As they tell the first-date story now, Refn was ill with the flu and after they met for dinner Gosling wound up driving him home. (Refn does not drive, an irresistible if irrelevant footnote to this movie.) The ride was uncomfortably silent until Gosling switched on the radio, and REO Speedwagon’s “I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore” began to play. Refn cranked it up and started singing along. Suddenly he understood the movie, he told Gosling: A guy driving around in Los Angeles at night, listening to the radio.

As the actor and director were changing tables during interview sessions at a beachfront restaurant here, Refn took Gosling by the wrist. “I’ve been telling them that you took advantage of me, Ryan,” he said. “You got me alone in the car when I was tired, and you played soft-rock music to get me in the mood.”

“Then I gave you a baby,” said Gosling, with an almost angelic smile. “A movie-baby.” Before moving on to his next interview, he murmured, “I hate following Nicolas. People are always asking me, ‘So — does Nicolas really make love like an eagle falling from the sky?’” He shrugged. “I guess.”

Both guys were still riding high on the explosive success of the previous night’s premiere screening — Refn would eventually win the festival’s best-director prize, and if there were an audience award at Cannes, I suspect “Drive” would be the runaway winner — so the pseudo-erotic giddiness was pretty understandable. By the time Gosling got to my table and sat down, he was in a calmer mood, eager to discuss his nameless character’s psychotic personality, the hidden influence of underground film pioneer Kenneth Anger and the reasons why “Pretty in Pink” isn’t quite a masterpiece. When he took off his linen jacket to reveal his muscular arms in a striped tank top, with a single, simple tattoo on his upper left triceps, you could almost feel the eyes of onlookers as they casually pretended not to stare. But as undeniably handsome as Gosling is, much of his allure derives from the sense that he’s been elusive and highly selective in his acting career as an adult, and seems more interested in making good movies than in making millions of dollars.

So “Drive” is now officially a huge hit, at least at Cannes. It could be because we’re all beaten down after two weeks of challenging art films, and we wanted a change of pace. What was your reaction to the screening last night?

I was shocked. I didn’t expect people to cheer like that. At one point after the film I think we started dancing — people were clapping on the beat and stuff. I didn’t expect it to be so much fun. I didn’t expect people to have so much fun, and I’m sure you’re right, it has a lot to do with the timing.

I’m sure they brief you on how it’s going to go — we’ll pick you up at a certain time and at this point you walk up the carpet, all of that. But what’s it like when you actually do it — a red-carpet premiere at Cannes?

I had spent the night before — at 2 a.m. we went to the Palais, just five or six of us, and we sat and watched a little bit of the print, just to check the color and sound. Apparently they only go to 7, but we made them go to 7.5. It was loud in there, but I think it could have been louder. It was a very special experience to get to be there alone, see the film, walk around in the theater when it was empty. It made going there the next day less nerve-wracking.

Then of course REO Speedwagon was playing when we came down the red carpet, I was wearing a blue tuxedo and I felt like me and Nic were going to prom. [Laughter.] And then everyone just seemed to have so much fun at the screening. It was just a magical night.

At the press conference, Nicolas said something about your character being psychotic but not a psychopath, and I wasn’t sure I understood that. How do you understand the Driver?

He’s someone who’s seen too many movies. He has seen so many movies that he’s begun to confuse his own life with one.

Are you talking about violence of his character or the sense of restraint? Because both of those things are in there.

Well, both. The duality of the film really came from the fact that we were watching “Pretty in Pink” and we agreed that if there was a good, old-fashioned head-smashing in it, it would be the perfect film. The lack of violence was keeping, say, “Sixteen Candles” from being a masterpiece.

In some ways the Driver is kind of a macho icon, like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, and in some ways he’s not. I noticed that he never lies and never brags. He doesn’t threaten anyone, unless he means it. He never tries to come on to the girl.

Yeah, I guess you’re right. It never felt right to talk much. We never talked about those classic, archetypal characters — the strong, silent type — but every time I started talking, it didn’t feel right. Maybe that’s just me.

This movie has basically no exposition or back story, so we really don’t know anything about the Driver or his past — how long he’s been working as a stuntman and getaway driver, where he comes from, any of that. Did you and Nicolas work all that stuff out?

Well, I’m used to figuring out the minutiae of the character, and Nicolas could care less. He wants to think in dream logic, and it was so freeing to think that way. This movie’s a dream that’s turning into a nightmare, and you’re experiencing this story from the inside of Driver’s world. This could just be his fantasy or his nightmare. It’s not literal. So we didn’t really think about those things.

You made this movie with a foreign director who’s never worked in L.A. before and doesn’t know how to drive. It seems like that would pose a distinctive set of challenges.

I’ve never made a film like this before, so I don’t know what it would be like with someone else. But it was a nice chemistry — my favorite thing to do in Los Angeles is drive around at night and listen to music. I like to listen to this radio show where family members call in and dedicate songs to other family members who are in prison. Some woman will dedicate a song to some guy named Winky who’s getting out in six months: “Stay safe and keep your head down.” So I started taking Nic into that world, which is driving around at night and listening to music, and the spell that a car puts you under. You get in the car and turn the key, and suddenly you’ve arrived at your destination and you don’t remember how you got there. That kind of trance that it puts you in. The movie became more about driving than about stunts, and more about being in the car than about the car itself.

At the press conference you said something about how you didn’t want this movie to be macho.

I just think there’s enough of that. This frat guy mentality, posturing and secret handshakes. It’s just been done. I thought it would be nice to make this film with a certain femininity about it. I mean, the female praying mantis eats the male praying mantis when she’s done mating with him, and she does it because the protein ensures the health and well-being of the newly fertilized eggs. What could be more brutal than that? But it’s not personal. It’s just her nature. There’s a violence to femininity that we wanted to explore.

So do you think of the character as feminine in some ways? He has this very calm, polite, civilized manner so much of the time, and then when he explodes into violence it’s pretty terrifying.

I think we tried to make a werewolf movie without the makeup. There’s a violence in him that he’s afraid of. He’s in a race to try and find a good cause that he can channel it into, before it turns on him.

He clearly falls in love with Carey Mulligan’s character, but when he figures out that she’s married and that her husband is coming home from prison, he’s totally respectful of that. He backs off, although it’s not so clear that she wants him to.

Well, it’s a non-sexual connection. That was key for us, when we took out the sexuality and it became more about how he was her knight, and his duty was to serve her in any way, and to die for her. That was his destiny. She was a princess locked in the tower, and he needed to defend her and slay a dragon.

Look, you’re this very accomplished young actor with great cheekbones and visible triceps. [Laughter.] You must be shown every crappy action script in the world. What makes this a movie you wanted to pull the trigger on?

It felt like this was an opportunity to play a character that had seen all those films, like I said earlier, and who was reinventing himself as some amalgamation of all those heroes that he had grown up worshiping.

You’re working here with so little dialogue. You have to express so much with just your eyes and your face.

Well, it was complicated not to try to tell the story. That’s what you get trained to do as an actor, help communicate the story. In this movie my job was to let Nicolas tell the story, and just to be there. To help create space, space for the audience to think whatever they want to think, and not try to control what they’re thinking every minute. It’s hard just to allow there to be space.

You had to create chemistry with Carey in near-total silence. So much of your relationship is just looking at each other.

It was funny on set, because sometimes we would just stare at each other for hours. It became like a joke. One time I went in to do a scene with Albert Brooks, it’s a big scene and he’s got a lot of dialogue. He asks me if I want a drink and I don’t answer him, and it was driving him nuts. After I did the first take, he said, “You’ll say something. I’ll ask you if you want a drink and you’ll nod your head or shake it, but you’ll give some indication. This not talking thing, it’s not working. It’s interesting, you’ve tried it, but it’s clearly weird. You’ll say something.”

Did you crack? Did you say something?

No. No, but while you’re doing it you’re constantly feeling this pressure to do something. But then you reach these moments — for instance, there’s a natural harmony between a man and a woman and a child, when they’re all in the same space with one another. If you allow there to be silence, you can hear it. You don’t have to act like a man, or act like a sexy woman, or act like a cute, ironic, funny kid in order to communicate. That almost drowns it out.

Obviously the driving scenes are a big attraction in the movie, and they’re really distinctive. I assume those take a long time to set up and shoot.

It was frustrating, because I learned how to actually do those stunts, and I just wanted to do them. You have to shoot them and set up rigs and lights, and that part of it is very frustrating. It does look beautiful. I can tell you that the process of learning to drive like that was pretty exciting. I went with the stunt coordinator to this church parking lot with a new Mustang or a new Camaro, and we would do stunts until it started smoking or caught on fire. Then some tow truck would take it away and we’d go home and wait until they found us another car. I’ve never had more fun on a film, ever. But it’s a skill you can’t use, a hobby you can’t really indulge. There’s no place to do it!

When you talk about the Driver as a guy who has seen too many movies and begins to identify with them too much, do you ever feel that way yourself?

When I was a kid, in first grade I saw “First Blood.” And the next day I filled my Fisher-Price Houdini kit with steak knives and took it to school and threw them at the kids at recess.

No, you didn’t!

Yeah. I got suspended and my parents banned me from watching R-rated movies. I could only watch National Geographic films, Bible movies or Abbott and Costello.

Wow. So for you there’s an element of this movie, under the surface, that’s critical of exactly this kind of movie, that sees them as a problem.

Well, yeah. I’d say going around smashing people’s heads in is a problem. I think he is psychotic. Look, as much as we changed about the novella, certain things had to remain. He had to go around killing people in the end, and how do you ever justify that? Why didn’t he just call the cops, as opposed to going on this revenge spree? He had to be a character with an unnatural and unhealthy sense of romanticism. This killing spree he was on was for love, so we had to try to understand the world of somebody that would do that.

That’s why we incorporated the stuntman element, and make it about the world of Hollywood. We even incorporated our own film set into the film. When he goes to the film set and gets the mask — becomes the werewolf — you can see fake heads in the background that we actually use for a character in the film, before we blow them up.

Right, and when you go on the movie set your white satin jacket is stained with blood, but nobody even notices because it’s a movie set. Speaking of that, Nicolas claims the big yellow scorpion on the back of your jacket comes from Kenneth Anger’s underground art film, “Scorpio Rising.”

It’s the scorpion from “Scorpio Rising.” When it was official that he was doing the movie, the first thing he did was tell me to watch “Scorpio Rising.”

The connection’s not all that obvious.

No. It’s just a bunch of guys taking their clothes off and putting them back on. Great music. What he meant was Kenneth Anger more generally, I think.

Maybe there’s a pop iconography in that movie that suggest your character.

Yeah, there is. So we borrowed the scorpion as, like, our Batman symbol in the sky.

Ultra-violent and ultra-stylish, “Drive” stands out in this year’s Cannes competition for its calculated, hard-edged brilliance. It’s frankly commercial and sneakily artistic, in a way no other film I’ve seen in this festival is. It could be a big international hit — Americans will get to see it in September — or it could become one of those genre-geek fetish objects that doesn’t quite connect with a mass audience. It’s been the talk of the town since its Thursday night premiere, and no wonder; the history of Cannes is all about the long cinematic collaboration between Europe and America, and “Drive” distills that into one concise, intense and exciting movie. Is it a genuine Palme d’Or contender? I’m not sure about that; even in a year when the jury is headed by Robert De Niro, it’s a little hard to imagine a genre movie winning that prize amid an extraordinary Cannes lineup that includes Terrence Malick and the Dardenne brothers and Aki Kaurismäki and Pedro Almodóvar, not to mention the exiled von Trier.

Adapted by British screenwriter Hossein Amini from a novella by James Sallis — and you’d have to say this is pretty far from Amini’s award-winning script for the 1997 “Wings of the Dove” — “Drive” follows a few days in the criminal career of a solitary, unnamed stunt driver, who works on movie sets by day and drives specially modified getaway vehicles at night. One obvious point of comparison for the Driver (as he is identified in the credits) is Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name in the Sergio Leone westerns; like him, the Driver wears the same clothes throughout the film — a stained white bomber jacket with a yellow scorpion embroidered on the back — speaks rarely and only when spoken to, and never lies or brags. Gosling is a very different actor from Eastwood, but they both use composure and self-containment, rather than volume or violence, to radiate toughness.

As we learn in a dynamite opening sequence, the Driver hires himself out to robbery teams as a short-lived accomplice. He doesn’t carry a gun and doesn’t want to know much about what they’re doing. For the right price, he’ll get you where you want to go, just as often by out-thinking the cops, or sneaking past them unobtrusively, as by outrunning them. There are a couple of terrific old-school car chases in “Drive,” but Refn isn’t trying to outdo “Bullitt” or get the next assignment in the “Fast/Furious” franchise. This is more like a tense, moody noir in the Murphy’s Law tradition, where the hero falls in love with the wrong girl and winds up with one of those bags of Evil Money that destroys everything it touches.

I’ve probably piqued your curiosity enough for a movie that won’t reach American theaters for four months and runs a real risk of being over-hyped in the meantime, but let’s add a few more touches. Carey Mulligan plays the aforementioned wrong girl, nicely underplaying her role as a working-class American woman, quite sweet and a little lost. She lives next door to the Driver with her adorable little boy, and lets the Driver go pretty far down the road of friendship, flirtation and seduction before she remembers that her husband, who boasts the unlikely but irresistible name of Standard Gabriel (Oscar Isaac), is about to come home from prison. When that happens, Standard and the Driver circle each other cagily but never quite come to blows, and then the Driver makes the fateful decision to help Standard with that “one last job” that will get him out of debt to the shadowy gangsters threatening his family.

Of course this allegedly straightforward pawnshop robbery in the San Fernando Valley goes as far off the rails as it possibly could, leaving the Driver and a girl he’s just met named Blanche (Christina Hendricks of “Mad Men,” in a brief but memorable role) holed up with an extremely large sum of money that some very bad people want to retrieve. Refn’s tremendous supporting cast also includes Ron Perlman as a low-rent, pizzeria-owning Jewish gangster, filmmaker and comedian Albert Brooks as his more urbane-seeming but even more sinister puppeteer, and Bryan Cranston (of “Breaking Bad”) as the likable, fatherly mechanic who is the Driver’s boss and only friend.

Refn’s composition and lighting and editing instincts are miles ahead of most people who work in action movies. He’s not enslaved by these archetypal characters and this classic “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” plot, nor is he seeking to reinvent or “subvert” them. It seems to me that he’s trying to answer the question of what happens when you make this kind of American crime film really, really well: Is it just a slick, nifty entertainment, or can it lay bare issues about human nature that other forms of storytelling never quite face? “Drive” builds extraordinary tension before exploding in brief outbursts of shocking violence, almost in the mode of a samurai film. There’s one sequence shot in an elevator, which takes the movie from love story to violent revenge thriller within a few seconds, that film students will be deconstructing, shot by shot, for years to come. (“Drive” was shot by ace cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, whose credits include “Three Kings” and “The Usual Suspects.”)

“Drive” was literally greeted with hoots and howls of joy from the press here, who perhaps felt beaten down by almost two weeks of sober, serious art-house cinema with nary an ass-kicking or supercharged Impala in sight. I felt some of the same exhilaration, but those who are comparing “Drive” to, say, “Pulp Fiction” today are getting overamped on the sea air and sunlight and strong coffee of the Mediterranean. Whatever you think of Tarantino’s 1994 Palme d’Or winner, it literally changed the course of movie history and established a paradigm for indie-film success that hasn’t quite been exorcised 17 years later. “Drive” has neither the outsize ambition nor the Godardian, art-school lack of discipline of that film — and anyway, what happened to “Pulp Fiction” can only happen once. Refn’s breakthrough film is successful in quite a different way, as an injection of clear, cool European technique into a classic American fable of guns, cars, girls and money. I think that’s quite enough.

There isn’t any talking for several more minutes, and when we finally hear a human voice, it belongs to a small boy reading aloud from the Book of Genesis. You could say that’s allegorical — reading the Old Testament while you wander through the desert — but it also isn’t. That’s very likely the only book his family brought along. “Meek’s Cutoff” feels from the beginning like one of those slow-developing, deep-focus American landscape movies, of the kind identified with director Terrence Malick (“Badlands,” “Days of Heaven”). It is, but it also isn’t. In this quiet, beautiful and terrifying fable about a group of lost pioneers, Reichardt combines epic ambition with a focus on intimate, personal detail. While Reichardt and screenwriter Jonathan Raymond (who also co-wrote her films “Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy”) are borrowing some real history, the events we see in the movie are only loosely based on the real-life pioneer history of Stephen Meek and his purported pioneer shortcut. (For one thing, Meek’s historical group was much larger than the small band of travelers we see in the film.)

That embroidery at the beginning is no accident. As those figures we saw fording the river gradually move into the foreground and become characters, Reichardt begins to show us the domestic realities of life on the trail. This is a world where men make the decisions, at least officially. When it’s a question of which direction to travel or what to do with a captured Indian or whether or not to abandon Meek (Bruce Greenwood), the grizzled and sinister mountain man who seems to have led the group hopelessly astray in the Great Basin, the wives of the three emigrant families are not consulted. But of course they’re the ones who cook and share out the food, care for the sick, mend the clothes and ruthlessly dump treasured items in the arid eastern Oregon desert, as needed.

It’s not like Reichardt and Raymond have set out to craft some feminist diatribe about Western history. There isn’t enough talking for that, and anyway Reichardt is always more concerned with focusing on the details right than with sending a message. Emily Tetherow, the young wife played by Michelle Williams who is more or less our leading character, unself-consciously describes the group of wives as “working like niggers” — which I guess is a political insight of a certain kind — and views the captive Cayuse Indian (Rod Rondeaux) coerced into being their guide with as much distaste and mistrust as everyone else does. But Emily’s decision to offer the Cayuse man some ordinary, practical help carries more moral weight in the film than the men’s debates about whether or not to shoot him.

If you’ve never heard of Kelly Reichardt, that’s really not your fault. She’s been making movies since the early ’90s, and getting better at it the whole time, but her minimalist, radically unfashionable style simply isn’t going to be a hot commodity in an era of perpetual distraction. In “Meek’s Cutoff” she displays a whole new level of ambition, making a period piece with an ensemble cast that features Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan and Will Patton alongside Williams, who manages to look luminous while covered in grime and wearing a yellow bonnet.

Beyond that, “Meek’s Cutoff” is a film that works masterfully with space, time and history. You could call it a thriller or horror movie in extreme slow motion, or a parable that’s more about America in 2011 than it is about America in 1845. At various moments it recalls Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Sheltering Sky,” Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed” and those verses from the Old Testament. No doubt it will bore many people silly, but its mood of desolation, danger and desperate faith affected me more powerfully than anything else I saw amid the onslaught of cinema at Toronto this year.

“Meek’s Cutoff” is now playing at Film Forum and the Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, and opens April 22 in Los Angeles and Portland, Ore.; May 6 in Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Texas; and May 13 in Atlanta, Bend, Ore., Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Eugene, Ore., Kansas City, Palm Springs, Calif., San Diego, San Jose, Calif., and Washington, with more cities to follow.

Which brings us to Natalie Portman in “Black Swan.” She’s definitely part of that 2010 mini-wave of young lead actress performances that we’re talking about here. But I have violently mixed feelings about her nomination and about her performance, Andrew. Talk about an instance where you’re with an artist in spirit but not in fact.

Andrew O’Hehir: Ha! We have a disagreement here, in that I think Darren Aronofsky uses Portman’s awkwardness to the film’s advantage. It’s hard to tell whether we’re watching Portman wrestling with the Black Swan/White Swan dichotomy, or her character doing so. This is sort of sophomoric, but there may not be a difference. There’s such a blow-your-mind meta level to “Black Swan,” anyway; a fable about the mad, controlling nature of artists made by an obsessive-compulsive director, etc. At any rate, although Portman is somewhat limited as an actress, I think she gives an amazing physical and psychological performance in this role. What are your reservations?

MZS: Vincent Cassel’s choreographer character, Thomas Leroy, nails my problem with Portman’s performance, in a comment early in the film that surely wasn’t intended as autocriticism but comes off that way: He tells Nina that she’s perfect for the role of the White Swan — the constrained and repressed part, the woman who dots her “I’s” and crosses her “T’s” and doesn’t have a spontaneous or dangerous bone in her body — but he doesn’t believe she can convincingly portray the Black Swan.

AOH: Do we have to say “Spoiler Alert” now, or something? If you haven’t seen “Black Swan,” go away!

MZS: The entire movie hinges on the conceit that in this choreographer’s version, the White Swan and the Black Swan are aspects of the same woman, and the transformation from one to the other is right at the center of the production and provides its thrilling, terrifying climax. That’s the entire raison d’être not just of the ballet within the film, but the film itself. So it’s imperative that Aronofsky cast an actress who can make us believe Nina as both the White and Black swan. 

I believed Portman as the White Swan — as the anal-retentive, emotionally arrested, mommy-dominated, neurotic basket case; the self-mutilating masochist; a woman totally divorced not just from adult sexuality but from her own feelings — from her id! But at the end, when Nina has been broken down and reconstituted and remade as the Black Swan, and we need to believe that she always had it in her and now it’s finally coming out, like that blast of ectoplasmic demon-angels coming out of the Ark at the end of the first “Indiana Jones” movie … Well, to say I didn’t buy it would be putting it mildly.

I was quite taken with the movie — much more so than I anticipated going in, because I have serious reservations about Aronofsky as a control-freak, White Swan sort of director — but that huge gamble he takes by casting Portman as the transformer, the wild card bet that pays off for the production, doesn’t come through for me. At all. I buy it because the movie asks me to buy it, but I didn’t feel it, you know? It was like, “OK, Darren Aronofsky, if you say so.”

I’d give Portman an award for the best lead performance by an actress who was miscast. 

AOH: You know, the funny thing is that I get exactly what you’re saying, but it worked on me differently.  To become the Black Swan, to liberate her libido and her, I dunno, artistic alter ego, Portman’s character literally has to destroy both her own personality and her own body. She has to shed blood and literally die (we suspect) in order to liberate herself from her neurotic personality constraints.

I honestly wonder, though, if Portman’s overexposure in much weaker films since the Oscar campaign began — the lame sex film with Ashton Kutcher and the undercooked stepmom film “The Other Woman” — have damaged whatever chances she started out with.

MZS: Was this a good year for the best actress category? It seems that way to me. Some years it’s as if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is throwing its collective back out straining to fill five slots.

AOH: Oh, I definitely agree. There’s nobody in the category this year who just makes you want to roll your eyes. I mean, I realize there was a constituency for Sandra Bullock last year. But, seriously now –

MZS:  I’m not crazy about Nicole Kidman in “Rabbit Hole.” I don’t think she’s awful — in fact she’s quite focused and effective, and she doesn’t do anything that might take you out of the movie’s atmosphere, which could be described as sort of a fog of grief. But looking back on it it seems more like a case of perfect casting. As our own Mary Elizabeth Williams pointed out in “The Fascinating Story of Nicole Kidman’s Frozen Forehead,” Kidman has had so much work done that it’s paralyzed her face to the point where now she’s only plausible as a semi-catatonic character.

AOH: I’m with you on that one. I pretty strongly disliked “Rabbit Hole” — watching it was like being suffocated inside a Pottery Barn catalog. I became fixated on real estate questions: “Where in NYC suburbia are these people? That’s a Long Island train, but it sure looks like Westchester!” And it is eerie how Kidman — and I think she’s a wonderful actress — is now best suited to play emotionally frozen characters. You have that critical cliché “a mask of grief.” She wears that mask all the time.

MZS: That nomination seems like part of the “In crowd” effect. She already won an Oscar, and that exponentially magnifies her chances of being nominated again. I think she’s the weakest of the five nominees by far. What did you think of Bening? Is she a shoo-in to win, and if so, would she deserve it?

AOH: Shoo-in is probably too strong. But I’d be surprised if Bening didn’t win, both because of cynical-political factors and because she gave a wonderful performance in a well-liked film. Bening’s life story and career trajectory are appealing. She was a respected theater actor and teacher for many years. She is widely admired but doesn’t work much and has never played the celebrity game, and she’s never won. All that sounds pretty irresistible to Hollywood. What did you make of her performance?

MZS: I thought it was terrific — exactly the right performance in a movie that very rarely steps wrong. I wouldn’t make any special claims for “The Kids Are All Right” as a great American comedy. Despite the subject matter — a lesbian couple whose domestic life is thrown upside-down when they start interacting with their children’s sperm donor — it’s probably the least edgy film Lisa Cholodenko has directed. It’s really warm and sweet and reassuring, to the point where it sometimes feels like the best movie James L. Brooks never made. But Bening’s performance as Nic raises it a letter grade by managing to be so likable without trying to be liked. It’s a very unself-conscious performance, and it really takes you inside this character’s somewhat maddening personality. Watching her, you understand why her mate would stray even as you empathize with her as a spouse betrayed.

AOH: Nic is a little bit of a jerk as well as an incipient alcoholic. She’s got sharp edges and is way too quick with a cutting remark. You don’t like her all that much right up to the point where she realizes she’s been betrayed, and I feel like Bening turns that around with tremendous technique and perfect emotional pitch.

MZS:  So neither of us would complain if Bening won. But what about the others? In my fantasy, any of the three actresses we haven’t talked about would slip in and take home the prize.

Even though “Winter’s Bone” was probably too much of an art-house movie to penetrate the voters’ consciousness, I’d love it if Jennifer Lawrence snuck in and pulled off an upset along the lines of Adrien Brody in “The Pianist” — one of my favorite wins in recent times, if only because it rewarded a minimalist, reactive performance instead of a shouting-from-the-rooftops sort of turn. Lawrence isn’t quite that muted in “Winter’s Bone,” but she’s still extraordinarily precise, especially for somebody who’s (hopefully) at the beginning of her career.

AOH: I’d definitely be shocked if Jennifer Lawrence won the Oscar, but then “Winter’s Bone” has had a really surprising run. When I saw it at Sundance last year, I loved it, but I suspected it would fly under the radar and barely get noticed in theatrical release. I guess it wound up being a great movie for 2010, both because it’s a film about economic hardship in Middle America and because it’s a film made by a woman, with a female protagonist who’s very tough in body, mind and spirit.

Lawrence is an amazing young actress, but I don’t think her Adrien Brody moment is here yet. Still, she might have more of a chance than Michelle Williams, who I think is the ultra-dark horse in this group.

MZS: Williams was superb in three films last year — in a supporting role as the ghost haunting Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in “Shutter Island,” as the pioneer woman in Kelly Reichardt’s “Meek’s Cutoff,” and in “Blue Valentine,” which she’s up for this year. If she did pull off an upset, I’d be tempted to read it as sort of a cumulative reward both for versatility and sound judgment in material.

She makes “Blue Valentine,” an extraordinarily ambitious film that’s rightly been likened to Stanley Donen’s underappreciated “Two for the Road.” I don’t think the movie would really work without her. I love its structural inventiveness and its willingness to go all over the place emotionally; if you charted its energy on a graph, the line would be zigging and zagging all over the place. But at times it felt a bit too conceptual to me — like the kind of movie that gets points for ambition even though you’re more with it in spirit than in fact. Ryan Gosling’s performance was exciting but seemed, like the film, a touch too schematic, too in love with its own formal daring. But Williams didn’t have that problem. She was just there — being, existing. She gave the film an immediacy and a voyeuristic quality. When people say the movie feels like a documentary, I think her performance might be what they’re actually responding to.

AOH: In terms of predicting a winner, I’m sticking with Annette Bening, which is the same thing I thought after first seeing the film more than a year ago. What about you?

MZS: I predict Bening will win, but my heart is with Michelle Williams. She reminds me of a young Ellen Burstyn in that she plays a lot of different parts, yet every time I see her in anything, I come away thinking she was so perfect in that role that not only can I not imagine anyone else playing it, but I worry she’s going to be typecast as that sort of character for the next five years. You’re right: It’s not her year. But her time will come.

AOH: I certainly think so, and there’s no question she’s still near the beginning of a major acting career. It’s totally possible that somebody looking back at the 2011 best-actress nominees from 40 years’ distance will be like, “Huh, Michelle Williams was nominated that year and didn’t win. I wonder who the rest of those people are.”

That’s one side of the story. The other side is that 2010 looks in the rear-view mirror like a terrific year for moviemaking, at least if you’re using a Venn diagram that extends from high-middlebrow Hollywood fare like “King’s Speech” and “Social Network” out to the indie-film fringes. Attendance was down a tick for the biggest “tentpole” productions last year (revenues increased a little, almost entirely because of the larger ticket prices for 3-D releases), but there was a smorgasbord of interesting mid-budget and low-budget films aimed at a blue-state, metropolitan audience. This year’s Oscar nominees are light on huge, expensive spectacles (“Inception” and “Toy Story 3″) but rich with provocative and engaging pop entertainments, from the marriage melodrama of “The Kids Are All Right” to the cinematic showboating of “Black Swan” and “127 Hours” to the wrenching, hardscrabble Americana of “Winter’s Bone” and “Blue Valentine.”

The 2011 Oscar race so far offers further evidence of how far the Academy’s collective opinion has drifted away from that of the mass audience. Film critics have traditionally approached the Oscars as a bear-baiting ritual that allowed them to deride the stodgy tastes of Academy members (often visualized as a pack of cranky Jewish retirees in golf pants). But given how closely the two groups mirror each other these days, it’s time to retire that one.

Sure, “Inception” and “Toy Story 3″ were both nominated for best picture and are two of the year’s top box-office films. But both got significant love from critics — and furthermore, if you think either has a shot at the big prize, you simply haven’t been paying attention. Those made the list, arguably, to balance out the Academy’s evident preference for more indie-flavored fare like fellow best-picture nominees “The Kids Are All Right,” “Black Swan,” “127 Hours” and “Winter’s Bone.” As I note below, Ben Affleck’s “The Town,” a mainstream hit touted as an Oscar contender in some quarters, was pretty well ignored. “Secretariat,” a horsey nostalgia exercise that performed well in Middle America but did no business in cities, was perhaps envisioned by its studio as this year’s answer to “The Blind Side,” but garnered no major nominations.

It’s not as if “Social Network” or “King’s Speech” are art-house obscurities or anything; the first has grossed almost $100 million and the second is at $50 million and counting. That makes them look like “Gone With the Wind” compared to, say, “The Hurt Locker,” whose domestic returns of $12.6 million almost certainly made it the lowest-grossing Oscar winner in history, even if you adjust for inflation or process it through a time machine. But like almost every recent Oscar winner, they’re pictures that have played strongest with college-educated audiences on the coasts and in big cities, and have made relatively little impression in the multiplex heartland. They’re movies made by and for a certain class of people, a difficult concept to conjure with in a nation where we pretend social class does not exist. They’re Oscar movies — and the more that category seems to change, the more it stays the same.

Here are today’s major winners and losers, as I see them.

WINNERS

“The King’s Speech” — With 12 nominations, including best picture, best director for Tom Hooper and acting nominations for its three featured performers (Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter), this appealing yarn about George VI, aka Bertie, and his Aussie speech therapist will now be seen as Oscar co-favorite. I’m not buying it, at least not yet. I foresee a split ticket, with “Social Network” winning best picture and best director, but “King’s Speech” potentially winning two or even all three of the acting awards.

“True Grit” — The surprise chick flick of the season — and if you think I’m cracking a joke, you haven’t seen it — piled up a bunch of nominations, but most likely won’t win in any major category. In the upside-down star-system logic of Hollywood, Jeff Bridges was nominated for best actor in what is clearly a supporting role, while youthful star Hailee Steinfeld, who’s probably on-screen for 80 percent of the film’s running time, won a supporting-actress nod.

“The Fighter” — Yes, Mark Wahlberg’s quiet starring role as small-town palooka Micky Ward was passed over, which is kind of too bad. But with a best-picture nomination and supporting nods for Christian Bale, Melissa Leo and Amy Adams — all of whom were fantastic — this richly enjoyable yarn of downscale ’90s America may get a second look from viewers who stayed away the first time around. Bale and Leo are seen by many as favorites, but the “King’s Speech” upsurge may swamp them.

“Winter’s Bone” — Debra Granik’s devastating crime saga set in the Ozarks came out early in the year and did modest business. But critics didn’t forget it, and neither did the Academy, which delivered a best-picture nomination, an acting nod for young star Jennifer Lawrence, and a supporting-actor nomination for the menacing John Hawkes.

“Gasland” — Oscar’s documentary category often tracks closely with rising social and political issues, and this relatively obscure work from activist filmmaker Josh Fox explores “hydrofracking,” a controversial and destructive method of natural-gas extraction that has rapidly become a hot environmental cause in the Northeast.

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” — Is the debut film from shadowy British artist Banksy a genuine documentary or an artfully constructed fraud? I’ve never thought it was an interesting question — since the movie is hilarious, and poses the same philosophical questions about art and commerce, either way — and in delivering an Oscar nomination, I guess the Academy agrees.

“Dogtooth” — This dark and disturbing allegory from Greek filmmaker Giorgios Lanthimos looked like the longest of long shots for foreign-Oscar consideration. But persistent critical adoration put it on the map, and here it is. (I’m not the biggest fan — but I’ll deal with the intriguing list of foreign-film nominees in due course.)

LOSERS

“The Social Network” — Don’t get me wrong; I still think this is the best-picture favorite, and that David Fincher will also go home with the best-director statuette. But it received fewer nominations than either “King’s Speech” or “True Grit.” Jesse Eisenberg won’t win, and neither Andrew Garfield nor Justin Timberlake were nominated for their outstanding supporting performances.

“Inception”–  Despite a world-conquering box-office take of $823 million and the adulation of countless fans, Christopher Nolan again finds himself a bit player in the Oscar race. “Inception’s” nods for best picture and original screenplay are basically affirmative action for commercial cinema. I don’t think it will win in either category, and Nolan himself was passed over in the directing category. Various commentators are acting like a surprise — at this point, it’s more like a ritual.

“Blue Valentine” — Maybe that NC-17 controversy really did hurt. Michelle Williams was nominated for best actress, but costar Ryan Gosling was passed over, and Derek Cianfrance’s gritty marriage drama, despite all the critical raves, was otherwise ignored.

“127 Hours” — Sure, both Danny Boyle’s film and star James Franco were nominated. But a muddled critical reception, mediocre box office and the general sense that Franco is an overexposed hipster avatar have rendered this brutal, effects-driven freakout an Oscar-race afterthought.

“The Town” — Ben Affleck’s Boston bank-heist thriller was well reviewed early in the fall, but all along it was just a dumbass pop film that was slightly better crafted than others of its ilk. Jeremy Renner’s supporting-actor nomination is richly deserved, but Oscar otherwise gave the cold shoulder to this forgettable vanity project.

“The Tillman Story” — Amir Bar-Lev’s fascinating documentary about Army Ranger Pat Tillman, the former football star killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan — an idiosyncratic individual from an amazing American family — seemed like an obvious contender. I guess Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s “Restrepo,” a powerful you-are-there doc, filled Oscar’s war-movie quota.