Guh.

After years upon years of disappointments and hilariously inept choices, I don't know why the Oscar nominations continue to bum me out on an annual basis. It's a fairly widely-held opinion that the Academy Awards are to some extent a system of rewarding the movie-that-most-resembles-an-Oscar-winner ("social issues" are addressed; somebody dies in some sort of slow, noble fashion; broad themes are telegraphed to the audience at an earsplitting volume.)

Maybe it was last year's bumper crop, with the eminently worthy (and, not for nothing, entirely harrowing and un-uplifting) No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood taking nods; even the big swooshy "Oscar" movie (Atonement) was actually really, really good. This year, there is one inexplicably overpraised favorite (Slumdog), the best biopic in a decade (which isn't saying much, but still: Milk is pretty solid), a tony filmed play that everyone likes but no one loves (Frost/Nixon? Really?), and two movies that almost everyone seems to have the same "eh" reaction to (Benjamin Button and The Reader). There were a couple of masterpieces this year: Rachel Getting Married is a genuinely new-looking film, and has better performances on average than any other movie I can think of this year; and WALL-E is nothing short of a minor miracle - a kids' film which teeters on the edge of a really scathing pessimism, and had the balls to stage its first act as a Chaplinesque silent love story.