The Oscars – An Analysis

The Academy Awards are often berated by critics and film buffs for playing it safe by picking upbeat, feel-good crowd pleasers as winners, but this year the Academy surprised everyone pleasantly when it chose “No Country for Old Men”, a stark meditation on the nature of evil, as Best Picture. The directors of this dark film, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, also won Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. "Taxi to the Dark Side," which won Best Documentary Feature, looks at incidents of torture by the United States at its prison in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq. Reporters also noticed that most of the major stars - Nicole Kidman, Laura Linney, Hilary Swank, and Tilda Swinton –were dressed in black.

What is significant is that all the best picture nominees won in one category or another – this way the Academy made sure no one film swept everything away. Something else that was unusual about this year’s Oscars is that it was only the second time in Academy history that Europeans took every acting prize: French actress Marion Cotillard won Best Actress for playing Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose," British actor Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor for his portrayal of a cruel oilman in "There Will Be Blood", Spanish actor Javier Bardem won Best Supporting Actor for his psychopath character in No Country for Old Men, and British actress Tilda Swinton won Best Supporting Actress for playing a corporate executive who tries to cover up a scandal in "Michael Clayton”. When asked backstage about how she felt about European actors sweeping the Oscars, Swinton replied: "Dude, Hollywood is built on Europeans. Don't tell everybody, but we're everywhere."

The only two winners that had a cheerful side were "Ratatouille" for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Screenplay for Juno, a movie about a pregnant teenager. An Austrian thriller about forgery and the Nazis called "The Counterfeiters," won Best Foreign Language Film. Shekar Kapur’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age won only for Best Costume. The Golden Compass easily took away Best Visual Effects. And what of the blockbusters? "The Bourne Ultimatum" won three technical (Best Film Editing; Sound Mixing; Sound Editing) awards. Robert Elswit won Best Cinematography for "There Will Be Blood." Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglov won Best Original Song for "Falling Slowly," from the underrated contemporary romantic musical, "Once." Art Direction went to "Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street" and Original Music Score went to Dario Marianelli for "Atonement".

Here, however, is a list of terrific movies that didn’t win but deserved to:

· Once

· The Savages

· Into the Wild

· 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

· The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

· I’m Not There

· Persepolis

· Across the Universe