At the core of "Mother" is the complicated relationship between a simple, perhaps mildly disabled young man named Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) and his unnamed mother (played by Korean TV legend Kim Hye-ja), the widowed proprietor of a small flower shop. Both actors were previously unknown to me, but even as the plot of "Mother" spirals from normal domestic drama into nightmare, they portray the haunted nuance of the mother-son bond with extraordinary complexity and compassion. Do-joon's mother has grown prematurely old with worry, literally tormented by the thought that something terrible could befall him. (And so, of course, it does.)

As for Do-joon, he may be a socially maladroit, lovable-looking mop top who lacks an adult-level intellect, but that doesn't mean he's mindless or stupid. If Kim Hye-ja's wounded, scheming, half-mad performance is the showstopper here, running the gamut from Medea to Miss Marple to Lady Macbeth, Won Bin's may be even better. One of the keys to "Mother" is that Do-joon knows and understands more than he lets on, the whole way through the story, and feels the same conflicted emotions toward his mom -- love and loathing, intense yearning and a desire for independence -- as does any other post-adolescent male.

At this point in Bong's career, he seems to specialize in taking well-established narrative formulas -- the monster movie in "The Host," the police procedural in "Memories of Murder" -- and pulling them apart at the seams. This one you might call the wrong-man thriller. "Mother" has a slow and relatively genial opening, but a muttering, ominous undertone runs beneath it the whole time. Do-joon and his no-account best friend, Jin-tae (Jin Goo), get in trouble for attacking a group of rich and prominent golfers after a traffic accident, but the incident is only a comic preview of the tragedy to come. When a local schoolgirl is found dead -- the first murder local cops can remember -- Do-joon becomes an easy target. He was wandering the neighborhood drunk and alone, has no alibi, and walked right past the girl minutes before her death. He can't even remember how he got home, and when the police ask him to sign a confession, he does. Case closed.

Do-joon's mother is of course the only person in town who believes he is innocent, and in the face of public indifference and ridicule must turn gumshoe, defense attorney and shrink in her efforts to free him. Entirely alone, she must hunt down Jin-tae -- who seems to have disappeared, perhaps after framing Do-joon -- hire thugs, pursue missing witnesses and investigate the dead girl's family, which has secrets of its own. More important still, she must shake Do-joon from his prison lethargy and somehow jog his memory, since the evidence suggests he was very near the murder scene.

You could certainly describe "Mother" as an impeccably realized murder mystery, whose clues are so cleverly woven into the story that you won't see them until they all click into place. But Bong is pushing past the constraints of the genre into claustrophobic psychological portraiture: Kim's increasingly disheveled and obsessive character is both hero and monster, protector and destroyer. She is driven by the most basic of human emotions -- a parent's unconditional love for her child -- and also blinded by it, to the point that she barely notices her own amoral and ruthless behavior.

This is a radically different kind of movie from "The Host," which was constructed around a lovable if ridiculous group of central characters. Bong never allows us to fully understand Do-joon and his mother, let alone like them, and he preys on the misguided assumptions we're likely to make. Some viewers will find "Mother" a cold or mannered film by comparison, and I guess it is. But its combination of dazzling cinematic craft, psychological insight and black humor make this one of the year's moviegoing musts -- and even or especially at her most deranged, Kim Hye-ja's amazing mother is profoundly, passionately human.

"Mother" is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It opens March 19 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Washington; March 26 in Austin, Texas, Hartford, Conn., Honolulu, New Haven, Conn., Phoenix, Portland, Ore., Sacramento, Calif., and Santa Cruz, Calif.; and April 2 in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Monterey, Calif., Nashville, Salt Lake City and San Antonio, Texas, with more cities to follow.

Although the charges and counter-charges in this case are pretty salacious, the furor is only partly about White and Baumbach. It's also about the uneasy symbiosis between film critics and the movie business, two organisms that feed off each other in an awkward dance of privilege, access and manipulation. L'affaire "Greenberg" is also heartening to many film journalists, in a peculiar way. It suggests, in the face of all available economic evidence, that what we do still matters. "I think it's almost a badge of honor to be occasionally disciplined or threatened by movie publicists," wrote Hollywood Elsewhere blogger Jeffrey Wells in a recent post. "Call it an oblique tribute to your tenacity or toughness of spirit or perceived influence."

If you need to get caught up on this earth-shattering dispute, valuable blow-by-blow histories can be found on New York magazine's Vulture blog and at The L Magazine. Mind you, calling this kerfuffle a tempest in a teapot might be demeaning to teapots. Neither Baumbach nor White is famous enough for anyone outside the self-regarding media bubble to care, and there were no First Amendment issues involved. (Getting to see movies for free is a perk, not a right.) In any case the worst of the nastiness has now been papered over: White will see the film this week after all, and Leslee Dart, a publicist with the powerful agency 42West, told Village Voice columnist Michael Musto that the decision to deny White entry to an early press screening was hers alone, and didn't come from Baumbach or Rudin. (It may be that Dart is taking a bullet for her clients, but that's exactly what publicists are paid to do.)

One thing that's clear in all this is that nobody expects White to like "Greenberg" too much. Although he's known for venomous diatribes against the films and directors he dislikes, Baumbach's last two films have proven to be especially irresistible targets. Here are the opening paragraphs from White's memorable review of "Margot at the Wedding":

Noah Baumbach makes it easy to dislike his films. Problem is, he also makes it easy for New York's media elite to praise them. Start with his style: "The Squid and the Whale" and Baumbach's new "Margot at the Wedding" are two of the decade’s most repellent movies. Visually, both look like mud; their smart-ass, low-budget affectations (shot by high-price cinematographers) bridge lo-fi mumblecore with Conde Nast hipsterism. This anti-aesthetic lays waste to the bromide that nobody sets out to intentionally make a bad movie; Baumbach does. His deliberate ugliness makes him the Lars von Trier of Brooklyn and the Hamptons.

Baumbach's characters -- picked from New York's self-punishing literary class -- are also repellent. Not since Woody Allen's Big Apple reign in the 1980s has a filmmaker so shamelessly flattered the professional classes in the guise of exposing them. Baumbach labels their tales with haughty movie titles that are actually New Yorker magazine short-story code, referencing a style of middle-class entitlement and smirk.

White goes on to describe the characters played by Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Baumbach's wife) as "skittish hateful chicks" and describes the director as a "cinematic enabler to New York's most obnoxious people," trafficking in "arrogance, conceit and ugliness." Other than that, though, he loved it!

Now, White isn't the first critic to be blacklisted, or threatened with blacklisting, over unpalatable opinions, and he won't be the last. In fact, White confirms that it's happened to him before. He was barred from a screening of Spike Lee's 1996 documentary "Get On the Bus," after a long-running feud with Lee and one of his publicists finally boiled over. The list of banned or almost-banned critics stretches at least back to the 1970s, and includes such luminaries of the trade as the late Pauline Kael, Judith Crist and the original TV-critic duo of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.

There are various reasons why the White-Baumbach contretemps sparked such a Twitterific uproar. White's incendiary critical persona, and propensity for making enemies, have rendered him an object of fascination for many of his fellow film journalists. Indeed, IFC.com's Vadim Rizov did some admirable digging and comes up with a suggestive case that White's antipathy to Baumbach stems from an ancient feud with Baumbach's mother, onetime Village Voice critic Georgia Brown. White, Rizov says, should have recused himself on that basis from reviewing Baumbach's movies.

This history connects to Leslee Dart's most explosive claim. She told Movieline's S.T. VanAirsdale that White "has gone on blogs and in interviews and said that [Baumbach's] parents should have aborted him." Various versions of this have often been cited on the Internet, but hardly ever sourced. In an e-mail, White confirms that it stems from his 1998 review of Baumbach's "Mr. Jealousy," in which he suggested that other critics were praising the movie simply to curry favor with Baumbach's mother, and concludes: "To others, 'Mr. Jealousy' might suggest retroactive abortion." That's a mean-spirited and distasteful dig, to be sure, but Dart and others have distorted and repackaged it beyond recognition. (Although that review predates the New York Press' Internet archive, J. Hoberman of the Village Voice has unearthed it.)

Whether you see White as sinned against or sinning, he's in pretty good company. In a 1996 interview, Pauline Kael told critic Glenn Lovett that the notoriously prickly P.R. forces at Warner Bros. had barred her from various screenings in the '60s and '70s. "It's very embarrassing when your friends and colleagues are getting into a movie and you can't," Kael recalled. "On one occasion I was invited to a screening by mistake. When I got inside and sat down, I was asked to leave. On another occasion, when the studio publicist saw me, I was told the screening had been canceled. Later, I was told that as soon as I left the building, the screening was called again." )

When Judith Crist got her first job as a film critic in 1963, at the New York Herald Tribune, she almost immediately became famous for trashing a now-forgotten movie called "Spencer's Mountain," a youth-oriented hit that, she wrote, "for sheer prurience and perverted morality disguised as piety makes the nudie shows at the Rialto look like Walt Disney productions." Warner Bros. sent Crist a telegram disinviting her from all future press screenings, and one major New York theater pulled its ads from the paper. In a Time magazine article, an unnamed Hollywood source described Crist as a "snide, sarcastic, supercilious bitch," not language often encountered in print in those days. It was, of course, the making of her reputation.

Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News told Lovett she was personally banned from Disney screenings by then-corporate head Jeff Katzenberg for "the tone" of an interview she'd done with Eddie Murphy. Rod Lurie of Los Angeles magazine claims to have been "barred for life" by Warner Bros. for his immortal description of Danny DeVito as a "a testicle with arms: flailing, spinning little knobs" in his 1991 review of "Other People's Money." Chicago Reader critic (and Film Salon contributor) Jonathan Rosenbaum reports that Warner barred him from screenings for almost three years, solely over his refusal to narc on a fellow critic who had told him about a "secret" screening of the 1991 drama "New Jack City."

Ebert and Siskel were briefly barred from 20th-Century Fox screenings in 1990 after making fun of the studio's comedy "Nuns on the Run" during a joint appearance on "Live With Regis and Kathie Lee." Ebert's published review of the film for the Chicago Sun-Times is exceedingly mild, even regretful, and it's hard to say what the most ridiculous element is here: That Fox made a film called "Nuns on the Run," or that the studio was outraged that leading critics thought it was dreary and unfunny.

Judy Gerstel, a critic for the Toronto Star and Detroit Free Press, was dropped from several studios' press lists in the early '90s, apparently for her brutal takedown of Steven Spielberg's "Hook," which she described all too accurately as a "pseudo-Freudian, pop-psychology paean to fatherhood that's more an acting out of male menopause than a cinematic work of art."

Sometimes it isn't opinions that get film journalists shunned, it's simple information. In 1993, Jeffrey Wells reported a freelance piece for the Los Angeles Times on a stealth-preview screening of the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle "Last Action Hero," a screening Columbia Pictures denied had even taken place. He was banned and bullied by Sony/Columbia for some time, but the episode only cemented Wells' reportorial reputation, and got him five years as a  Times columnist and then an independent career as a popular film blogger.

There's no more reliable way to alienate the Hollywood studios than to report on film junkets, the assembly-line meet-and-greets in which an assemblage of journalists are flown into New York or Los Angeles, housed in luxury hotels at the studio's expense, and granted short, closely monitored interviews with big-name talent. (Like most major publications, Salon does not accept free lodging or transportation from movie studios.) Blogger and freelancer Eric D. Snider's 2006 report on a junket for Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center," "I Was a Junket Whore," is a classic of the genre -- right down to the tone of wide-eyed amazement -- but I could have told Snider from personal experience there'd be some payback.

David Edelstein, now the critic for New York magazine, recalls an episode in his own career that has pre-echoes of the White-Baumbach affair. It suggests how thin-skinned filmmakers can be, and how long they can hold grudges even when doing so is totally counterproductive. Edelstein saw Milos Forman's "Amadeus" in 1984 and hated the portrayal of the relationship between Mozart and his rival, Antonio Salieri. He wrote a withering review for the Village Voice that compared the film to "a Masterpiece Theater production of 'The Mark David Chapman Story.'" Apparently, this made Forman go ballistic. "But there was nothing he could do about it until, years later, he saw my review of 'Dangerous Liaisons,'" Edelstein remembers. "I wanted to make it clear that that 'Dangerous Liaisons' didn't feel like a period piece, and the one I could think of was 'Amadeus.'

"I had forgotten that Forman had his own version of 'Dangerous Liaisons' coming out, 'Valmont,' and reportedly he went crazy when he read this, taking it as a sure sign that I would come out with both guns blazing in my review of 'Valmont' -- why he cared I can't imagine." So Edelstein got a call from the New York publicist for "Valmont," saying that he "would not be admitted to the screening, and that they were going to pay attention to everything I wrote from then on." Edelstein asked some other critics to intervene on his behalf, and a few days later, another publicist called him back: "'For the record, you were never banned. We just have to schedule some more screenings.' I said, 'Come on. You called me and told me I was banned. You're going to tell me you didn't say that?' 'Yes, I'm going to tell you that.'"

"I find it fascinating that Milos Forman, whose movies almost exclusively deal with people being punished and martyred for mouthing off ('The People vs. Larry Flynt,' 'Amadeus,' 'Man on the Moon') -- he's all for free expression until it's directed at him."

I don't expect Armond White and Noah Baumbach to get past this dust-up and start exchanging holiday cards any time soon. But the only thing Baumbach, Rudin and company have accomplished this week is to make sure that lots and lots of people who'd never even heard of Armond White will now want to read his review of "Greenberg" next week.

Although I have mixed feelings about "The Hurt Locker" itself, and about the cultural-psychological reasons for its ascendancy, Bigelow herself is a genuine and strange cinematic genius who has paid her dues several times over and richly deserves her moment of triumph. (Is "Hurt Locker" her best film? Probably not. Her second-best? Not even sure about that.) I wish producer-screenwriter Mark Boal hadn't complicated Bigelow's big moment on the stage of the Kodak Theatre by persistently tugging on her elbow, like a kid in a department store who needed to use the john. That was odd.

Did it take a grueling, ¿Quién es más macho? war thriller for a female director to win a pile of Oscars? I know there are counter-arguments -- mainly, there just haven't been that many Oscar-scale movies made by women -- but I kind of think, yeah, it did. This may have more to do with the Academy's recent preference for "serious," male-coded film genres than with simplistic sexual discrimination. Hollywood legend Joseph L. Mankiewicz won back-to-back writing and directing Oscars in 1950 and 1951 for "A Letter to Three Wives" and "All About Eve," but it's difficult to imagine such female-centric movies garnering those kinds of honors today.

Taking the longer view, this year's Oscar campaign and its conclusion offered some crucial flashes of insight into how the Academy works in the 21st century, which is a whole lot different from the way it used to work. Although this goes against nearly everything I believe about life on Planet Earth, I have concluded that Academy voters as a group are less cynical and calculated than I thought -- but also that there is a conflict or schism between the membership and the needs and desires of the Academy's leadership, or at least its image-management and P.R. teams.

I exchanged e-mails late on Sunday night with a critical colleague, one who'd made the same misguided assumptions that I had about the inevitable victory of "Avatar," notwithstanding the accolades heaped upon "Hurt Locker" by every critics' group and industry trade organization. Our fundamental error, we concluded, lay in believing that after several years of victories by mid-budget Indiewood pictures the Academy's collective thinking, and voting behavior, would at some point return to "normal." What we meant by normal, of course, was an ingrained institutional preference for big-budget spectacle. But that old normal is dead, and here's the new normal: Hollywood's central trade group doesn't like its own movies that much.

Allow me to quote an esteemed expert: "One thing that's become clear is that the film industry feels no confidence about the cultural significance of its own products. Hollywood's self-appointed division of self-importance, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, passed up the chance to honor one of the most ambitious and successful films the American movie factories have ever made in order to hand out hardware to a mid-budget, semi-independent production made in Jordan without movie stars."

OK, the expert is not all that esteemed. It's me, and other than replacing "India" with "Jordan," that's taken verbatim from the article I wrote last year about the Oscar victory of "Slumdog Millionaire" and the shunning of "The Dark Knight." If anything, the contrast is even starker this time around. "Avatar" is, of course, a much bigger hit than TDK, and its use of motion-capture technology and 3-D clearly points toward the Hollywood future. "The Hurt Locker" is a genuine indie production, financed and made entirely outside the studio system, which grossed less than $15 million in the United States.

Comparing different eras of financial and cinematic history is rife with pitfalls, but that clearly makes "Hurt Locker" the lowest-grossing best-picture winner in Oscar history. (No. 2 is probably "The Last Emperor" from 1987, but when you adjust for inflation, Bernardo Bertolucci's costume drama made almost three times as much money as Bigelow's war epic.) It's delicious and strange and at least potentially ironic that this happened in the year when the Academy expanded the best-picture category from five to 10 nominees, in an evident effort to make the competition more commercial and more attractive to mainstream audiences.

Honestly, the only conclusion I can draw is that Academy members are voting with their hearts. Who'da thunk it? Maybe an earlier generation of Oscar voters was more persuaded by box-office numbers, mass popularity and marketing muscle -- or was simply more in tune with mass taste -- but they evidently don't give a damn about those things now. Personally, I'd have ranked a couple of other nominees above "Hurt Locker" -- definitely "A Serious Man," maybe "An Education" -- but it's an idiosyncratic film made by a genuine visionary. Even setting aside the history-making element of this vote (which was surely a consideration) it's a respectable choice.

Now, the Academy brass, especially its marketing mavens and the shepherds of its lucrative contract with ABC, may take a more jaundiced view of the membership's sudden attack of integrity and independence. Oscar's long relationship with the wider moviegoing public has always been tempestuous, but both as a television franchise and a touchstone of cultural relevance, the Academy Awards cannot afford to be seen as some elitist, out-of-touch coastal bastion of indieness. If we allowed ABC execs a free spin in the time machine, and a chance to replace the last four or five years' worth of Oscar-winners with movies heartland consumers actually paid to watch, they'd take it in a heartbeat.

Still, at least in terms of water-cooler controversy, this year's Oscars were largely successful. Mind you, the telecast was a misbegotten mishmash, and the toxic, unfunny repartee of Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin made Hugh Jackman's 2009 song-and-dance numbers look like the height of showbiz professionalism. But viewership was up, reaching the best numbers since the "Crash on Brokeback Mountain" showdown of 2006, and the huge roster of nominated films yielded contradictory but complementary results: Multiple nominations for hugely popular films, and an underdog victory. A lifetime achievement award for Jeff "The Dude" Bridges (let's be honest; that's what it was), and shocking proof that Sandra Bullock is not just a human being but a funny, warm and generous-spirited one as well.

But the repercussions of "The Hurt Locker's" victory over "Avatar" go well beyond Kathryn Bigelow's historic breakthrough, and well beyond questions of which movie you or I like better, or which one made more money. It's another salvo in Hollywood's peculiar, long-running war against itself, a war unlikely to have any winners.

At Sundance 2009, the film was acquired by Senator Entertainment, a then-new distribution venture backed by German money and headed by former THINKFilm president Mark Urman. If that seemed like a foolhardy time to launch a new indie distributor, it was. Senator fared even worse than Urman's previous defunct company, existing for a few months (mainly on paper) and then going belly-up without even bothering to release any movies first. Overture Films -- another relatively new company, but one with such releases as "The Visitor," "Law Abiding Citizen" and "Capitalism: A Love Story" on its résumé -- sifted through the wreckage for salvageable pieces, and so we're finally seeing "Brooklyn's Finest" in theaters, albeit without much hype or marketing muscle behind it.

This remains an agreeably chewy, pulpy work of old-fashioned crime cinema, a fair bit overcooked and overlong, but worth catching for its acting, its atmosphere and its action set-pieces. A dark, deterministic cop opera that verges on self-caricature at times, "Brooklyn's Finest" is also a mightily impressive visual spectacle that reestablishes Fuqua's claim to be the hip-hop generation's heir to Martin Scorsese. Screenwriters Michael C. Martin and Brad Caleb Kane focus on a classic trio of troubled New York cops, each devoured by the job in different ways, whose paths eventually intersect by accident in a notoriously crime-plagued housing project in the Brownsville neighborhood. While Fuqua doesn't quite match the crackerjack narrative intensity of his 2001 "Training Day," what he's crafted here is a brooding, violent, slow-digesting tragedy of considerable power. 

For my money, Richard Gere gives one of his best performances in years as Eddie Dugan, an embittered, depressed beat cop in his last week before retirement. Eddie's fighting a losing battle against his own disgust and apathy, and trying like hell to pretend that the prostitute he patronizes is actually his girlfriend. Ethan Hawke plays detective Sal Procida with a hackneyed "yo, Vinny" Italian-American accent, but also provides a complicated portrayal of a family man and star narcotics officer who uses his position to steal drug money and mete out vigilante justice. Don Cheadle, excellent as always, plays another star detective, Tango Butler, who's gone way too deep undercover inside a drug gang, and may be transferring his loyalty from the NYPD to a vicious, charismatic drug lord (Wesley Snipes, in one of his oiliest and most irresistible performances).

Fuqua's dandy supporting cast also includes Ellen Barkin, who gets just two scenes as a ball-busting, queen-bitch FBI agent and eats them whole, along with nice turns from Lili Taylor (as Sal's wife) and Brian F. O'Byrne. If Fuqua is unusually skilled at unleashing actors, he has more trouble managing scripts, and I think this one gets away from him, finally becoming a construction just as mechanical as "Crash," if far more fatalistic. Speaking as a Brooklynite who lives maybe four or five miles from the projects depicted in the film, Fuqua makes them seem a lot more dire and doomed than they are. Still, that's his job, right? Nothing illustrates the timidity of present-day Hollywood more completely than the fact that Fuqua had to go outside the current studio system to make something that so strongly resembles a late-'70s/early-'80s Hollywood film. At least it's a decent one.

"Brooklyn's Finest" is now playing in many major cities. Wider release may follow.

Nobody's saying that this year. While Pixar's "Up" (also nominated for best picture) is considered the likely winner, it's definitely nothing like a formulaic kid-flick -- and it's also the only computer-animated film among the five nominees. After more than a decade of CGI dominance, handmade is suddenly all the rage: Even Disney's nominated "The Princess and the Frog" was hand-drawn, as if in a deliberate effort to suggest that company's great tradition. Nominees also include two stop-motion literary adaptations aimed at a kidult crossover audience, Henry Selick's "Coraline" and Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox."

But those movies had all been widely seen, favorably reviewed and discussed as possible Oscar fodder. Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, was prepared for the nomination of "The Secret of Kells," a dazzling, not to mention utterly charming, hand-drawn fable about a 12-year-old boy's adventures in early medieval Ireland. "We thought we might be in line for some Irish and European awards, and that would be that," says director Tomm Moore. "The Oscars? No way. That never entered my mind."

A haunting blend of history, fairy tale and pure invention, Moore's film follows a young student monk named Brendan, who has spent his whole life inside the fortified walls of the Abbey of Kells, whose forbidding abbot (voiced by Brendan Gleeson) has built it as a sanctuary against the Viking raiders who are pillaging and burning Irish villages at will. (It's somewhere around the year 800 A.D., give or take.) Into Brendan's cloistered life comes a playful monastic wanderer named Aidan (Mick Lally), who apparently studied with the legendary St. Colum Cille (aka St. Columba) on the Scottish isle of Iona, and carries with him perhaps the single greatest treasure of medieval Ireland.

That treasure is neither gold nor jewels but a book -- a lavish illustrated manuscript version of the Gospels that in centuries to come will be known as the Book of Kells. (Today it is considered Ireland's most important single cultural artifact, and can be seen under glass in the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin.) Brendan's yearning to help Aidan complete the manuscript, and safeguard it from Scandinavian marauders, leads him outside the walls of Kells into the magical forest around it -- and also out of the then-new Christian world into the pagan past.

Borrowing a wide range of illustrations and motifs from the Book of Kells and numerous other medieval and indigenous sources, Moore and his team of Irish, Belgian and French animators send Brendan on a mystical voyage. He is aided by an irrepressible forest sprite named Aisling ("ASH-ling"), but must go alone to face the terrifying Crom Cruach, an ancient and perhaps demonic Celtic deity who -- at least in some legends -- required the sacrifice of first-born children to ensure the harvest.

All this is a freewheeling and fanciful blend of art and legend; Moore doesn't pretend to offer a historical account of how the Book of Kells was created, or a coherent version of the collision between paganism and Christianity in Ireland. Rather, "The Secret of Kells" is a gorgeous transcription of medieval decorative art and its themes into a contemporary animated narrative, one that should enthrall children older than 8 or so, along with the adults lucky enough to watch with them. (My guess, so far, is that the invading Viking hordes and the Crom Cruach sequence are probably too scary for my 6-year-old twins. They have a difficult time with the evil stepmother in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.")

American distribution rights for "The Secret of Kells" belong to GKIDS, an independent producer and distributor of children's entertainment whose main property is the New York International Children's Film Festival. To its credit, the company responded to the unexpected Oscar nomination by pushing the film into one New York theater this weekend, with wider release and a DVD version soon to follow. I had hoped to meet Tomm Moore in person during his New York visit, but both of us were snowed in after the recent blizzard and decided to talk on the phone instead.

It's such a wonderful idea for an animated film, but also a pretty unlikely one. Tell me how and when you came up with it.

I had an idea along these lines when I was in college in '99, and I started to develop it with a group of friends -- the idea of trying to translate Irish art, Celtic art, into animation. To do something along the lines of, say, what they did in "Mulan" with Chinese art.

After I got out of college we set up an animation studio in Kilkenny and we were doing commercials and other kinds of jobs. So this was a pet project we could never get off the ground until 2005, when we met the producers of "Triplets of Belleville" [the French-Belgian animated feature, Oscar-nominated in 2003]. We were able to put the financing together and work on a final script. We had many years of development prior to that, in terms of the art style. But in 2005 we were finally able to hit the ground running.

Talk about the art style. Obviously you drew on the Book of Kells itself. Was there other medieval art, or art from other periods, that you looked at?

At a certain point it was the Book of Kells itself, and then we started looking at medieval art in general, the triptychs and other things. Basically anything in and around that whole era -- European medieval art and also anything involving indigenous folk art that had been translated into animation. We looked at, like, the Hungarian folk-tale series that had been done in Eastern Europe, where they had taken Hungarian art and animated that. Or American things like "Samurai Jack," where they'd taken Japanese and other indigenous art and adapted it into TV animation. We took all of that as reference points, and tried to come up with our own style.

I know this is a work of fiction, not history. But how much research did you do? Did you want to paint something close to an accurate portrait of that era?

We started off with a fairly dry version of the story, which was even a little bit too historical. Then we started working with a screenwriter named Fabrice Ziolkowski, this French-American guy, and he helped us tease out more of the hero's-journey story. That opened it up to allow us to bring in some of the legends and fantasy that surrounded the history, which might have made the story skew a little bit younger, and also made it a bit more fun for the animators doing it.

Telling the story through this young boy, who's a kid but also a monk -- or, I guess, a student monk -- was an interesting choice.

We were always telling the story through Brendan's eyes, but I think I was looking too much at Aidan and the Abbot in the first draft of the script. Seeing the world through Brendan's eyes is much more interesting. Imagine the suggested world of a kid in the Middle Ages who's never been outside the walls of this abbey -- that gave us another way of looking at the whole movie. So he became central rather than secondary.

Was the Abbey of Kells really this kind of fortified bulwark, the way you portray it? Is that part historical?

Yeah, basically it is. The land was given to Cellach, who was a historical character, by a local nobleman. Iona had been burned out and sacked so often that they decided to come into the center of Ireland [County Meath, roughly 40 miles north of Dublin] and try to get away from the Vikings. Of course the Vikings just came up the rivers and wound up sacking Kells in the end anyway. Maybe the walls weren't that big! We exaggerated that a bit, now.

It's fascinating that you depict the monks at Kells as being not just Irish, or not even principally Irish, but as coming from all over the world -- Italy, Africa, the Middle East. What's the historical basis for that?

Well, this is what we found most interesting and surprising when we did research into the Book of Kells. One of the things they don't understand is that there are inks and patterns and designs in the Book of Kells that come from all over the world. There's some ink that seems to have come from Afghanistan; there are patterns they've linked to Morocco. It's fascinating stuff: They've found bones of pet monkeys, things like that. Stuff we didn't even use in the movie. There was a lot of trade and interaction, a lot of people coming to Ireland from mainland Europe for refuge. Maybe it was all down to trade and dialogue, and maybe there were all sorts of people from all over the world living in Ireland at the time. We thought it was a nice reflection of how cosmopolitan Irish society has become today.

Right. As you and I both know, Ireland in the 20th century was, at least at times, a pretty provincial place, somewhat cut off from the world.

I grew up in an Ireland where basically all my friends were Irish people with good Irish names, all of that. My son now goes to an Irish-speaking school where he's got friends from Burma, Poland, you know, everywhere. So I thought it was interesting to see that in the Middle Ages Ireland had an influx of people from everywhere, which parallels what's been going on just in the last 10 years.

Wait -- your son goes to school with Burmese and Polish kids who are learning Irish?

Yeah.

That's fantastic! I wish my dad, who was a Celtic scholar, was still around to see that. It seems like you're trying to address the old-style Irish nationalist stereotype, the idea that there was some pure culture that had been handed down from ancient times.

Ah, no. We're a mongrel breed and that's for sure. A lot of Irish people are surprised by how rich a cultural history we had around that time.

Talk about the way you use the pagan and pre-Christian iconography in the movie, especially the ancient Celtic god Crom Cruach, whose image was supposedly destroyed by St. Patrick.

What I found most interesting about that period -- I've done a couple of graphic novels about St. Patrick, and what I really learned was how the ancient Celtic gods had been transmuted into the new Christian pantheon. A lot of the saints, like St. Colum Cille, had all these amazing legends around them: His hand glowed, so he could write at night! All this strange stuff. It would always be this confluence of the old pagan beliefs and the more modern -- well, not modern -- but the newer Christian stuff.

I found that the Crom Cruach story seemed to be linked to this old duality, with Lugh as the sun god and Crom as the god of the underworld. There were all these legends about human sacrifices that St. Patrick stopped by defeating Crom Cruach. I sort of thought, maybe that's where the idea of the snakes being driven out of Ireland came from, St Patrick defeating Crom. Even though Crom is most often represented as a worm or a giant, a giant idol, we picked on serpent. We thought there was symbolism we could use from the Book of Kells, where they have all these Ouroboros, these snakes eating their own tails, going around the pages. So we thought, let's make Crom into something Brendan imagines after seeing some of the Book of Kells.

And then there's Aisling, your little forest sprite. Where does she come from?

I don't know if you know much Gaelic, but Aisling means "dream," and there's this tradition of Aisling poems, more from the Celtic Revival period, you know, the William Butler Yeats era. They used to write these poems where Aisling would be a girl the poet would see, who would tell tales about Ireland's woe or whatever. We thought it would be fun to make her a little girl rather than a woman, make her this symbol of the matriarchy that Christianity was replacing, but also something like a little sister to Brendan. I based her on my own little sister, you know? She's always trying to best him, and she's got all these powers. Because she's a fairy she can transform into any creature. She's kind of a mixture of this wise old pagan deity and a pesky little sister.

Tell me a little bit about the techniques and technology you used. This is all hand-drawn animation, or mostly?

The animation is 95 percent hand-drawn. We did 20 minutes of animation in Kilkenny, and that was the lead for all the other studios. In Belgium they colored all the characters on the computer, and we did some CG, like the Crom Cruach sequence and the Viking attacks. We had to use CG for the crowd scenes, but we tried to make it all look hand-made, keep it looking like medieval art. That was the goal.

Surprisingly, you're up against another hand-drawn animation ["The Princess and the Frog"] and two stop-motion films, along with "Up."

It's amazing to me. When we started making this movie in 2005, hand-drawn animation was basically dead, except in Japan. It's a mad year to be in the Oscars. Basically we're all in the shadow of "Up," which I think is a great movie. We kind of won big just by getting this nomination. We never thought that could happen.

"The Secret of Kells" opens March 5 at the IFC Center in New York, with other cities to follow.

This year's documentary Oscar race is widely seen, rightly or wrongly, as a head-on collision between two consciousness-raising, global-issue docs, of exactly the kind that have dominated the category in recent years. In one corner is former National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos' "The Cove," an exciting, if occasionally gruesome, exposé about the massacre of dolphins in a secluded Japanese bay. In the other is documentary veteran Robert Kenner's "Food, Inc.," an investigative collaboration with writers Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser that hopes to spark wide public debate about the costs of industrialized food production and the local-and-organic movement.

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.