Let’s be honest: As interesting as the fashion or the other award categories are, it’s the Best Picture category that gets everyone’s blood pressure reaching for the sky. It’s the category where anything can happen. Some years, serious fare like Gandhi will triumph over sentimental candy like E.T. The Extraterrestrial. In others, a pop-tart like Titanic will inexplicably win over a gritty uppercut like L.A. Confidential.

     The only thing that’s predictable is that they never nominate the films we want to see nominated. (Case in point: Two of my favorite movies of last year, The Interpreter and The Weather Man, are nowhere on the Oscar radar. That’s fine, though. I don’t mind being alone in thinking these underrated gems are more memorable than all but two of this year’s Best Picture nominees. Netflix knows which movies I’ll be watching again.)

  
Five

 

     So here’s the question: Which of this year’s contenders — Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck, Crash and Munich — should reach the much-coveted finish line?

     On the basis of technical flaws betraying a film’s storytelling ambitions, I’d eliminate two contenders from the lineup from the get-go. The first is Crash. Though tautly directed by Paul Haggis, this preachy drama is not so tight in the script department. It starts out strong, then implodes messily into a mass of inconsistent characterizations and plausibility-busting coincidences. Much ado has been made about the film’s take on prejudice. But suggesting that people are masters of cognitive dissonance, especially when it comes to unconscious assumptions about race, is as banal as Down to the Bone’s admonition that drugs are bad. It even goes beyond the simplistic. Crash’s moralizing object-lesson is the product of antiquated thinking on race relations. C’mon, this is the twenty-first century. Even the critically panned Freedomland gets the complexities of race in America right.

 

 

     Then there’s Munich, by one of the biggest directing names in Hollywood. But even the mighty can stumble, if not fall outright. The real controversy is not Steven Spielberg’s politics, so easily misconstrued by the inattentive but that he falls victim to cheap editing tricks and an inadequate script overpopulated by underdeveloped characters.

     Some critics have come to the defense of a monumentally silly sex scene in which our tortured hero Avner makes love to his wife but cannot exorcise the horror of what he has seen and done. But whatever the intention to point out that Avner’s safest haven has been violated, the juxtaposition of Eric Bana’s orgasmic contortions with violent scenes is too clumsy to justify such paltry insight into Avner’s changed character.

 

     Spielberg is often accused of being overly sentimental — a directorial trait that still has people wondering how A.I. would have turned out if Stanley Kubrick had directed it instead — and scenes like this one prove it, despite the film’s glum ending.

Bottom line: Munich isn’t undeserving of an Oscar because of it’s politics but because it just isn’t that good of a film. Schindler’s List, it ain‚t.

  

  

     With Crash and Munich out of the running, this leaves Capote, Brokeback Mountain, and Good Night, and Good luck. Although Capote’s first two-thirds feel like homework setting up the emotionally volatile conclusion, a beautifully written script and walloping cast make it hard to dismiss the film out of hand on technical grounds.

     This brings me to that elusive criterion beyond the merely technical. Call it artistry, or innovation, but it’s what separates a great film from a good one. I’d put it this way: A good film is entertaining, a great film is both entertaining and insightful into the human condition.

     As a biopic, Capote offers an emotionally vivid, jagged-edged portrait of a troubled man and his self-inflicted wounds. But in comparison to the bolder, more ambitious, and more provocative contenders for Best Picture, Capote’s character study amounts to little more than a psychological curiosity.

   

  
     So now we’re left with Brokeback Mountain and Good Night, and Good Luck, two films that made it on my mental list of outstanding films in 2005. Good Night, and Good Luck is a timely political alarm, an attempt to put the brakes on the spinning gears of history. It not only recasts George Clooney as a savvy filmmaker and surprisingly masterful director, but, along with films like Syriana, rekindles cinema as a thinking person’s medium.

   

     But it’s overall theme of governmental chicanery and a compromised media is a familiar refrain, however important. Offering it in the form of a movie guarantees that the message is more accessible to the masses — and maybe this time it’ll stick — but the topic is still a bit too far removed from people’s lives. Good Night, and Good Luck, for all its sophistication, may be a film that looks a bit too much at the choir as it speaks.

  

 

     Brokeback Mountain, however, has an appeal that goes beyond a specific political issue to something that touches the humanity in all of us: love. Without preaching or pretensions, Ang Lee’s masterpiece offers a romance as breathtaking in its beauty as it is sorrowful in its tragedy. That the film’s lovers are two men is incidental. True love knows no conditions.

     Better yet, Brokeback Mountain isn’t self-conscious about its controversial nature — a controversy that will disappear once society matures enough to stop fussing about homosexuality.

Because it stays away from political statements great and small, telling, instead, a simple yet passionate human story, Brokeback Mountain succeeds in unleashing a volley into the heart of identity politics (that is, politics that that have evolved to encompass different races and genders, but not different sexual orientations). It’s a poetic challenge to those who would use God and religion to hide their bigotry toward people different from them. It’s a challenge to society to accept love as a truly many-splendored thing.