I admit that The Last Kiss review below became a bit involved. For involved reviews of a more relevant kind, folks should check out The New Republic's new Oscar blog, which is filling its niche nicely. I never wanted to see Babel, so I'm feeling a bit lost, and I really, really don't think that "Twenty years from now, Borat will be a classic, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist, the way Easy Rider did in the 1960s or Wall Street did in the 1980s," but Ross's lament that middlebrow movies have largely vanished from the Best Picture category is one I share:
Sure, Driving Miss Daisy slugging it out with Dead Poets Society and Field of Dreams might not have been a matchup made in film school heaven, but it made for good award-show theater--as did 1991's Beauty and the Beast versus Silence of the Lambs battle royale, and Braveheart's 1995 competition with Babe, Apollo 13, and Sense and Sensibility, and 1999's Shakespeare in Love versus Saving Private Ryan, and a host of others.
Whereas today, the Academy is more likely to nominate movies that are highbrow and semi-artsy without being any good: Sometimes they're awful (Babel, Crash) and sometimes they're just overpraised (last year's Good Night and Good Luck, this year's Letters From Iwo Jima), but in either case they aren't any fun.
So I'm with him in rooting for The Departed, and I'll go a step farther and say that Jack Nicholson's campy performance didn't bother me at all.
