either.

Now, Academy voters tend to be older and culturally rather conservative, even if their social views are liberal. They don’t exactly represent the “Food, Inc.” demographic, and may not want to think too hard about where the veal comes from that is served so elegantly at fine dining establishments of western Los Angeles County. In that regard, maybe the bravura cinematic qualities and the clear-cut morality of “The Cove” make it a safer bet in your office pool.

Let’s fend off overconfident-prognosticator disease right now by noting that the documentary vote is notoriously unpredictable, even compared to other Oscar categories. Academy voters might well choose between Flipper and Bossy by selecting neither. (Last year, “Man on Wire” won over presumed favorite “Trouble the Water”; two years ago, Alex Gibney’s little-seen “Taxi to the Dark Side” triumphed over Michael Moore’s “Sicko” and Charles Ferguson’s “No End in Sight.”) There are three other nominees this year, all eminently worth seeing: Anders Østergaard’s “Burma VJ,” a chronicle of the 2007 Burmese uprising, mostly shot by clandestine reporters inside that closed country; Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers”; and Rebecca Cammisa’s wrenching “Which Way Home,” which follows the stories of Mexican children traveling to the United States on their own.

Still, there’s no question that the genteel and largely amicable contest between “The Cove” and “Food, Inc.” is the main event, and one that demonstrates how much the docu-Oscar category has become a bully pulpit through which Hollywood airs its collective social grievances. Once upon a time, and not that long ago, the Academy’s documentary competition was something else entirely: a realm of hushed, somber historical films — often but not always Holocaust-related — and life-affirming journeys with classical musicians, famous writers, outdoor explorers and/or children. The Oscar-winner in 1965 was “The Eleanor Roosevelt Story.” In 1975, “The Man Who Skied Down Everest.” In 1980, “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China.” In 1993, “I Am a Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School.”

But you can see the entertainment industry’s guilty-liberal, semi-activist conscience emerging as early as Barbara Kopple’s breakthrough labor doc “Harlan County, USA” in 1976. There have been sporadic eruptions of left-wing sentiment ever since, as in “The Times of Harvey Milk” in 1984 and the surprising and controversial choice of “The Panama Deception” in 1992. And then came the explosion of the 2000s, the decade of “Bowling for Columbine,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Taxi to the Dark Side,” when the documentary Oscar began to feel like the semi-official opposition to Fox News, or an avenue for agitating against the Bush-Cheney regime and associated right-wing orthodoxy.

As almost anyone in the documentary world will tell you, Academy voters have been and continue to be exceptionally conservative when it comes to issues of art and craft, preferring straightforward message-delivery to any kind of ambiguity or aesthetic ambition. Revered cinéma-vérité pioneer Frederick Wiseman has no Oscar nominations on his 40-year résumé, while Albert and David Maysles (“Gimme Shelter,” “Grey Gardens”) were nominated just once, for a 1974 short. (They didn’t win.) This year, R.J. Cutler’s fascinating glimpse behind the scenes at Vogue magazine, “The September Issue,” was ignored, as were Wiseman’s “La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet” and French New Wave pioneer Agnès Varda’s autobiographical “The Beaches of Agnès.” Each of those is a disheartening omission; taken together, they have to be filed under Some Things Never Change.

Still, given the reality that mainstream American documentary filmmaking has become a coffee-house debating society for various strands of global-progressive-environmental ideology, the Academy could do a whole lot worse. Both “Food, Inc.” and “The Cove” are meaty, well-crafted and provocative works of advocacy. Both deserve to reach wider audiences, and — who knows? — maybe they’ll even reach a handful of viewers who don’t already agree with their positions. Now, is this highly politicized era of documentary-Oscar history superior to the one that produced “Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel With the World” (1963) or “Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids?” (1977)? Let history judge. 

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.

As you may have noticed, the economy has changed a bit in recent years. Our corporate overlords have outsourced our entire industrial economy to Asia — the invisible hand made them do it! — and the largest global crisis since the Great Depression has left us mired in seemingly permanent debt and stagnation. (Socks are much cheaper than they used to be, though, so it was all worth it!) Movies, along with military hardware, remain almost the only economic sector where America still reigns supreme. (The multilingual industries of India make more films and sell more tickets, but remain far behind in terms of global revenue.) Indeed, it can sometimes be difficult — as with “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” the second highest-grossing film of 2011 — to tell the difference between the movies and the military gear.

But despite producing a series of enormous worldwide hits last year, Hollywood has been badly hurt by the recession, and faces a mounting crisis with no obvious solution. Box-office results last year were not merely bad overall, they were a lot worse than they looked. In terms of actual dollars, the decline in United States box-office receipts from 2010 to 2011 was around 3.5 percent, but higher average ticket prices masked a 5 percent drop in attendance, following another 5 percent drop the year before that. That’s right: There were roughly 10 percent fewer tickets sold in 2011 than in 2009, and fewer people went to the movies last year than in any year since 1995. Given that a disproportionate amount of last year’s dollars came from franchises that have either definitely or probably played out the string — “Harry Potter,” “Transformers,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “The Hangover” — some people in Hollywood are forecasting a Maya-style apocalypse in 2012.

And then there are the Oscars. I don’t think you need to be Dr. Freud — or Viggo Mortensen playing Dr. Freud — to see this year’s Academy Awards campaign as the film industry’s half-conscious attempt to lick its wounds, buck itself up, whistle a cheery tune and imagine that prosperity lies right around the corner. For one thing, that’s the only way I can make sense of the best-picture nomination given to “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” which is pretty much the Ur-example of an earnest, sentimental, middlebrow Oscar-bait vehicle that nobody actually liked. Furthermore, Jesus — if only the tune were a bit cheerier. Have you ever seen such a parade of depressed, wounded and dysfunctional men and boys as in this year’s roster of best-picture nominees? During the first Great Depression, we got “It Happened One Night,” “Grand Hotel,” “42nd Street,” “Top Hat,” “You Can’t Take It With You” and a little something called “Gone With the Wind” (all of them Oscar winners or nominees). This year we get a washed-up movie star, a cuckolded and about-to-be-widowed dad, a weird kid with a dead dad (times two), a guy trapped in the past, a divorced dad running a losing baseball team, and an emasculated hardass dad with a flying wife who’s trapped in the past in a movie nobody can understand. Oh, and a horse.

Seriously, the only movie among this year’s nine best-picture nominees that isn’t a study in masculine suffering is “The Help,” simply because it doesn’t have any men in it. (I’ll grant half a point to the decidedly odd “War Horse,” whose human characters don’t matter much and tend to die rapidly.) But “The Help” can serve in its own way as analogy and salve for Hollywood’s (and America’s) current predicament, since it presents itself as a moral fable about how we all faced a Difficult Time and became stronger and better people. It, too, is an ambivalent, Gatsby-flavored tale about time (more ambivalent than it wants to be, maybe), struggling to balance the desire to rescue what is beautiful from the past — as the eponymous hero of “Hugo” and Oskar in “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” and Owen Wilson’s dazed Yank in “Midnight in Paris” all want to do — with the imperative of closing the door and moving forward, as do George Clooney’s Matt King in “The Descendants” and Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane in “Moneyball.”

Viewed through this prism, the Oscar front-runner status of Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist,” which seems so unlikely at first glance, starts to make sense. Last spring at Cannes, when I wrote about the possibility that a black-and-white silent with an unknown star, by a French director with an unpronounceable name (roughly: ah-ZAH-na-vee-syoose), might become a hit, the only response I got from readers was derisive laughter. I didn’t really believe it either, to be fair, but the alchemy of “The Artist” turned out to be unique: A lightweight but confident entertainment for adults, in a year virtually bereft of same, and a big wet kiss to Hollywood’s golden age, delivered by those normally snooty, snail-eating Europeans.

Even if the psychological parable in “The Artist” was unintentional on Hazanavicius’ part, it has so far proved irresistible to Academy voters. Not only is this a movie about a guy who faces a career crisis and a major economic crash and comes back, it’s also about the biggest and most traumatic transformation in the history of the film business, the transition from silent movies to talkies. One might almost say the biggest and most traumatic transformation until now; today’s Hollywood executives, embattled by YouTube, mobile devices, online piracy, HDTV home theater systems and the explosion of HBO-style television drama, may feel like they’re living through the birth of the talkies all over again.

In other words, I think “The Artist” as an Oscar contender is a phenomenon specific to 2012. It’s a nice enough little movie, but if it wins a pile of awards later this month, people may well look back at the whole thing later with some degree of puzzlement or buyer’s remorse (as with, say, “Shakespeare in Love” or “Dances With Wolves”). The thing is, there’s no other obvious Oscar winner amid all these lugubrious films about angst-ridden heroes wrestling with the legacy of the past, and compared to this collective depresso-fest “The Artist” feels vigorous, loaded with brio and eager to please.

If we’re tempted to revert to old stereotypes of the French as a constitutionally melancholy race obsessed with their past glories, we might want to take a look in the mirror. Of the American films among this year’s nominees, only “Moneyball” and “The Help” seem essentially optimistic in tone, and both are about lonely outsiders challenging the failure of conventional wisdom and pushing forward toward a more enlightened world. (The fact that one is about massive social injustice and the other is about statistical analysis and information flow tells you all you need to know about their Oscar chances.) “The Descendants” seems to have all the basic ingredients of a surefire Oscar winner — spunky kids, a dad who cries, life lessons and beautiful scenery — but packages them together as a series of lazy teachable moments and boozy Hawaiian postcards. George Clooney’s measured, careful performance is an obvious Bill Clinton attempt to feel our pain, whereas Jean Dujardin’s performance in “The Artist” is a delightful surprise.

In both “Hugo” and “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” preteen boys try to recover from the calamitous deaths of their beloved fathers, and pursue obscure keys to the hidden secrets of the past. While I found the first quite lovely, and the second tedious, there’s little doubt that “Hugo” was an expensive folly, a personal foray into cinema history with Martin Scorsese that was too sad and strange for mass audiences. (And while Hazanavicius paid tribute to early Hollywood, Scorsese reminded us that spectacle cinema was born in Europe.) As for “Extremely Loud,” I genuinely don’t know who got anything from that movie or what it was; it’s supposed to be a tear-jerker about 9/11 and autism and growing up fatherless and contemporary economic anxiety and race relations in New York and a bunch of other so-called big topics, but ends up instead as a mildly irritating combination of Wes Anderson shtick and afterschool special.

While Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” and Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” are flawed and idiosyncratic personal works by important directors who could hardly be more different, both stick to the grand theme of Oscar 2012: the irresistible allure of the past and the forbidding uncertainty of the future. Of course, Malick is thinking about the past of the entire universe and the future in terms of our return into that vastness after death, whereas Allen’s interest in the past is limited to early 20th-century literature and music, and all he sees ahead is the final punctuation to a cruel joke. As I read the films, Owen Wilson’s Gil in “Midnight” and the Malick stand-in played by Sean Penn in “Tree of Life” arrive at similar understandings of their disparate universes: The past is in us, whether genetically or cosmologically or culturally, and it always will be. But we can’t live there.

Arguably that’s the same pseudo-Zen lesson absorbed by Matt King and Oskar and Hugo and George Valentin, the silent-movie Ozymandias played by Dujardin in “The Artist.” The days of American specialness and bigness — whether you’re talking about Cecil B. DeMille or Henry Ford or Gen. MacArthur — are pretty much gone, and just to veer into unauthorized political commentary, voting for Tweedledum or Tweedledee in November won’t bring them back. Our economy and society aren’t what they used to be, and neither are our movies. Whatever wins this month will not be remembered alongside “Gone With the Wind” and “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Godfather.” Hollywood did not entirely bring this crisis upon itself, but to the extent that the Academy Awards can take the institutional temperature of America’s film industry, it seems to be wallowing in self-pity and lamenting its lost past, like the characters in these films as they hit bottom. At least at the end of “The Artist,” George figures out that he’s got to dance for a living.

But the Oscars we have are the Oscars we have. So I want to lobby here for who really should win now, given the unfortunate but undeniable reality that Brooks and Kirsten Dunst and Tilda Swinton and Michael Fassbender, et al., are out of the picture.

BEST PICTURE

Who’s in: “The Artist,” “The Descendants,” “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” “The Help,” “Hugo,” “Midnight in Paris,” “Moneyball,” “The Tree of Life,” “War Horse”

Who got snubbed: Most notably “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” which just didn’t stand out enough (or make enough money). Also “Bridesmaids,” “Drive,” “Melancholia” (which recently won best picture at the European Film Awards) and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” each of which is, in my oh-so-humble judgment, better than several of the nominated films.

WTF factor: “Extremely Loud”? Really? That there were nine nominations instead of six to eight is itself a pretty big surprise – but all the nominations piled up by Stephen Daldry’s treacly post-9/11 magic-healing movie makes me feel a teenage level of bile toward the Academy and its collective taste for ultra-middlebrow sentimentality. Maybe voters made up for that on the other side of the ledger by nominating “The Tree of Life,” a spiritual allegory many viewers found incomprehensible.

Who should win now: Again, this category is me voting with my heart, not horse-race analysis. We all know that “The Artist” is still in the lead, with “The Descendants” and/or “Midnight in Paris” making up ground on the outside, etc. If the Oscars are about big spectacles that combine romance, adventure, tragedy and comedy, that put all kinds of money on the screen but also demonstrate a passion for life and movies, then there’s only one choice. Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” is a grand folly, a money-loser on an epic scale, the greatest work so far done in 3-D, an adaptation of a children’s book that far outdoes its source material and an old-school Big Movie aimed at all viewers. Reward this great director for taking enormous chances when he didn’t have to, and pulling it off in a way nobody expected.

BEST ACTOR

Who’s in: Demián Bichir, “A Better Life”; George Clooney, “The Descendants”; Jean Dujardin, “The Artist”; Gary Oldman, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”; Brad Pitt, “Moneyball”

Who got snubbed: Ryan Gosling for both “Drive” and “The Ides of March,” although the writing’s been on the wall, re Gosling backlash, for some time now. It’s also not surprising that Leonardo DiCaprio (for “J. Edgar”) and Michael Fassbender (“Shame”) were left out; the latter’s day will come and the former was perfectly dreadful.

WTF factor: There were murmurs around Bichir, a terrific Mexican actor who plays an immigrant gardener in Chris Weitz’s little-seen “A Better Life” (and also had a supporting role on TV’s “Weeds”). But it’s still a big surprise – is this the first time an actor who’s also played Fidel Castro (in “Che”) has been Oscar-nominated? Gary Oldman arguably wasn’t the most memorable aspect of Tomas Alfredson’s cool, modernist “Tinker Tailor,” but it’s a nice surprise to see the movie, and his underplayed performance, get some recognition.

Who should win now: I like everybody in this category, and of course Clooney and Dujardin are the front-runners. But Academy members, this year of political discord is a good time to send a unifying message to all Americans and all citizens of the movie world. Readers of OK! Magazine and art-film connoisseurs are now joined in their love of Brad Pitt, a movie star who has (at length) revealed himself as a superb actor. Pitt personally nursed “Moneyball” through its production nightmares and near-collapse, and fills the potentially two-dimensional role of Billy Beane with tremendous humor and heart. It’s time.

BEST ACTRESS

Who’s in: Glenn Close, “Albert Nobbs”; Viola Davis, “The Help”; Rooney Mara, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”; Meryl Streep, “The Iron Lady”; Michelle Williams, “My Week With Marilyn”

Who got snubbed: First and foremost, Tilda Swinton in “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” It’s a brilliant performance in an arty, painful, violent film that was simply too challenging for Academy voters (or many civilians) to enjoy. Also highly deserving from the indie/arty fringe are Kirsten Dunst for “Melancholia” (she won the best-actress award at Cannes) and Elizabeth Olsen for “Martha Marcy May Marlene.”

WTF factor: I suppose Mara’s nomination is a surprise, given that “Dragon Tattoo” was locked out of the other major categories. Still, she was good, and my only problem with it is the zero-sum game that booted Dunst, Olsen and Swinton to the curb.

Who should win now: This is a tough one to call, and I’m going to end up with the most conventional choice. I didn’t love “The Iron Lady,” which is a semi-coherent blend of mid-grade British political drama and soap opera, but the range and intelligence of Meryl Streep’s performance as Maggie Thatcher – bringing both her profound strength and her personality defects to life — are extraordinary. I know Streep has her haters, but we’re talking about the greatest stage and film actress of her time, who’s drawing near a late-midlife career transition.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Who’s in: Kenneth Branagh, “My Week With Marilyn”; Jonah Hill, “Moneyball”; Nick Nolte, “Warrior”; Christopher Plummer, “Beginners”; Max von Sydow, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”

Who got snubbed: Albert Brooks for his comic-sinister Jewish gangster in “Drive,” and that’s a complete and total freakin’ disgrace. Everybody in Hollywood has decided they hate that movie, and that’s some cinema-studies grad student’s dissertation topic right there waiting. I know there’s a technical argument about whether Andy Serkis’ motion-capture performance in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” actually qualifies – but it should, and he belongs on the list ahead of at least three nominated actors.

WTF factor: Pretty much the whole list, except for Plummer. Oh, I have no problem with Jonah Hill, and I do understand that Branagh was chewing the scenery because he was playing noted hambone Laurence Olivier. Max von Sydow, of course, is one of the greatest actors in film history in the twilight of his career, and was easily the best thing about “Extremely Loud.” But none of them was all that great. “Warrior” doesn’t belong on a list of top-five Nick Nolte performances, but I guess it proved he could still display some vulnerability after a lengthy period of simply playing a bear.

Who should win now: Christopher Plummer as the abruptly uncloseted senior-citizen dad of Mike Mills’ underappreciated “Beginners.” Furthermore, he will win. So, no, there’s still no justice in the world, but sometimes the stars align. (And as Albert Brooks reportedly quipped this morning, he doesn’t have to attend any more events that Plummer wins.)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Who’s in: Bérénice Bejo, “The Artist”; Jessica Chastain, “The Help”; Melissa McCarthy, “Bridesmaids”; Janet McTeer, “Albert Nobbs”; Octavia Spencer, “The Help”

Who got snubbed: Well, on one hand I love everyone on this list. On the other hand, the entire movie world is shocked today that Shailene Woodley, who plays George Clooney’s eldest daughter in “The Descendants,” got left out. And while I can’t pretend to be amazed that Charlotte Gainsbourg’s tender and heartbreaking role in “Melancholia” got overlooked, she deserved to be nominated and to win (unless Woodley won).

WTF factor: Melissa McCarthy and Janet McTeer are big surprises, but in the best possible way. Jessica Chastain’s nomination is a mild surprise, but only because it’s highly unusual to see two nominees in the same category for the same film.

Who should win now: What an absolutely terrific group of women! I mean, they really don’t need to give it to Bejo, because “The Artist” is likely to win all kinds of other things and her performance is charming but slight. I’d be delighted to see any of the others crying at the podium, and my typin’ fingers were all set to go with a passionate defense of McTeer’s fearless, swaggering role as a woman passing for male in early 20th-century Dublin. But “The Help” does deserve some recognition, both as a movie and a social phenomenon, and Octavia Spencer’s brave, conflicted and righteously angry performance is the right vector for that.

BEST DIRECTOR

Who’s in: Michel Hazanavicius, “The Artist”; Alexander Payne, “The Descendants”; Martin Scorsese, “Hugo”; Woody Allen, “Midnight in Paris”; Terrence Malick, “The Tree of Life”

Who got snubbed: Boy howdy — all kinds of people! You can start with David Fincher, Steven Spielberg, Stephen Daldry, Bennett Miller, George Clooney and Lars von Trier, all of whom (except the last, of course) seemed plausible or viable at various times.

WTF factor: Actually very low. Malick’s nomination is an unexpected and pleasant surprise, and Scorsese or Allen might easily have been dropped in favor of someone else, but this is undeniably a strong and varied list.

Who should win now: I’m on the fence about “Tree of Life,” at least in terms of its ultimate significance and success, but it truly is a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic experience. In fact, I’m grateful that these nominations will compel me to circle around and watch it again. There’s often a lifetime-achievement aspect to the directing Oscar, and given the enormous philosophical and artistic goals of “Tree of Life,” this is really the Academy’s one chance to honor the strange, remarkable and resolutely unprolific career of Terrence Malick. Besides, don’t we all want to see whether the legendarily private Malick will actually show up? (My money’s on no; maybe he can play clarinet via Skype with Woody Allen.)