This year's Oscar nominees are mostly worthy representatives of the mainstream. Gareth Higginspresents his own list of less-seen gems
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences prides itself on being the arbiter of good cinematic taste, but the fact that Alfred Hitchcock never won a best director Oscar, while both Ron Howard and Mel Gibson have the shiny gold statuette on their mantelpieces, illustrates how Oscar gets it wrong as often as not.
In some years the bad choices are glaring: from Oliver! winning the top prize in 1968, the year of 2001: A Space Odyssey; to the almost forgotten Dances With Wolves taking home seven Oscars on the night Goodfellas left with just one; right up to last year's upset, when the well-intentioned but somewhat trite Crash was chosen ahead of the artistic beauty and much greater political significance of Brokeback Mountain.
So, earlier this week, when a rather excitable Salma Hayek announced the nominations, it was a pleasant surprise that most of the nominees seemed to deserve it. No one could object to the best picture nominees, with Babel, The Queen, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine and Letters from Iwo Jima all representing high-quality mainstream cinema. But an exercise in such majoritarianism as the Academy voting procedures will always produce results that exclude less-seen gems. So here is one film-lover's suggestion of alternatives to the likely winners in the main categories:
Best Film
Neither of the two frontrunners - the Big Issues polemic, Babel, or the wonderful serio-comic Little Miss Sunshine - match the quality of Children of Men, a magnificent film that manages to put a new spin on dystopian futures. The story - about the desperate attempt to get the only living pregnant woman to freedom - sounds bleak, but the film couldn't be more life- affirming if Oprah herself was to turn up at the end to give her benediction. It's a far more serious film than this would suggest, and is photographed with an urgency that begins to make you feel like your own life depends on it.
Best Director
Even though The Departed feels like "Marty's Greatest Hits", the Academy should finally come good on its debt and give Scorsese the award he's now been nominated for six times. But this would be ignoring Darren Aronofsky, director of The Fountain. A visionary film about love and living life in the moment, The Fountain is an almost religious experience, as well as being one of the most visually striking and seamlessly edited films in living memory, much of the quality of which can be attributed to Aronofsky's titanic struggle to get it made.
Best Actor
Robert Altman's last film, A Prairie Home Companion, is notable for a number of things, chief among them being that he managed to encompass an entire world of richly drawn characters in a couple of hours. But it was also the movie debut of novelist Garrison Keillor, playing a fellow called GK. Bearing more than a passing resemblance to Keillor's real-life public persona, GK succeeds in delivering on screen what Keillor's words have done for decades: giving his audience a sense of home.
Best Actress
While no one doubts the divine right of Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth to be crowned by the Academy, there is another performance by an actress from last year that can rank alongside the finest in film history. Sarah Polley's wounded healer in The Secret Life of Words is the fulcrum for this unflinching but poetic tale of dealing with past trauma. Her scars are physical - we see them on her chest - but this young actor can communicate things with her face that special make-up effects never could.
Best Supporting Actor
The recent NUI Galway student, Martin Sheen, so impressed himself on the popular consciousness in The West Wing that he had become all but indistinguishable from President Bartlett. In The Departed, however, his small-time Boston cop is so nuanced that it made me forget that Sheen should be sitting in the Oval Office saving the world.
Best Supporting Actress
Maggie Gyllenhaal, in Stranger than Fiction, plays an adorable left-wing activist who seeks to change the world through baking cookies. Combining a tough-talking exterior with an inner vulnerability that reminded me of Diane Keaton, her performance helps Will Ferrell look like a serious actor, and was the reason I saw the film twice.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Philip K Dick's novel, A Scanner Darkly, presents another dystopian future, this time one in which the protagonist is so confused that he doesn't know whether he's a cop or a drug-dealer. Richard Linklater adapted the story into a form that manages to convey this duplicitous inner voice, creating a world where nothing is certain and making appropriate use of Dick's actual words as narration. The film leaves the audience with the clear view that some attempts to control narcotics are as insane as the people who consume too many of them.
Best Original Screenplay
Michel Gondry's film, The Science of Sleep, follows the logic of dreams - which is to say, not much logic at all. It is mad in the way our sleep-stories are, confusing in the way relationships often feel, but it left me with the warm feeling that is otherwise only present at the beginning of a love affair.
Best Foreign Film
Jean-Pierre Melville's French Resistance thriller, Army of Shadows, finally released in the US after nearly 40 years, made many critics' lists as the best film of 2006 - yet the Academy, in its wisdom, chose to nominate it for nothing.
Best Art Direction
And finally, the alternative Oscar for best art direction goes to Casino Royale - the first Bond film in which nothing feels fake, including the villain's motivation, and the first in which 007 actually looks like he's working for a living rather than merely being a murderous playboy at the behest of the British taxpayer.
An honourable mention in this category should also go to Miami Vice, which looks and feels so good, and is so well put together from a technical point of view, that you could watch it with the sound off and not miss anything.
A bit like the Academy Awards ceremony, in fact.