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I say a stranger’s vulnerability and not a friend’s, because a loved one’s vulnerability is less of a risk to them, and so less of a burden to me, the witness. In the split moment that a person is vulnerable, or when we project a vulnerability onto them, we become responsible for their existence in the world. In seventh grade, the year-supreme of vulnerability, I overheard a girl in my class talking about her excitement over the year's first dance. Her mother was taking her to get her hair done, she said, and to buy her a new dress. My skin prickled with discomfort. Didn’t she know the dance wasn’t a “get your hair done” kind of big deal? On the night of the dance, everyone was in a casual dress or jeans. She showed up with an elaborate updo and a ball gown. That moment has forever seared itself in my mind. I wanted to throw up and cry.

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

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

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No, I know, I know -- they sometimes do, pretty much on the stopped-clock-occasionally-correct principle. And somebody must like each of this year's best-picture nominees, with the possible exception of the universally allergenic "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close." (I appreciated one reader's recent comment that the hidden virtue of that film lay in combining the annual quota of schmaltzy Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock vehicles into one compact package.) After all, the whole reason why "The Artist" appears to be the front-runner is because it's charming and unpretentious and nearly impossible to dislike -- although I don't happen to think it's all that great -- whereas the other nominees do not share that quality.

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

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If in those days the Oscar campaign was a question of burnishing the imperial brass, this year it's something quite different. These are the Oscars of wounded dads and autistic kids, of orphans in love with old movies and lonely guys struggling to break free of nostalgia. When you look at this year's nominated films, it's not like there'a a tenuous theme that halfway threads them together. There's more like a torrent of male grief, sadness and loss that pretty well drowns you. These are the maudlin Oscars, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past"; the Therapy Oscars, the Oscars of Healing, the Oscars of Chicken Soup for the Hollywood Soul. I'm just not sure the therapy is likely to meet the patient's needs.

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Stephen Frears' "Lay the Favorite," with Bruce Willis and Rebecca Hall, is a lightweight sub-Hollywood farce; Julie Delpy's "2 Days in New York," starring herself and Chris Rock, is a halfway agreeable mess; Nicholas Jarecki's "Arbitrage," with Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon, is a decent corporate-world thriller. And while I'm delighted to defend Spike Lee's "Red Hook Summer," it's a rough and rugged ultra-indie production that disappointed many viewers. If none of those films is life-changing, none is even half as bad as Rodrigo Cortés' "Red Lights," a moronic paranormal mystery featuring the latest dispiriting Robert De Niro performance.

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That's quite an introduction to a character, especially considering that Erik is evidently based on Sachs himself, an indie-film stalwart best known for the 2005 Sundance prizewinner "Forty Shades of Blue." Sachs has made no secret of the fact that "Keep the Lights On," the story of a long-running and tormented relationship, is drawn from his own life. (His ex-boyfriend is well known in the New York publishing world.) But this isn't an excuse to issue apologias or vent personal grudges; it's a loving but entirely fearless portrait of gay urban life at the turn of the millennium, seen through the prism of one dysfunctional love affair. In fact, this movie may test how far the gay community has come on issues of self-representation. While it seems unlikely that bigots and homophobes would actively seek this film out (except, you know, on the sly and stuff), any who do see it could certainly cherry-pick details to support the thesis that Erik's entire cadre of humanity are degenerates.

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Holland -- whose remarkably diverse career includes two earlier Holocaust themes ("Europa, Europa," "Bitter Harvest"), a Henry James novel ("Washington Square"), "The Secret Garden" and three episodes of David Simon’s "The Wire" --  first turned down the film because its principal backers demanded that the actors speak English. She wanted the languages to reproduce the polyglot Babel of Lwow, then a Polish city and now a center of Ukrainian nationalism.

We spoke with Holland last week, ahead of the Oscar nominations, in Washington, D.C., where "In Darkness" was screened at the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

Many of us approach the Holocaust with a mixture of horror and wonder, it’s so inexplicable. Do you keep returning to it in film because it’s unsolvable, or because you’re trying to understand something about it?

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Fans of Delpy’s zany 2007 relationship comedy “2 Days in Paris” will already have a good idea what to expect here, but it really doesn’t matter whether you’ve seen the earlier movie. Jack, the American boyfriend played by Adam Goldberg in “2 Days in Paris,” has evidently moved on (leaving behind a young son), and Delpy’s character, Marion, is now shacking up with a Village Voice journalist and radio host named Mingus, who has a daughter of his own. (Rock even says the character is based on the prominent African-American journalists Nelson George and Elvis Mitchell.)

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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

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Of course "Bachelorette" will be compared to last summer's hit "Bridesmaids," because it's a female-centric and female-created comedy and because of its themes and setting. Headland insists that any resemblance is coincidental, and in fact they're quite different kinds of movies. This is a rapier-sharp, fast-paced comedy of manners, less concerned with delivering big laughs than with exploring its characters and their complicated interactions. Headland is clearly trying to channel the spirit of John Hughes (perhaps a coked-up and promiscuous John Hughes), but her discursive, self-involved, shamelessly New Yorky characters also suggest the films of Whit Stillman ("Metropolitan" and "The Last Days of Disco").

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Click through the following slide show to see the nominees in the four main acting categories.

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