MOVIES: On the eve of the nominations

The astute long-time reader will have noticed that I haven't done a "best of" list this year. I saw far fewer movies this year, mostly due to some chronic medical problems. Nothing life threatening, just annoying stuff that left me on too many weekends feeling too tired to go out and see movies. And when you see only one or two movies a month instead of five or six, you tend to see the Big Movies and only the Big Movies.

And that means that any Best Of list I could come up with would be made up pretty much of the usual suspects -- Milk, The Visitor, Man on Wire and so on -- and in that case, what's the point? The fun of a good Best Of list is the unexpected surprises, the movies and performances that don't pop up on anyone else's lists. And this year, even the long shots that I'm really hoping to see on tomorrow's nomination list are the same long shots that everyone else is hoping for (Richard Jenkins, Melissa Leo, Rosemarie DeWitt). My one no-chance-in-hell long shot, a nomination that would make me giddy with joy but won't happen, would be a Best Actor nomination for Colin Farrell, who was so unexpectedly marvelous in In Bruges.

So, in lieu of a formal list, a few thoughts on the year:

Expected nominees whose absence would please me: Sally Hawkins and Meryl Streep in Best Actress; supporting nominations for Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dev Patel, and Kate Winslet, not because any are undeserving (though c'mon, Dev Patel? Really?) but because all are clearly leads; The Dark Knight in Best Picture.

Let's talk about that last one. There's really only one interesting thing about the movie, and that's Heath Ledger's performance. And as good a performance as it is -- it will win Best Supporting Actor, and probably deserves to -- it is itself widely overrated; it's a good piece of acting, but it's not the master class the Oscar punditry has declared it to be. The hype and the over praise, of course, were unavoidable from the moment of Ledger's death; that tragedy led us to over hype the performance, and that hype led us to wildly over hype the movie, which really isn't all that interesting. It's certainly not worthy of a Best Picture nomination.

Would there have been any surprises on my hypothetical Best Of list for 2008? Well, one, I suppose: I seem to have missed posting anything on it at the time, but I really liked Speed Racer and couldn't figure out what all the complaints were about. Of course it was loud and garish and frenetic; it was a freakin' cartoon, beautifully translated into live action. The effects were astounding; the cast was uniformly fine, capturing the cartoon tone in just the right style. (I particularly liked Matthew Fox, absurdly square-jawed and stalwart as Racer X, and Roger Allam, perfectly hissable as the Evil Villainous Tycoon.) Not a perfect movie, to be sure -- no movie with an adorable urchin and his pet monkey could be -- but destined, I think, to be the Tron of its generation. In twenty years, it'll be recognized as a misunderstood delight, and it won't even take that long for the influence of its effects wizardry to be felt.