Oscars

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.)

That’s the assignment for today: Films, filmmakers and actors who clearly deserve awards consideration, who would definitely receive it in a universe superior to this one, and who still have some kind of shot even in the cold, hard world of reality. If you’re warming up your comment-writing fingers to accuse me of elitist snobbery, please note that we are not discussing films or actors that probably or certainly will be nominated, no matter how deserving they may be. I’ll be as happy as a Pismo clam dressed in lemon butter to see George Clooney and Brad Pitt get their best-actor nominations this year; they were both terrific. But I won’t pretend to be surprised. (Ditto for Meryl Streep, Michelle Williams, Albert Brooks, Terrence Malick, Martin Scorsese, and so on.)

If anything, these are the potential nominations I once thought were likely, and now seem to be slipping away with the melting sands of pop-culture time. It’s like that scene on the Great Beach of the Hereafter at the end of “Tree of Life”! Allow me to treasure these possibilities a few days longer — and please, share your own lists and castigate me for the unforgivable omissions.

Best actress

Ellen Barkin, “Another Happy Day” This mean-spirited family comedy from writer-director Sam Levinson (son of Barry) was a classic ‘tweener, too indie for mainstream audiences and too conventional for the art-house crowd. I, for one, really liked it — and thought it was the ideal comeback vehicle for the 55-year-old Barkin, who gives a blistering, hilarious and profoundly compassionate performance as the screwed-up mom at the story’s center. Apparently no one else cared. But this is Oscar-worthy acting if I’ve ever seen it, daring, risky, vulnerable, free of shame or fear. If I can’t win over the Academy, maybe I’ll convince you to check out the movie (and also Barkin’s awesome Twitter feed).

Kirsten Dunst, “Melancholia” I get why the Academy is never really going to honor Lars von Trier for anything (even bracketing his ill-advised attempt at Nazi-related humor), and I’m pretty much OK with that. Hollywood cinema and von Trier’s brand of confrontational art-house fare are really different categories, like pickles and peanut butter, and they don’t belong together. But “Melancholia” is A) a spectacular achievement, and B) as close to a mainstream crossover as he’s likely to come. It also features a major Hollywood star in a luminous, courageous performance where she pees on a golf course, has sex with a stranger, suffers a terrible nervous breakdown and protects a child from the end of the world. Dunst already won the best-actress prize at Cannes, and an Oscar nomination — nobody expects her to win — would be wonderful recognition for this amazing movie. Do the right thing, Hollywood!

Best actor

Michael Shannon, “Take Shelter” I recognize that Shannon, a 37-year-old character actor with dozens of film and TV roles on his résumé, is not to everybody’s taste. He often plays unstable villains or heavies, and while I almost always find him enjoyable, he has a reputation for chewing the scenery. In both “Shotgun Stories” and the apocalyptic Middle American weather thriller “Take Shelter,” indie director Jeff Nichols has found a way to harness Shannon’s immense power, and this titanic, slow-burning performance as an Ohio construction worker battling troubling visions and a possible psychotic breakdown is the best work of his career. For my money, in fact, “Take Shelter” was the American film of the year, but Shannon (wonderfully supported by Jessica Chastain, who plays his wife) is its face, its heart and soul.

Best supporting actress

Vanessa Redgrave, “Coriolanus” On this one, Academy members, I’m drawing a line in the sand. Did you actually watch Ralph Fiennes’ terrific adaptation of Shakespeare’s bleakest tragedy all the way through? If you fell asleep with a glass of sherry, start over again! If you did, and you saw 74-year-old Vanessa Redgrave as the terrifying Volumnia, the mother who would rather see her son come back dead from the war than not go at all, and you did not realize that this was one of the greatest Shakespeare performances ever committed to film, then I don’t know what to say. Mail me your card so I can publicly humiliate you, and perhaps God will forgive you. I can feel, dammit, that the Academy’s going to ignore Redgrave — because she’s a notorious commie who might say something inappropriate, because it’s Shakespeare but the depressing kind, not the funny, sexy, dress-up kind — and it makes me feel like the guy in “Office Space” with the stapler problem. I’m going to burn all your houses down. Metaphorically, of course.

Best supporting actor

Christopher Plummer, “Beginners” In fairness, this one is still pretty likely. The supporting-actor category doesn’t feel overcrowded this year, and while Albert Brooks’ creepy-hilarious turn as the sinister Jewish gangster in “Drive” is getting most of the love, Plummer is a well-respected figure who has never won an Oscar (and only got his first nomination two years ago, for playing Tolstoy in “The Last Station”). His funny, relaxed and irresistible performance here as Ewan McGregor’s 70-something gay dad, who comes out and embraces his new identity with awkward but endearing enthusiasm, demonstrates how much better the great Canadian thespian has become on-screen in his senior-citizen years. (As a younger man, he had the Olivier-Burton hambone syndrome.) This is also the easiest way for the Academy to honor Mike Mills’ magical “Beginners,” which is both a sweet-tempered love story and also the most loving and generous film about homosexuality ever made by a straight person.

Best director

Ralph Fiennes, “Coriolanus” You can see my remarks above about Vanessa Redgrave’s performance, which is only the most conspicuously great element about the blistering contemporary spin Fiennes and screenwriter John Logan put on the Bard’s dark-hearted tragedy about political authority, the war between the masses and the elites, citizenship and betrayal, mothers and sons. Fiennes himself plays the inscrutable Roman general at the heart of the story, but allows himself to be upstaged by a brilliant cast that features Gerard Butler, Brian Cox and Jessica Chastain — and by the haunting sense that the discord Shakespeare saw in the early 17th century is still with us today.

Nicolas Winding Refn, “Drive” I’m prepared to debate many aspects of the Euro-American crime-movie meets art-film hybrid “Drive,” from its performances to its morality or lack thereof. But in terms of its economical and beautiful construction, it might be the best directed picture of the year. Watch the blend of light and sound, choreography and camera movement, in that romantic-violent elevator scene, the one that encapsulates all the film’s themes into a few seconds, with no dialogue. And then tell me that Nicolas Refn — who, yes, needs to dial back the coolness quotient a little — doesn’t deserve his genius reputation. I’m almost sure this one won’t happen; the critical hype for “Drive” really did damage to both its box-office returns and its awards potential. But the movie’s still great!

Cinematography

Manuel Alberto Claro, “Melancholia” This category can offer the Academy a way to honor arty-flavored films it really doesn’t know how to address, and in this case that’s fully appropriate. Shooting with cutting-edge digital cameras, Claro managed wildly disparate moods and textures in “Melancholia,” from the hand-held, wedding-video first half to the spectacular, CGI-enriched images of its apocalyptic conclusion. (And then there’s the special camera used to shoot the slow-motion images of the movie’s memorable prelude.) Collaborations between directors and cinematographers are difficult to judge from the outside, but I think von Trier’s decision to shoot with Claro instead of longtime crony Anthony Dod Mantle was a key factor in the aesthetic shift that produced this masterpiece. (Emmanuel Lubezki also deserves a nomination in this category for Malick’s “Tree of Life,” but that’s considerably more likely.)

Foreign-language film

“Miss Bala,” directed by Gerardo Naranjo (Mexico) The Academy’s foreign-film awards have a long and dreary history of rewarding feel-good pictures that almost no one wants to see, and ignoring what’s actually going on in world cinema. (Mind you, I’m not dissing this year’s presumed front-runner, the Iranian drama “A Separation,” which is one of 2011′s best films.) That problem is much larger than we can address here, and has a lot to do with the Academy’s idiotic rules, but never mind. American-educated hotshot Gerardo Naranjo’s relentless action film, about a Tijuana beauty queen caught up in a gang war, offers a chance to make amends. You can watch “Miss Bala” purely as a brilliantly engineered crime thriller, but it’s hard to avoid the portrait it paints of a profoundly dysfunctional Mexican society, where ordinary people’s lives are subject to the whims of drug lords, corrupt cops and American drug-enforcement cowboys who cross the border with impunity.

Perhaps the first thing to understand is that the new docu-Oscar rules, which go much further than eligibility issues, were largely pushed through by Michael Moore, who sits on the Academy’s governing board. The intention behind the changes, including the bizarre-sounding NYT/LAT requirement, is to streamline a notoriously clunky and cliquey nominating process, and to ensure that the Oscar-winning documentary is “truly a theatrical motion picture, because that’s what these awards are for,” as Moore told indieWIRE.

Furthermore, the new rules are meant to minimize the possibility that major, well-reviewed documentaries will be shut out of the Oscar nominations for mysterious reasons, as has happened repeatedly in the past. As Roger Ebert wrote more than 15 years ago, the list of non-nominated documentaries is like an honor roll of classics, from Errol Morris’ “The Thin Blue Line” to Moore’s “Roger & Me,” from Michael Apted’s “28 Up” to Steve James’ “Hoop Dreams.” In recent years, you could add “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Grizzly Man” and “Waiting for ‘Superman’” to that list. Two of 2011′s best-reviewed docs, James’ “The Interrupters” and Asif Kapadia’s “Senna,” have already been eliminated from consideration this year.

Under the current system, secret committees of 10 or fewer volunteers from the Academy’s documentary branch view groups of films and vote on them, creating the possibility that some tiny knot of dissenters — perhaps one or two voters — can sabotage a film’s Oscar hopes by giving it low marks. “That first round of voting, to go through all the eligible films and get to the short list, just seems really weird,” says Schnack. “You have small groups of people, each of which only views a small portion of the films. Instead of voting for their passions, they can end up voting against what they dislike. I think it’s pretty much true that one person can sabotage a film.”

Under Moore’s proposed new rules — at least as summarized in an admirable explainer by Dana Harris of indieWIRE — the documentary “shortlist,” and later the list of five nominees, will be selected in a vote by the Academy’s entire documentary branch, which reportedly has 157 members. “That restructuring, where the entire branch gets to vote and not just a small committee, strikes me as an incredibly good thing,” says Schnack. “That might be the single biggest change.”

Veteran documentary producer and programmer Thom Powers, who runs the prestigious Stranger Than Fiction series in New York, notes that there are legitimate concerns about exactly who’s in the documentary branch and how they will vote. “That membership remains secret, although if you’ve been paying attention over the years, you can figure out a few dozen of the names,” he says. “It’s valid to wonder whether all 157 members will really dive into the 100-plus films that will qualify. Is this system going to favor the top 15 films that are most talked about and most prominent? One unfortunate thing about that secrecy is that it does favor filmmakers with deeper pockets or more powerful distributors.”

In another major departure from established procedure, the five nominees will then be submitted to the entire Academy membership of 6,000 or so Hollywood professionals for final voting, not just to the specialists of the documentary branch. Under the current system, as Michael Moore puts it, “When people get the award for best documentary and they go on stage and thank the Academy, it’s not really the Academy, is it? It’s 5 percent of the Academy.”

While the decision to use the stodgy warhorses of print journalism as an Oscar-eligibility filter may seem arbitrary and retrograde, it’s an attempt to restore some order to an unwieldy system. The New York Times’ editorial policy is to review every film that plays at least a one-week engagement at a theater in New York City, which nearly matches the current Oscar eligibility rules requiring a New York or Los Angeles theatrical run. (If the Times revises that policy, then the Academy promises to revisit the new rule.) Those films likely to be eliminated under the new rule, like this year’s acclaimed Marine Corps documentary “Semper Fi,” are those that lack commercial distribution or are bound for TV, and play as part of the International Documentary Association’s DocuWeeks festival.

“I’m not that concerned with the eligibility rules,” says Schnack. “They’ve tinkered with those six or seven times in the last 10 years, and somehow roughly the same number of films manage to become eligible.” He points out that while a film like “Semper Fi” would indeed be ineligible for 2011 under the new rules, if it were to find theatrical distribution in 2012 it would receive the required Times review and become eligible next time around. Exactly the same thing applies to another shortlisted film for 2011, the Harry Belafonte documentary “Sing Your Song.” It has played to enthusiastic audiences at film festivals, and will open commercially in New York this week, so it would certainly have become eligible for 2012 under the new rules.

There’s a long tradition of films that are primarily or exclusively intended for television getting Oscar nominations, after meeting the letter but perhaps not the spirit of the eligibility rules. That may well change; I’m not sure, for instance, that Marshall Curry’s “Street Fight,” an Oscar-nominated 2005 film about an infamously dirty Newark, N.J., mayoral election, would meet the new requirements. But that’s an issue in a much broader debate, and the Academy has clearly decided that it wants to honor theatrical films, not TV films. After all, as Michael Moore observes, the television industry gives out its own awards, and if they don’t quite carry the cachet of an Oscar, so be it.

Some voices on the Internet, including respected indie-film blogger Anthony Kaufman, have suggested that letting all Academy members — actors, costume designers, cinematographers and so on — vote for the best documentary will push the awards in an ever more tepid and mainstream direction. Neither Powers nor Schnack sees it in those terms. “It’s called the Academy Awards,” says Powers. “Academy members should get to vote.”

“Look, we love the Oscars because it’s a big, glitzy ceremony with a big gold statue,” says Schnack. “It’s part of Hollywood history and part of documentary film history. Over the years, the winners [in the documentary category] have included Walt Disney and Jacques Cousteau and the Department of the Navy. It’s a crazy, big award, and if we want to be part of it our movies should be judged as movies, by the same standards that apply to narrative films.”