It seems like LOST always has a new trick up its sleeve and this week’s “Recon” has more than a few as we see Sawyer play every side against the other. James Ford, party of one?

Dennis

So happy to have a Sawyer episode! Not to hate on Kate every week but, eh, hell, it’s what I do. This episode just proved how little chemistry Sawyer and Kate actually have. I loved Sawyer and Juliet but this episode has proven that Sawyer has chemistry with everyone… except Kate. I was invested in Sawyer and She’s All That’s Jodi Lyn O’Keefe! I was invested in Sawyer and Charlotte! I was invested in Sawyer and Miles! Heck, I was even invested in Sawyer and his very special episode of A Little House on the Prairie.

I’m still fascinated that the LOST writers think there’s enough people out there who still care (ever cared?) about the Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle. Ooh Sawyer said he’s going to get him and Kate off the island! Ooh Sideways Sawyer apprehended Sideways Kate (who doesn’t apprehend Kate, is the question?). Still, between Ben’s side-story last week, and Sawyer’s this week, I’m happy the alterna-world is getting more compelling. What does it all mean and how do they relate? I can never answer those questions, when it comes to LOST. At least this is enjoyable head-scratching.

Speaking of which, I meant to mention in this week’s Remote Uncontrolled that Michael Emerson should net another Emmy for his performance. Well, fellow Emmy winning cast member Terry O’Quinn sure is giving him a run for that, playing whoever the hell he’s playing. And speaking of that: Apparently even The Smoke Monster has parental issues on this show. Perhaps Mama Monster was too full of hot air? Yeah, even I hate me for that pun.

Robert

Sawyer’s always been a character that I’ve wrestled with as a force on the show. He’s been the outlaw, the smooth talker, a source of never-ending nicknames, even a competent leader of DHARMAville, but he’s never truly been on the right side of things. Aside from the rare heroics (trying to stop the Others from taking Walt, trying to save Claire from Keamy’s raid,  jumping out of that chopper), he’s only ever been on his side. His new allegiance with Locke—followed by his double-crossing deal with Widmore—tells me he’s still only looking out for self, all in hopes of just getting off the damn island for good.

On the surface, that’s how Sawyer’s always been played, but I suspect there’s something bigger at work here. Just like we’ve discovered how important Kate has been to the formula (yes, that damn triangle made Jack and Sawyer do things they wouldn’t necessarily do), Sawyer surely has a purpose in all this (his playing Locke against Widmore has to be a part of the endgame, right?). Personally, I don’t think he’s ever leaving the island, but in trying to do so, I do think he’s going to give us one final act of heroism (Sawyerism?) by taking out someone important who happens to be in his way. Right now my money is on Widmore for the loss.

That would make his life as alt-Sawyer/James Ford that much sweeter, of course. His life as a detective (partnered with Miles aka The Guy Who Finds Dead People?) is a polar opposite of everything we’ve come to learn about him, but it’s still true to his fundamental character. He’s obsessed with finding the real Sawyer, he still likes him some Watership Down, and his gruff demeanor still rubs people the wrong way, but at least he’s on the side of right now. His blind date with Charlotte was a nice nod to last season (if only to let us know that she did make it off the island and still ends up an archaeologist) but it was the way it went down the tubes that revealed James Ford’s vulnerability. After pondering Half-Pint’s fear over losing her parents and hearing Charles Ingalls kick some mad prairie knowledge, he has a change of heart and tells Miles the truth about his trip to Australia and Anthony Cooper. It showed that this James Ford was a man that could screw things up and still turn back to fix them, rather than barreling through life without looking back.

Still, the biggest difference between this flash-sideways and the previous episodes is that this one left us with a hanging thread. Considering how LOST has handled season openers and finales, this makes me think we’ll eventually see what happened after James caught Kate in the series finale. But that whole ending makes me wonder if all of these flash-sideways, like his car, might get rear-ended at the buzzer. I hope not.

Chris

Only eight episodes left until the finale! All will be answered! It’s almost over! Ahhhhh! Oh ABC On-Air Promotions Department you do enjoy the taunting.

Now that we’re how-many-episodes into the season, I’m starting to wonder about the pacing of the show in its final gasp. And I know I’m not alone ‘cuz my fiancee looked over at me at the end of the episodes asking, “how is this going to end? They’ve answered nothing! Nothing happened in this episode!” It’s true, nothing much happened in this episode. Sawyer went to Hydra Island, scoped it out, appeared to be makin’ deals with both sides and came back and that’s it. The set-up to the final punchline is excruciatingly slow, and in the past I’ve been the guy that’s all “just sit back and enjoy the ride” when it comes to LOST but…c’mon! Now I’m at a point where I’m beginning to struggle to see how this show is going to resolve itself in a satisfying manner.

Having said that, just like in previous episodes this season I thoroughly enjoyed watching a new side of an established character. In this case it was Sawyer and his turn to truth-telling emotionally-stable guy was interesting and fun to watch. Even better was the pairing of Miles/Sawyer as buddy cops. I’d watch that show if they spun it off and I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only one! The scene at the beginning with Sawyer’s usual con turned on its head was genius, as was pairing him with Charlotte. Like the previous episodes, alt-Sawyer reached an epiphany, started telling the truth and backed away from his resolve to kill Anthony Cooper (would he have done it anyway? What happened in his alt-Sydney experience?) and even went groveling back to Charlotte after that misunderstanding. Actually I wonder if it was a misunderstanding or if Charlotte was specifically looking for that folder in Sawyer’s chest. The way she played it made it seem like she was hunting for something other than a shirt. Maybe alt-Charlotte is a con artist instead of an archaeologist.

So Widmore’s on Hydra Island. That was a turn of events that I’d forgotten about since the last episode. More questions arise from there – is he from on-island or the alt-sunken-island timeline? What’s locked away in that room? (I read a comment somewhere that said maybe Desmond’s locked away in there…) Who’s this Tina Fey lookalike and will she be this season’s Arzt or Frogurt? Is the MIB actually Aaron? Will Claire eventually kill Kate? And most importantly, will next week’s episode about Richard be the best episode of LOST ever? Hm. Yeah these episodes aren’t answering anything. ABC, you’re fired!

Scott

“Sundown” essentially resolved Sayid’s six year character arc and “Dr. Linus” recast Lost’s chief villain as one of the good guys, so it was only a matter of time before we got a “What Kate Does”-esque letdown. “Recon’s” only real surprise was that so much wheel-spinning came from a Sawyer episode, since Mr. Ford’s entries are always among the show’s finest.

But I wouldn’t rate “Recon” as a waste of time; this was all about set up after a run of episodes full of answers and great character work (I’d be willing to bet that those watching only for answers will find plenty in next week’s fabled Richard entry “Ab Aeterno”). The flash-sideways didn’t quite resolve Sawyer’s deep personal demons the way Locke’s or Ben’s did, but it did end with the stoic con man letting someone in by sharing his pain with his partner Miles. And frankly, I had so much fun watching what felt like a pilot for Ford and Miles: LAPD Nites that I really didn’t care about the narrative moving forward.

Widmore’s return to the island with another obligatory squad of heavily-armed nerds was fairly uneventful and chock full of the kind of hollow dialogue I wish we’d move past by now (“I didn’t kill those people.” WHO DID?? “You know so little.” TELL ME MORE THEN, JERK!). Zoe is a yawn of a character, more like the annoying Pickett than the bizarro psychopath Keamy. I’m thinking everyone who arrived on the sub will be dead in the next three episodes except Widmore, who will be bound and pushed around the island like Ragdoll Ben at the end of season 3.

Not as clear-cut a reaction as we might have expected to this week’s episode, but we’ve still got a way to go before it’s all said and done. What did you think?

Chris Johnston talks about video games old and new at Player One Podcast.

It’s nearly spring where I live and I hope that it is nearly spring where you live too. But isn’t it strange how some shows have been in spring for months while others seem to be stuck in late January? I know the dictates of schedules are a stranged and ever changing things, but it’s taunting to see sunny Generic California Place flashed in my face weekly as well as disconcerting (and worrying!) to see characters still stuck in the murk and grey of late winter. Join us in March, guys, it’s plenty nice here!

Speaking of nice, here’s the nice things (and nitpicky and critical) things we thought about TV last week–tell us your thoughts in the comments!

Dennis

Greek: “Your Friends and Neighbors” and “The Big Easy Does It”
Tragically, I fell a week behind on Greek, and had to do a little catching up, watching the last two week’s of episodes, and “Your Friends and Neighbors” was too damn poignant for me not to mention. I liked how the show has gotten Casey, Ashleigh, and Cappie reflecting about the end of college, and what that mean for their friendships and relationships. Some solid college quotes to ponder from Joel (“Some people should be around your entire life, and others should make an appearance”) and Casey “We were freshman, our biggest concern was whether or not the dryer was eating our socks.”

The more recent episode of the show was also more depressing, but no less compelling as almost all the show’s established or budding relationships began to crumble. I like that Casey/Cappie, Rebecca/Evan, and Rusty/Catherine start to fall apart as much because of internal forces (Rebecca’s distrust of love, Cappie’s fear of graduation) than the people outside of it (Joel, Beaver and the random guy Rebecca made out with at the bar, Dana). Even if the characters aren’t presently happy, I’m pleased to have the Greek-ers for another upcoming season, even if that season will likely be its last.

Lost: “Dr. Linus”
For the first time all season, I didn’t watch Lost live (yes, some shows actually still demand live viewings over DVRs and Hulu), and since I missed this week’s Getting Lost deadline, I figured I’d mention it here. This is was definitely my favorite post-premiere episode of this season (didn’t hurt that it was Kate-free). I like when Lost remembers its history and there was a lot of it here: A Nikki and Paolo reference! Flash sideways Alex! (I’m still bummed they quickly killed her, Karl, and Danielle off in season 4). Flash sideways Arzt! Still, I wish sometimes the show wouldn’t be quite so blatant in its storytelling. Did we need Island Ben to have a diatribe about how he failed his daughter, so that we’d know how significant Sideways Ben helping Sideways Alex was? Lost viewers have watched the show obsessively enough to figure out the parallels, writer dudes. Also, I get it, the episode is titled “Dr. Linus,” so did they have to say that like 18 times in the episode? That’s a huge TV pet peeve of mine.

30 Rock: “Future Husband”

With Jack’s rotating wheel of love interests (Julianne Moore, Elizabeth Banks), 30 Rock is encroaching on Love Boat/Will & Grace celebrity surplus territory, but Michael Sheen is one guest star I can get behind. I don’t care how awkward of a “future husband” he is, Liz Lemon has to keep going on dates with him until their hitched. Until he plays Tony Blair for a third time in HBO’s The Special Relationship, I need to get my Sheen fix somewhere, and it might as well be here.

Damages: “You Haven’t Replaced Me”
It’s weird, Damages has gotten back almost entirely to its season 1 goodness but I always forget I watched this show by the time Roundtable time comes. This episode might’ve been my favorite of the season. The Patty/Ellen dynamic is one of my favorites of the show and it was on full display here. If season 1 was a sort of cat and mouse game between Patty and Ellen, then this season, it’s more mother lion and her ever-growing cub, and poor Alex, Patty’s new recruit appears to be the toy the two felines are swatting back and forth. I can’t imagine this season will end well for Alex, but knowing the show’s twisty nature, perhaps I shouldn’t underestimate the seemingly naive British newbie either.

Zoe

Modern Family: “Truth Be Told”
You know, I’m not sure about the wisdom of casting someone from the show you’re most often compared to, but I’m not a casting director and it’s always nice to see Kitty (and her…those).

Overall this episode was, like the last few, solid, but not amazing. It did, however, greatly impress me by having Mitchell’s quitting stick. I’m always pleased to see sitcom cliches ignored, and that one especially grates me, so it was nice to see the follow-through. However, it’d be even nice if Mitch and Cam were allowed to express affection towards each other. Maybe even kiss! I get why the network might be wary of this, but let’s face it, you have two dudes raising a kid together. People who are offended by gay kissing are already offended. How about throwing the rest of us a bone?

Psych: “Mr. Yin Presents”
Psych finales are usually the only time character ad plot take leaps forward, which it was why it was nice to have that congruent with a Hitchcock homage. And while they engaged in the usual over-explaining it was…relatively subtle and well done. I’m not thrilled about some of the plot points, like a recurring serial killer (it might surprise you to learn I have Thoughts about that) or the ultra-suddent break-up (I don’t care what the state of the relationship is–if someone you like saves your life and you just got back from a long trip, you at least do it before breaking up), but it all set the stage for fun times, slight forward character momentum, and, well, Vertigo references. I can get behind that.

As with all trips forward in time, I came back chock full of knowledge that, while exciting, may be unsettling to those living in the present. Allow me to help make this transition as smooth for you as possible.

1. Everybody loves Hot Tub Time Machine.

This is probably the most jarring, so I figure I might as well throw you in the cold pool right away and get it over with. Yes, everybody loves this movie. Yes, it’s because our (full disclosure: my) expectations were bargain-basement, and the script is basically 40 amazing t-shirt sayings you’ve never seen before strung together and filmed. The fact that it’s being screened to practically any rando two weeks before its release should tell you that. If it wasn’t good, it would be under lock and key until it absolutely had to be taken out into the world right before summarily hitting the trash, like leftovers from July ‘07.

2. Rob Corddry has finally experienced his break-out role.

Once upon a time, there was a Daily Show correspondent who was very, very funny. But unlike his fellow funny Daily Show correspondents (Colbert, Hodgman, Helms, Riggle, et al), he lacked a full head of hair, and thusly, he was subjected to one live-action Seth Macfarlane pilot, and then sent away to serve a life sentence in balding, white comedian jail.

For awhile, it looked as though he would not trend on Twitter again until he died, or stole something unnecessarily from a child.

And then he turned in a performance in Hot Tub Time Machine that makes anything that happened during The Hangover seem about as funny as something thrown together over some Night Train, and then shown to an audience of sober people.

3. Clark Duke has a name, and there is a 45% chance that you know what it is.

Is Clark Duke the main attraction here? Absolutely not.
But is Clark Duke going to get offered movie roles after this? Yes.
And is it probable that those roles will be superior to the ones Rainn Wilson is being offered? Yes.

4. Everyone is laughing uncontrollably hard at a running gag involving amputation.

If I say anything more about that, I will ruin the joy, but you should prepare yourself: you will soon be finding the humor in imminent amputation. You will cheer for it. Let me repeat that: you will be cheering for someone losing a major appendage from their body in a horribly violent and traumatic way.

I’m just preparing you.

5. Educated people find ejaculate funny again.

I’m just preparing you.

6. Hot Tub Time Machine is a film described, with a straight face, as having a lot of heart.

The character featured in the some of the grossest gags in the film also ends up being immensely relatable, and even, dare I say it, likable. And if you’re a total whiner crybaby (like I am), you will find yourself at some point feeling as though you might actually be shedding a tear or two, if you were just a hair more drunk.

Looks like it’s just me (Robert) this week. Everyone’s off doing things and denying their LOST nerd tendencies, but no matter. Let’s re-cap what went down with “Dr. Linus,” shall we?

While it was good for a chuckle or two, the glimpse of alt-Ben as a school teacher in “The Substitute” relegating him to the life of a naggy subordinate seemed trite and incomplete, especially considering how integral he’s been to everything that’s happened since Season 2. I thought that might be the last we’d ever see of him, but this episode took that inkling of a thread and pulled it out to a proper conclusion, setting out to give alt-Ben a touching final bow while also moving on-island Ben towards his new place in the scheme of things.

When alt-Ben becomes frustrated by how the school is being run, he makes a play for Principal Reynolds’ job by exploiting some dirt that his Alex shares with him. It sets up a poignant showdown that mirrors the same decision he had to make in the original timeline when it was his daughter versus the fate of the island. For a moment there, I really thought Ben was a goner but his revealing plea for forgiveness and understanding strikes a chord with Ilana, with her acceptance of “I’ll have you” serving as his only relief.

Speaking of which, his role on the island—at first tempted to follow Locke out of desperation, now willing to stay with the Ajira gang thanks to Illana’s acceptance—isn’t quite clear any more. I’ve said it in past weeks that I don’t really get what’s going on with Locke and Claire (and now Sayid) and the island, and even if that picture is starting to become clearer, I still don’t care so much about what happens. I’m sure  there’ll be some big showdown and it’ll be life-or-death stakes, but I still feel like it won’t matter in the end.

Instead, I go back to my theory that the flash-sideways are going to eventually be revealed as being the  ”correct” timeline. Since the producers (Lindelof and Cuse) have said that both of these realities are “real” and neither can be dismissed outright, I can only assume—as everyone else has—that it’s a matter of two parallel timelines that have to be resolved. The “what if” question that alt-Roger poses to alt-Ben about staying on the island and how much different their lives could’ve been is maybe the first hint we’re given about where things diverged from the original timeline. That makes me think Roger and Ben left the island before things changed, which couldn’t have been because of any of the Lostie-related action from last season (and certainly not after Ben was shot by Sayid). There’s a clue in there; I’m sure of it. I just haven’t figured it out yet.

(By the way, I thought it was great to see that Ben naturally cares for Alex even though he doesn’t have the same father-daughter relationship with her. And I’m still amazed at how Michael Emerson manages to play so many sides of the same character so effortlessly. In one scene, he looks studious and caring as he cares for his alive-but-elderly father Roger, and in the next, he’s broken and frayed as he reluctantly digs his own grave. Ben has developed nicely from that mousy guy who was caught in Rousseau’s trap way back when.)

On the other hand, the B-story with Richard, Jack and Hurley also offered up some information on the nature of Jacob and what it means to be “touched” by him. Richard couldn’t live with the idea that he’d served an entity that didn’t care about him but couldn’t kill himself because Jacob apparently granted him some sort of “conditional” immortality. When Jack lights the dynamite and refuses to leave, he believes neither one of them will die because Jacob touched him too. That’s right—Jack believes it. And when the lit fuse dies out just before detonating, the question of whether everyone Jacob has touched can die is answered. Jack, Hurley, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, Sayid, Sun and Jin also have this same “gift”. Again, that’s not to say they can’t be killed, but they just can’t do it themselves—like that time they tried to detonate an atomic bomb.

With the semi-glitz and glamour of the Olympics over and the actual glitz and semi-relevancy of the Oscars complete it’s time to contemplate television again. Sweet, sweet television, that never runs long or forces you to interact with Ben Stiller. So happy you exist.

Here’s what we thought about last week’s TV–tell us your thoughts in the comments!

Ellen

The 82nd Academy Awards
Somehow, James Cameron became his own greedy occupying US military. A largely dull Oscar ceremony ended up warming arthouse moviegoers’ hearts everywhere as the once-studio-snubbed The Hurt Locker walked away with the double blasts of Best Director and Best Picture. Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman ever to walk away with a directing award, and judging by her shock when Tom Hanks mumblingly opened the final envelope she, too, bought into the prevailing wisdom that “Space Smurf Pocahontas”‘ mighty box-office clout would translate into little gold men.

It was good to have Avatar to kick around for one more night, if only because so many other jokes during the telecast fell flat: Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin as hosts had great chemistry but terrible writing rife with slightly homophobic jokes about manly affection (including a Paranormal Activity skit); it’s telling when presenter Tyler Perry comes off with the best line of the night in a throwaway joke about The Blind Side. The Best Actor honoring speeches became something of a roast and a John Hughes tribute was unexpectedly moving, but the dances were puzzling and the conductor too heavy on his baton in several of the speeches. That twist ending, though!

ALSO: here’s the explanation for that woman in purple who crashed that speech.

Robert

Caprica: “There Is Another Sky” & “Know Thy Enemy”
One thing that Caprica has required so far is patience—and lots of it. Unlike Battlestar Galactica, there isn’t much action in the world of the Graystones and Adamas, but true to Ronald D. Moore form, Caprica really shines when it hits a nerve. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that bigger things were coming, and “There Is Another Sky” is the first episode to really give this solid-but-languishing series a much-needed kick in the pants.

Tamara Adama—who we’d last seen in the pilot episode—wanders through the holoband as a now-bodiless avatar like some ghost in the machine. She finds her way into a pretty nasty situation and what happens next (and the way it’s handled) is pretty ingenious, as if watching the plot of The Matrix somehow unfold in reverse. We also see how Joseph Adama is finally coming to grips with the loss of his wife and daughter, and how it manifests itself in young William Adama. The resentment, the frustration and the unspoken things that chip away at them finally come to a close when Joseph finds solace in his Tauron heritage.

Meanwhile, Daniel Graystone decides to play his Cylon ace card when his company’s future is at risk. The pitch he makes to the board plays magnificently, at first seeming like a parallel of our entertainment industry’s struggle with trying to maneuver through a changing market, but then ever-so-subtly shows a darker side as Daniel’s definition of a “new race” that can work without rest or pay or rights is a chilling hint of everything we know will eventually come.

CSI: Miami: “LA”
It’s been at least a couple of seasons since I stopped watching CSI: Miami. It supplied guaranteed laughs every Monday night but I’d finally gotten tired of watching it in MST3K mode. However, the idea of this much-hyped episode directed by Rob Zombie was just puzzling enough to pull me back for a return visit. I was expecting something similar to when Quentin Tarantino and William Friedkin guest-directed CSI, but for all the touting, there was almost no sign of Rob Zombie present. Guest stars included Michael Madsen, Zombie alums William Forsythe and Malcolm McDowell and the obligatory Sheri Moon appearance, but I was really hoping for some of Zombie’s horror roots to show through. Ultimately, it was another ho-hum episode in an otherwise ho-hum show, to the point where even David Caruso’s sunglasses looked uninterested.

LOST: “Sundown”
For a while now we’ve been wondering when Sayid was going to get off his ass and get to the killin’ again. This week’s episode was no disappointment. Check out more with this week’s Getting LOST.

Armando

Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains: “Tonight, We Make Our Move”
I’ve watched every Survivor season since day 1. It and American Idol are the two shows I can sit and watch with the family and just have a fun time with. Definitely manufactured reality at it best, and at least with Survivor the location is fun, the schoolyard popularity type antics are in full swing, and of course, what my kids enjoy the most, the challenges. Last season was one of it’s best ever because of a guy named Russell who, in my opinion, has played the game better than anyone else. He should have won.

Well, he’s back in what is the greatest assembly of former players yet. Better than All-Stars which seemed a bit forced. I am definitely enjoying the Heroes vs Villains concept and the “drama” it has created.

Another cool thing is it not only are the best players on the show, but the best and most challenging challenges are being brought back to show as well.

Good Stuff. Go Russell!

Parenthood: “Pilot”
When I first saw the promos for this, I was worried that Modern Family my have struck the chord this show might be going for. I was wrong.

Modern Family is the more funny, quick snapshot of today’s family and the not so always “normal” events that happen in our day to day family activities.

Parenthood is the broad strokes of the more dramatic wall painting of an extended families lives.

Plus, anything with Lorelai Gilmore–err Lauren Graham, instantly becomes a favorite of mine. I could watch her eat oatmeal and make faces to the camera and I’d be happy.

It’s a huge plus that at least the pilot of Parenthood was a pleasant surprise. It’s a definite new edition to my DVR series recordings.

LOST: “Sundown”
Still my favorite show right now, and definitely one of all time faves. (Buffy, Gilmore Girls, LOST, The Wire, Glee, yes I said Glee, and The Sopranos ) No other show has me counting down the days until it’s next episode. See Getting LOST for more details of this love affair.

Zoe

Community: “Physical Education”
I’m going to admit something here: Abed is my least favorite character on Community. I mean, I like Danny Pudi and he definitely has wonderful moments, but overall he does seem to play into the whole “Community is only about pop culture references!” thing more than any other cast member. (For the record, I disagree with that thesis as I get almost none of the references and still enjoy the hell out of the show).

So, given that, it was pretty awesome when this week’s Abed-themed episode made me laugh harder than any one in a while. Abed’s plot was a great showcase for Pudi and the Gang and Jeff’s pool plot served as a bizarre, yet grounding, backdrop. Add on the Bert and Ernie scene at the end and yea, I’m pretty damn glad this show is back.

But could they find a reason for Pierce to be there?

Dennis

Parenthood: “Pilot”
Parenthood has already been a Steve Martin-starring movie and a short-lived Leonardo DiCaprio-starring TV series, but being that I have seen neither, I spent an hour instead comparing this show to ABC’s still-running (albeit, barely functionally) family drama Brothers & Sisters. And these certainly shows have more in common than just Six Feet Under alumni as regulars. Peter Krause and Monica Potter are slightly less boring than B&S’s Tommy and Julia, due to a possibly Asperger’s-afflicted child. On the other hand, Dax Shepherd’s Crosby (I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous, his real name or his character name?) is way less interesting as a screwup here, than Dave Annabale on his ABC show. Plus, not confusing at all, Shepherd’s love interest is Marguerite Moreau (who is also appearing on–wait for it–Brothers & Sisters),  And Erika Christensen, you are no Sarah Walker, as a mom trying to juggle successful career and child (does anyone else find this apparent storyline “trend” offensive?), but at least you have Eli Stone’s Sam Jaeger as your husband. May he fare better than John Pyper-Ferguson! Also, title FAIL. Why is Brothers & Sisters’ most compelling character its matriarch, while Parenthood’s grandparents (Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie “More Blythe Danner in Meet the Parents, Less Sally Field” Bedelia) are far from grand? Can’t they make this show about Lauren Graham, Mike O’Malley (between this and Glee he’s making up for years of Yes, Dear), and Mae Whitman (Arrested Development’s um, her) just retitle it More Original Than Every Family Show Or Movie This Show Used to Sort of Resemble?

Scott

Best Picture: Inglourious Basterds – a bold and brilliant film filled with humor, excitement and an unparalleled love of movies
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker - the success of the first great film about Iraq is almost entirely due to Bigelow’s tense action direction
Best Actor: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart - the Dude is due; one of his greatest performances, unfortunately in a so-so film
Best Actress: Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia - turns what could’ve been a caricature into a touching portrait of happy marriage and joie de vivre
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, Precious
Best Screenplay, Original: Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds - Quentin’s most mature and inventive writing yet
Best Screenplay, Adapted: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci and Tony Roche, In The Loop - hilarious, rapid fire, and deeply sad
Best Animated Feature: Coraline - unexpectedly the toughest category for me this year as I loved all of the nominees, but the ambitious and creepy Coraline takes the gold
Best Cinematography: Christian Berger, The White Ribbon - the incredible cinematographer behind all of Michael Haneke’s good movies deserves it
Best Foreign Language Film: The White Ribbon
Best Musical Score: Michael Giacchino, Up - one of the best composers working today turns in his most memorable work to date

Ellen

Best Picture: The Hurt Locker - This isn’t my favorite nominee, but here’s why I’m pulling for it: It represents great filmmaking, intense character work and an appropriate timeliness — everything I think the Best Picture category should honor (even if it normally doesn’t.)
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker - K-Bigs!
Best Actor: Colin Firth, A Single Man
Best Actress: Carey Mulligan, An Education
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds - BAD and ASS
Best Supporting Actress: Anna Kendrick, Up In The Air
Best Screenplay, Original: Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man
Best Screenplay, Adapted: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci and Tony Roche, In The Loop
Best Animated Feature: Fantastic Mr. Fox
Best Foreign Language Film: The White Ribbon
Best Score: Hans Zimmer, Sherlock Holmes

Dennis

Best Picture: The Hurt Locker – Avatar sure was pretty to look at and with ten nominees really really shiny, computerized blue thingies probably deserve a nomination. But a win? Did you hear the same dialogue I did? I wouldn’t mind an Inglourious upset either. Everything else? Meh.
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Best Actor: Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker
Best Actress: Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, Precious
Best Screenplay, Original: 500 Days of Summer - What? That’s still not nominated? (Sorry couldn’t resist)… Inglourious Basterds
Best Screenplay, Adapted: Precious
Best Animated Feature: Up

Robert

Best Picture: Inglourious Basterds – I don’t get to go to many movies throughout the year, but when I sat down in that dark theater and the first scene opened with “Once upon a time…in Nazi occupied France” I knew I was in for something special. It’s been a good while since Tarantino brought us this level of confident, spellbinding dialogue backed by such strong, calculated performances. For me, it’s a rare thing to think “I’m watching a master at work right now” but that’s the feeling I had all throughout Inglourious Basterds.
Best Director: Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
Best Actor: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Best Screenplay, Original: Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
Best Animated Feature: Up
Best Documentary: Food, Inc.
Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, Inglourious Basterds
Best Visual Effects: Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones, Avatar
Best Musical Score: Michael Giacchino, Up
Best Sound Editing: Christopher Boyes and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, Avatar
Best Sound Mixing: Paul N.J. Ottosson and Ray Beckett, The Hurt Locker

Who gets your vote, dear readers?

My first experience with the Independent Spirit Awards was in 1997, when the comely Serena Altschul of MTV News interrupted my daily video-watching to report that this edgy alternative to the Oscars had nominated Queen Latifah for Best Supporting Actress for her revelatory performance as Cleo Sims in the underrated female action drama Set It Off. To a budding cinephile who had seen my beloved Pulp Fiction deprived of its Oscar glory by the boomer nostalgia of Forrest Gump two years earlier and modern classics like Heat, Seven and Casino ignored as the mind-numbingly boring Braveheart took the gold the year before, this renegade awards show seemed like a dream come true. I imagined that the voters were all New York City video store clerks with horn-rimmed glasses who had written books on Abel Ferrara and stood in line to see Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka.

That year Fargo took the top prize at the Independent Spirit Awards and The English Patient won the Best Picture Oscar, a decision that seemed ridiculous at the time but with 13 years of hindsight is somewhat akin to Beyonce winning Best Actress over Meryl Streep or Kevin Costner winning Best Director over Ingmar Bergman. I did a little more investigating and found that the Independent Spirit Awards got it right on several occasions when the Oscars were laughably wrong. Where the Oscars showered praise on middlebrow awards bait like Out of Africa, Rain Man and Driving Miss Daisy, the Independent Spirit Awards gave their top prizes to offbeat gems like After Hours, River’s Edge and The Player. I bid adieu to the Oscars with a petulant “Screw you, old man!” and adopted the Independent Spirit Awards as my new movie awards show of record.

The next year everyone in the world caught Titanic fever. Unlike most film snobs, I actually liked that overstuffed spectacle, but my horse in that race was Curtis Hanson’s dark, stylish L.A. Confidential (I even started wearing blazers to my high school in rural Georgia so I’d look all mysterious). As I watched James Cameron attend coronation after coronation that year, I joined the growing backlash who just wanted something, anything to halt this raving madman’s Hitler-like march through the Shrine Auditorium’s Sudetenland (a position I find myself in again this year). Of course, Cameron laid waste to the Academy Awards that year, winning an unprecedented 4,295 Oscars.

I was happy to learn, though, that The Apostle, Robert Duvall’s raw and brilliant examination of faith, had taken top honors at the Independent Spirit Awards, and the UK’s British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards named The Full Monty their Best Film, perhaps the only award of consequence Titanic didn’t win that year. I wasn’t a big fan of The Full Monty, but I loved the fact that a scrappy little movie about steel worker strippers had vanquished the most expensive film of all time. I read a little more about the BAFTAs and saw that, like the Independent Spirit Awards, they’d awarded many great films that were treated like red-headed stepchildren by the Oscars: GoodFellas, The Elephant Man, Dr. Strangelove. Sure, they’d made their share of wacky decisions — The Commitments over Silence Of The Lambs??? — but they were just crazy Brits! The wankers! I had another trusted awards show.

Over the past decade, though, the BAFTAs and the Independent Spirit Awards have become every bit as boring, predictable and shallow as the Oscars. The BAFTAs still have good years here and there, getting it right where Oscar went wrong with Brokeback Mountain over Crash, The Aviator over Million Dollar Baby (which wasn’t even nominated), and perhaps this year with The Hurt Locker over Avatar. But more often than not, they’re the same conventional wisdom zombies as the Oscars, celebrating mediocrity like Slumdog Millionaire, The Last King of Scotland and Gladiator. Plus, have you ever watched the BAFTAs? I promise you that you will never again question whether the Oscars are an entertaining TV program if you watch a single BAFTAs. This year, host Jonathan Ross delivered a sub-Leno monologue in front of the giant word “FILM” before throwing to a Transformers 2 montage set to “Killing In The Name”.

Sadly, that’s nothing compared to the hollow shell that the Independent Spirit Awards have become. With only one exception, since 2004 their Best Film has been the latest show pony put forth by Fox Searchlight, an indie/major hybrid with a bottomless awards campaign budget that no other indie distributor can hope to match. This isn’t necessarily a problem when something as good as The Wrestler or Sideways takes the gold, but what about when treacle like Little Miss Sunshine wins over the modern classic Pan’s Labyrinth or… ugh… Juno wins over a masterpiece like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? Adding insult to injury, those back-to-back travesties happened in years when the Oscars somehow got it right, awarding The Departed and No Country For Old Men, respectively, giving the Independent Spirit Awards the once-unimaginable indignity of being less cool than the limp, lifeless, Ron Howard-loving Oscars. The Fox Searchlight streak will probably continue this year with the annoying hipster trash 500 Days Of Summer taking top honors, though it’s being challenged by the very worthy Precious (thanks to the Oprah/Tyler Perry publicity machine).

So now, awards are meaningless. To me. At this point in my life. Just as I don’t understand why Conan O’Brien made it his life goal to acquire The Tonight Show, a program that Louis CK memorably referred to as “some old, shitty thing”, I don’t understand why Martin Scorsese cares that some faceless group gives him a statuette when he’s directed Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, After Hours and GoodFellas without getting one (let’s not forget that Oscar ignored Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa, and countless other geniuses). But that man wanted an Oscar, dammit, and it felt great to see him get one. After contributing unparalleled greatness to film decade after decade, I’d probably crave the recognition of my peers, too. Despite all the mistakes the Academy has made over the years, a great film artist winning an Oscar still means something, as evidenced by this year’s outpouring of support for Jeff Bridges, one of the best actors of his generation and a longtime Oscar loser. I don’t see anybody clamoring about his potentially winning an Independent Spirit Award. The 90’s allure of the alt-Oscars is gone, but even at their height they never held the significance of a well-deserved win of the real thing.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

First I should explain which movies are not among these three. Superhero films are not really science fiction, so that excludes Watchmen and arguably Push. Star Trek was a sequel and a remake, and while an extremely successful one, didn’t really break new ground in any particular direction. Terminator Salvation was a mess. The Time Traveler’s Wife was a romance novel.  The Road was a Cormac McCarthy novel. 9 barely had a story. Monsters vs. Aliens and Astroboy were cartoons. 2012 and Transformers were beneath contempt.

No, the significant science fiction films from 2009 were, in alphabetical order, Avatar, District 9, and Moon.

Avatar was nominated for nine Oscars, District 9 for four, and Moon for none.

We discussed Avatar on SPJ before, but of all of us I was by far the most critical, saying (in the comments):

Avatar is a failure as a film. My hope is that history will eventually come to regard it in a similar light as Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will; both of those films were technical masterpieces that significantly advanced the state of the cinematic art, and both of them were morally bankrupt products of their time.

This sounds hyperbolic, and I am only too aware how precariously close to invoking Godwin’s Law I am by making this pronouncement, but Avatar is a dangerous film. Its technical achievements work in service of a story that is both hamfistedly unsubtle and socially naive; it packages its simplistic environmental message in a tale that embraces so many noble savage fallacies it’s hard to keep track of them.

Even if one is willing to set aside the social and racial issues of Avatar, it is also a disappointment as a work of speculative fiction. It presents the viewers with a number of fascinating ideas, then fails to explore the consequences of a single one of them. The Na’vi are set up to be a startlingly different culture from ours, with a deity whose existence is measurable, empirical fact, and a connection to their environment that has a literal, physical manifestation. Yet they fight with insulting, inexplicable naiveté, and die when the plot requires them to. Avatar deserves an Oscar nod for visual effects, but that is where its successes begin and end.

District 9 is a more complicated case. I applaud its ambition and parts of its execution; as a parable of racism and apartheid it embodies the nobler of science fiction’s virtues, but good intentions are not enough. Execution is paramount.

The villains in District 9 have a single motivation: the acquisition and control of alien weaponry. One group of villains goes about this in a methodical, scientific way. The other group is a barbarous tribe who inexplicably believes that slaughtering and devouring aliens will bestow alien abilities on them. I will let the reader guess the races of each group. The aliens themselves, stand-ins for repressed ethnicities anywhere in the world, seem to be the filthy, barely-intelligent creatures most humans dismiss them as; only one out of many thousands of them has any agency or intellect. We’re given no explanation for this, leaving us to wonder how else humanity could or should treat a population of semisentient aliens who seem unable to take care of themselves. This film has a message, but it’s not the message it thinks it has.

I appreciated District 9’s intentions, and its visual storytelling is beyond criticism. Neill Blomkamp is clearly a promising director, and I look forward to his subsequent efforts. It takes risks in an era when science fiction films are increasingly disinclined to do so. With ten slots in the offing, I don’t think a Best Picture nomination is unreasonable—but it should by no means win.

Which leaves us with Moon—brilliant, underappreciated Moon.

Made for less than it cost to create three minutes of Avatar, Moon was the best science fiction film of the year, and arguably the best picture of any kind. Director Duncan Jones stretched his five million dollar budget within an inch of its life to create a compelling, intimate portrait of the day-to-day life of the solitary supervisor of a lunar mining operation.

Moon is more than atmosphere, though. Without spoiling anything, I will say that I must assume that Jones has seen and read enough science fiction to know what viewers would be expecting from a story like his. Gloriously, he defies those expectations. Where we expect the film to descend into weary, taut-psychological-thriller territory, it instead embraces a more optimistic view of humanity. When we expect it to make a statement about the untrustworthiness of technology, it shows us cooperation. And when we expect it to end one way, it ends another. As a fan of science fiction, I’ve become accustomed to films that bludgeon me over the head with their effects and their messages; subtlety is a rare thing in modern filmmaking in general, and rarer still in genre film. Yet Moon respects both its audience and its own characters enough to paint a nuanced and affecting portrait.

Its success in doing so hinges in no small part upon Sam Rockwell’s performance, and he delivers. His lack of a nod from the Academy is the most egregious aspect of the film’s total Oscar snub; the exclusion of Clint Mansell’s evocative score and Jones’s heroic direction follow closely behind.

It is tempting, in the end, to make sweeping predictions about society’s preference for empty entertainment and Hollywood’s willingness to cater to that preference, but I don’t think it’s so simple. Had Moon been marketed outside of art-house theaters, I have no doubt it would have made more money and commanded more industry attention. Had Blomkamp run his script by a couple more people, District 9 could have been the film it wanted to be.

I even think there’s hope for Cameron. Yes, buried somewhere in the guts of Avatar, there was a great film trying to get out.

In the end, it won’t matter. Years from now, we’ll shake our head at which films got which awards, wondering how, with no less than ten Best Picture nominations to award, the academy saw fit to ignore the achievements of some of its peers’ finest efforts, but it won’t matter. Quality endures.

This week LOST focuses on Sayid and how his troubled and violent past catches up with him. Meanwhile, Smokey sends a deadly message and finds new company.

Robert

I came into this episode not expecting a whole lot and I should’ve known better. Sayid has always been a bit of a puzzle for me throughout the run of the series. I’ve always seen him as one of the characters with the most heart, but time after time he shows us that he can also be the most ruthless and cold-blooded Lostie of them all. Add to that his rather non-ambulatory state for the first four episodes of this season (and the now-dismissed theory that he was somehow a reincarnated Jacob) and I’d pretty much under-estimated what importance if any he had for the show.

This week that all changed. Not only was he back on the move and trying to figure out what had happened to him, but he’s also on a mission now, which leads to it’s own set of questions. Didn’t Smokey’s question of “what if you could have anything you want?” sound a lot like Ben’s rap to Locke about the “magic box” from “The Man from Tallahassee” way back in Season 3? Think about that for a second. Plus, thinking back to last season, remember when Sayid said he finally realized why he had to come back to the island in “He’s Our You” when he managed to escape from the DHARMA folks and pop a cap in young Benjamin Linus? That’s right. I think Ben still has his coming.

And can I say I really liked the head-fake with Sayid’s flash sideways? The idea that Sayid could lead a content life without Nadia seemed possible but not truthful to his character. Something to keep in mind is that Darlton have already said our final glimpses of these characters (not the timelines) is the most important to them and we may not like what we see. So watching Sayid regress into the killer he’s always been was pretty spectacular but also another sign that these flash sideways are the ultimate resolutions for these characters as we know them. I’ve been saying it ALL THIS TIME.

Also, in a way, I was sad to see Dogen and Lennon go so suddenly, but only because they seemed to be important to how this final season would play out. I guess not. It’s now all shaping up to be about Smokey and his posse (hey, what happened to Sawyer?) versus…somebody.

Armando

I’ll just go ahead and say it, tonight’s LOST was bad-ass! They just took it to a whole new level of Stephen King-edness. It’s getting clearer and clearer that this is somehow a battle between Good and Evil, but what is also become clearer is that just because some calls themselves Good or another Evil may not exactly mean Good and Evil the way we see it.

The more I watch of this season, the more I see how much Carlton and Damon must love comics. In comics, incarnations/personifications of concepts like Good and Evil and situations like the one the Losties are in happen quite often. And as a reader, to enjoy it you just have to accept that in this “reality” things like that can and do happen. When you mix in “real” characters to these not-so-realistic situations, you get the type of science fiction drama LOST is rocking our worlds with right now.

And again, I still don’t know what the flash sideways is but I loved it. I realized tonight that maybe, just maybe, Sayid could take out Jack Bauer. How awesome was that ending? Flocke and his crew ready for battle! I am loving LOST right now to the Nth degree. What other show has ever given us this much discussion?

Do I know how it’s going to end? No clue. Do I understand every little thing going on? Not at all. Can I turn my eyes away? Never!

Chris

Great episode, definitely bad-ass (especially the last 20 minutes). One thing stood out for me though. They’ve been showing character redemptions for the past couple episodes—Jack, Kate and Locke—but this Sayid-centric episode was different. He had a pseudo-redemption when Nadia asked him just to go home but then he was once again forced into taking action. The scene with Keamy was excellent, yet I couldn’t help wondering why in this flash sideways Keamy was no longer military (or seemingly a gun-toting maniac). Now I guess we sort of know what happens to Jin in the sideways timeline but what does that mean for Sun? And is Jin with Smokey now? So many questions! They’ve answered nothing! Argh!

I am quite glad that the temple storyline appears to be over. Dogen and that other guy met their demise in a very cool way thanks to Sayid badassery, but I never really liked the whole temple thing. I’d just rather forget that part as it really didn’t seem to be all that important to the story at large. Seemed like a bit of an excuse for Darlton to get some of their favorite actors in the show before the curtain fell.

I’m left wondering what it means for our characters when Smokey/Jacob offer our characters something—Jacob’s deal with Dogen (save your loved one but never see them again) and Smokey’s deal with Sayid (what if you could see your loved one again?). Does that mean the sideways flashes are Smokey-wins scenarios? Have we already seen the ending of the series from the beginning? Oh god, my head’s starting to hurt. Too bad that in the Smokey-wins scenario it appears that Sayid doesn’t end up with Nadia. But I figure that’s just one of many non-happy-endings we’re going to see in LOST this season.

Scott

So how’s that for a final episode? “Sundown” is undoubtedly one of LOST’s darkest and most apocalyptic entries ever. I doubt I’ll get Sayid’s creepy smile and “not for meeee” line reading out of my head anytime soon, or the aftermath of Smokey’s ethnic cleansing of the Others set to a distorted recording of “Catch A Falling Star”. For those looking for things to wrap up, last night essentially brought the resolution of Sayid’s six year long character arc: he’s a guy who has chosen violence and intimidation at every turn despite significant reservations and—faced with a final decision of selfishness or selflessness—sealed his fate by murdering Dogen and Lennon, thereby freeing Smokey to lay waste to the Temple. Dogen warned Sayid that if Smokey/FLocke/UnLocke/DreadLocke spoke a single word to him it would be too late to kill him, and it seems he was right. If he’d plunged that dagger in his chest before that thrown-off pleasantry, would everything have turned out differently? It’s impossible to know now, but the silver-tongued promises of our villain(?) certainly won Mr. Jarrah over.

I am a bit disappointed that this season’s most confusing aspect to me—the re-animation of Sayid, Christian and Claire’s dead bodies vs. Smokey’s assuming the appearance of dead bodies—wasn’t explained at all. And why was the circle of ash that has reliably kept Smokey out of the temple before now not enough to keep him out once Dogen met his demise? It’s probably related to all this Candidate business, but I could definitely use some explanation of the increasingly arbitrary ”rules” that govern the island’s supernatural beings.

As someone more interested in the mythological/religious elements of LOST than whiny character concerns of who’s going steady with who, ”Sundown’s” most intriguing element to me was the choice of many of the Others to join the side of Satan incarnate to temporarily save their own asses rather than die on the side of the good guys. Like Hebrews of the Bible unwilling to abandon God to save their own hides, Dogen and Lennon are dead but probably doing OK in the afterlife right now. Cindy and the rest of the Others who turned their backs on Jacob? Not so much.

Did Sayid’s turn work for you? Were you expecting things to work out differently for our favorite tortured torturer?

Chris Johnston talks about video games old and new at Player One Podcast. Armando Reyes talks comics, music and life on the road on Twitter.

Call them raunchy, call them crass, but in the world of podcasting Keith and The Girl–already veterans of the medium with five years and over 1,100 episodes under their belt–take their work seriously. It should be no surprise that they pulled out all the stops to promote their upcoming book What Do We Do Now? with a record-setting 75-hour marathon podcast.

With a parade of guests including comedians, musicians and a close-knit circle of friends, the show began streaming live over the Internet on Sunday, February 28 with non-stop candid conversation and laughs about every topic under the sun, from the virtues of music on vinyl to tips on how to properly fill out an online dating profile (hint: never volunteer that you love washing dishes) to the trials and tribulations of life as a stand-up comic. And without any air of pretense or melodrama, hosts Keith and Chemda manage to keep the adults-only chatter grounded in those sometimes hard to swallow truths about family, sex and interpersonal relationships that we all struggle with.

Which brings us back to What Do We Do Now?, a book that poses all manner of questions on those topics no matter how frank or embarrassing they might be. Never ones to mince words, Keith and Chemda and take turns answering each question with their own sensibilities, often giving different ways solutions to the same problem. Sometimes laugh out loud funny, sometimes intimate and serious-minded, these two have no problem cutting through the bullshit to make for a self-help book that never really feels like a self-help book. They say there are no dumb questions but only dumb answers? Not in this book; all smart answers here, friends. Dumb questions? You’ll have to decide that one for yourself.

Pre-orders for What Do We Do Now? are available online, and if you hurry, you can still catch the live 75-hour podcast before it ends at 9 PM ET today.

UPDATE: The live stream went dark after a reported Time Warner outage. According to this post to Keith’s Twitter, the show is still going as planned and being recorded. Live stream should be back up soon. In the meantime, there are those 1,136 episodes…

UPDATE 2: The live stream is back up again. Tune in here.

The biggest change to this year’s Oscars is the widening of the Best Picture field. We sure had fun debating this back in June when the Academy announced the effective doubling of the class of ‘10, but how do we feel now that we officially have 10 Best Picture nominees this year? Ellen Wernecke thinks we’re going to be just fine; Dennis Anderson isn’t so sure.

Ellen

The Oscars are upon us once again and you and I have a lot of homework to do. For those of us who insist on being informed moviegoers, award season is occasionally a frantic rush to squeeze in a few more viewing hours before the big night, especially since last summer when the Academy heaped on more work in the form of an expanded Best Picture field. As of early Wednesday morning as I write this, I have only District 9 yet to watch, and on the basis of 9 mostly solid movie-going experiences I’m prepared to say: May the Best Picture win! Here’s why I think the Academy should keep the widened field:

Every additional slot could mean an otherwise overlooked movie gets a broader audience. Avatar didn’t need the Academy’s help, but The Hurt Locker, an indie that snuck into theatres in the summer when even ardent movie buffs (ahem, me) didn’t bother to make time for it. Whether it wins Best Picture or not—and there are many who think it should—the exposure has been great for the picture in general and underrated director Kathryn Bigelow in particular. While I for one would prefer to never read another “Kathryn Bigelow directs MAN movies” trend piece, I hope her moment in the sun allows her to pursue whatever project she wants next.

The din about the “arthouse” seems to have died down a little. The heaviest cudgel raised against the Oscars in recent years is that it doesn’t reflect what “real” Americans watch, because “real” Americans like Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen and The Squeakuel and drink beer and drive Fords and watch The Jay Leno Show. (I see stereotyped people. They don’t know they’re stereotyped.) Whether Hollywood is run by thusly defined “real” Americans or not isn’t the point, because it’s not a popular vote of all; it’s a popular vote among the film industry. Like any industry, it has its grudges, its bitchy insider tales and its standards. But okay, rest of America in a demographic that doesn’t really exist but has been exploited by politicians since Richard Nixon, here are a few movies like The Blind Side and Avatar and Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire that you may have accidentally seen after finishing Going Rogue for the fifth time. Now we can get back to excellence — or the opposite of same:

The threat of a bad movie winning is neutralized in company. I’ll let my cohort below handle The Blind Side, a movie that hit smack in the center of every expectation I had for it without a single surprise, and the bloated Ferngully ripoff Avatar, since we all know what’s wrong with it. (I hope.) Before “James Cameron’s Space Smurfs” opened, Up in the Air was widely acknowledged as the Best Picture frontrunner—i.e. this fact was printed over and over until it became accepted as the common opinion. I liked Up in the Air, but I didn’t fall for it, and rebelled against the tide that made it an inevitability that a movie about The Economy and People Making Connections and Vera Farmiga Being A Knockout would strike a chord with the American moviegoer. In a year with fewer Best Picture possibilities, that narrative wouldn’t have been challenged for months. Suddenly, Avatar made more money than Rain Man in the casino and we all had something to talk about — or in my case, something to appreciate about Up in the Air in that Farmiga was not forced to speak pidgin English and wear a leaf lei over her biologically incorrect bosoms.

Even if it fails, it can’t be said to have broken with tradition. Back when the Oscars were a slightly less bloated, much less colorfully televised affair, the number of nominees for each category fluctuated frequently from year to year. Imagine if, say, Academy voters had decided this year to nominate nine Best Songs instead of the typical five. Some of you would be looking for razor blades right now. (If John Legend was going to butcher all of them like he did with the Wall-E tune “Down to Earth” last year, I might be with you.) The award given to the movie Sunrise at the first Oscar ceremony, Best Artistic Quality of Production, doesn’t even exist any more—but, like the first 10 minutes of Up, if you can watch it without shedding a tear then you are clearly a robot.  If we can let go of a corner of the Best Picture prestige—whatever corner past travesties like Crash and Forrest Gump and the Peter Jackson merit badge for Return Of The King have not already occupied—we can accept that in the end, the only Best Picture vote that matters is yours.

Dennis

If anyone can remember way back to early last year (so quickly Oscar seasons fade from memory), there was a lot of shock and outrage over the exclusion of Christopher Nolan’s well-received Bat-sterpiece, The Dark Knight from the Academy’s final five. How could the less well-received The Reader have nabbed the fifth spot over Bruce Wayne and company?

Then, when it was announced some months later that for this year’s 82nd Annual Academy Awards that there were would be 10 nominees, right away many a journalist, blogger, and commenter alike claimed that now, more great movies like Dark Knight, or Wall-E would be recognized. As it turned out, with more Best Picture contenders this year, also came more head-scratcher nominations, and perhaps the head-scratchiest selections ever in the history of Oscar.

I certainly won’t mention what pictures should have been nominated. Sure I have some thoughts on the matter, but doesn’t everyone? But the simple notion that everyone can think of a movie or five that should’ve been nominated but wasn’t? That is the point. Or at least this helps me get to my point: The Academy’s selections, at least for awhile now, have been out of touch with any sort of cinephiles’ consensus and doubling the amount of nominees only makes this more glaringly obvious.

It’s easy to pick on The Reader. It’s easy to criticize Crash. It’s even fairly easy to pick on a more than halfway decent feel-good flick like Little Miss Sunshine for netting a nomination. These are the movies that large amounts of Oscar campaigning made a half-OK, undeserving film into a 100 percent overrated, oft-detested Best Picture nominee. But then there’s this year. And then there’s The Blind Side.

If The Reader was the misguided brat in last year’s graduating class at The School of Oscar, The Blind Side is the kid eating paste in the back of the class this year. It’s almost too easy to pick on The Blind Side. And yet, I will for argumentative purposes.

At the sake of full disclosure, I didn’t actually hate The Blind Side. It was sappier than uh, a tree, but it was almost entirely bearable to sit through. Quinton Aaron’s performance was understated and dare I say, underrated. Sandra Bullock deserved a nomination, and I won’t be bummed by her possible win on Sunday. But thing is, The Blind Side wasn’t one of the best pictures of the year. Not top five. Not top ten. Probably not even top twenty.

And therein lies the problem: If this were a year in which only five films were selected as a nominee for Best Picture of the year, The Blind Side wouldn’t have been nominated. Sure, an unnecessary film or four would have netted a slot. We would’ve griped that Up in the Air had pulled a Juno, or we would’ve been peeved that the 3D smurfs had shut Up out, but hey, The Blind Side? It would have never (hopefully?) been in the same breath as “best picture.”

Again, I’m trying not to pick on Blind Side (if I were I would’ve just abbreviated those two words. Sorry, low blow). If Blind Side hadn’t been nominated, I’m sure The Hangover, or (sorry, Sandra) The Proposal would’ve been anointed in its place. Not to sound like I’m paraphrasing a Spider-Man character, but with more nominations comes even more ridiculousness. And let’s leave the ridiculous where it belongs – at the Golden Globes.

For 81 years the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has handed out the Academy Award of Merit (known as “Oscar” to the rest of us) as the highest recognition of the talent and technical craftsmanship that goes into filmmaking. Consisting of actors, directors, producers, cinematographers, writers, musicians and thousands of others, the Academy chooses and votes for work that it deems worthy of recognition for all of history. It’s a lofty goal, and as it stands Oscar has gotten it right more often than not—so much so that the awards have become the mainstream public’s go-to gauge for knowing what’s considered the best out there—but it’s not without shortcomings.

It only seems right that the very people that create films should be able to honor what they believe is the best work produced each year. It’s like any other trade. Who would know better the amount of hard work that goes into making a film than the people in the film industry themselves?

But filmmaking isn’t just a trade; it’s also an art form. And like all art, it’s subject to judgment and interpretation by everyone who experiences it. To look at it in those terms, it seems like an impossible task. How do you pick the best piece of art of any given year? Or the best artist? And how do you reconcile that with how the rest of the world feels?

With 2,738 Oscars rewarded since the first ceremony in 1929, it shouldn’t be any surprise that Oscar hasn’t always made the right call, especially compared to public sentiment. It doesn’t help that every once in a while the machinations that go on behind the scenes show themselves, making Oscar worth little more than a 8 1/2 gold statuette (see sidebar).

The problem that the Academy has always faced is that it’s often perpendicular to what people actually go to see in theaters. Box office mega-hits, whether they be big-budget action flicks or runaway comedies, don’t usually find their way to the Oscar line-up—perhaps they’re considered thoughtless genre work or just seen as “less-than”. Most of the time it just leaves mainstream audiences frustrated because they don’t see what they consider entertaining being recognized. For better or worse, that frustration eventually turned into flashy events like the People’s Choice Awards and MTV Movie Awards.

On the other hand, some consider the Oscars too pre-occupied with glamour and politics to be taken seriously as an judge of good filmmaking, paving the way for alternative awards ceremonies like the National Society of Film Critics Awards or Independent Spirit Awards. While those aren’t nearly as visible or high-profile as the Oscars, the films chosen at these ceremonies are generally considered of the utmost quality.

While the fragmenting of awards gives everyone a little bit of everything, it eventually dilutes the overall goal that the Academy set out for itself all those years ago. When you have five different “best” winners from different award ceremonies, which do you believe? Which do you trust? Maybe the answer is wherever your tastes lie, but ultimately, one has to be chosen as the best, and only one entity can declare it.

Throughout the years the Oscars have been the high-water mark for distinguishing the best of the best, and as much as simply getting considered for an Oscar has become a business unto itself, winning an Oscar should be a mark of unparalleled prestige and acclaim. The fact that the integrity of the Academy wavers from time to time is troubling, but all told, it still strives for a standard of excellence and quality.

Until Oscar falls so far out of touch that it becomes the Grammys (and this year could be that year, depending on who wins), I think it’s safe to say that most moviegoers will still pay attention to what the Academy considers to be good. All of Oscar’s choices may not the de facto best, but one can bet that they’re at least worth noting and seeing.

So who says the Academy has the right to tell us what’s the “best” of the year?

We do.

I had the pleasure of introducing a friend to both Thai food and 30 Rock this week, both things I am amazed they have gone this long without. And it got thinking about what a joy it is to get to experience something wonderful for the first time, or at least be there to see someone else experience that feeling.

What I’m saying is, the Olympics have been on a long time. There’s been some natural disasters, some musical disasters (that’s you, “We Are the World 25″), and some patriotism. But now I’m really ready for my stories to be back. In some ways, it’ll be like the first time all over again.

This is what we thought this week, share your thoughts in the comments!

Scott

Men Of A Certain Age: “Back In The Shit”
As a 27 year old, I really shouldn’t enjoy Men Of A Certain Age. It’s about dudes nearing fifty grappling with divorce, gambling addictions, diabetes, and sneaking suspicions that they’ve wasted their entire lives… but with wry, observational comedy! Nothing much really happens beyond hanging around with car salesmen and party store managers in diners and on their hikes-that-are-actually-leisurely-strolls up hills in suburban L.A. Over its first 10 episode season, though, MOACA (I pronounce it “mocha” so it sounds chocolatey and delicious) has attained the elusive comedic hangin’ with friends vibe that I currently only get from MOACA (mmm… chocolatey), Modern Family and The Office. Its characters are subtle and lovable, and the tone and writing are awkwardly funny in a wholly relatable way that can appeal to its target audience of middle-aged TNT viewers and jazzy young hepcats like myself. This last episode wrapped up the events of the season a little too on the nose; I liked Terry’s sudden emotional growth spurt, but I think Joe’s dark side would’ve seemed a little more sad and believable if stretched out over another episode or two, and Owen deserved a longer respite at the competition before being brought back into the fold by his newly softened dad. But I’m now anxiously awaiting the return of MOACA, and all the chocolatey goodness that comes along with it.

Zoe

The Daily Show
Since we’re not some sort of liberal mouthpiece, there’s usually not much of a reason to bring up The Daily Show here. And there’s nothing particularly amazing that happened on The Daily Show this week. But what was nice is that most of the week was comedians visiting. And while Jon Stewart’s interviews certainly have their own style, they’re also the part of the show I’m more likely to skip. But there’s something really nice about when fellow comedians – especially ones who are friends with Jon – come on. It’s basically just five minutes of watching people have a great time, laughing until they can’t breathe. And I always enjoy watching that.

Psych: “Think Tank”
I was singing Psych’s praises but a few weeks ago, and I stand by them, but sometimes the show is a little too much…exactly what you think it is. By which I mean it’s so formulaic, it actually fights minor, formulaic changes. This week Shawn’s dead was offered a consulting job with the police department, which would be a slight plot development with essentially no major changes and plenty of chances for hijinks (and possibly even character growth!) And yet, they decided not to do it. Because even a cliche, rote change of the formula is too much of a change for Psych.

I haven’t decided yet whether this tendency is wholly genius or not.

Dennis

Greek: “Love, Actually, Possibly,  Maybe… Or Not”
Every week I’ve been meaning to mention how much I enjoy Nora Kirkpatrick’s relatively recent character addition, Catherine, but I never quite find a way to fit her in. Luckily this week’s Valentine’s ep featured Catherine quite prominently, so I finally have my opportunity! I’ve enjoyed Catherine scenes with her mentee Casey since she showed up at the start of this season, but whodathunk that throwing Casey’s younger brother Rusty in the mix as a potential love interest would really let CTU’s greatest overachiever shine? Catherine’s scheduled pre-date with Rusty, where she spoke entirely in one-word answers (most meek little yeses)? Hilarious! And getting hit with a literal Cupid-themed arrow, just as she finds that Casey blackmailed Rus into their date? Icing on the valentine’s cupcake!  Catherine mentioned in the episode she’s planning on going to Yale Law. Is it too much to hope she pulls an Andrea Zuckerman, skips Yale, and ends up sticking around at CTU Law with Casey in the fall, instead?

The Deep End: “White Lies, Black Ties”
I’ve been singing this show’s praises (if calling a show “not awful,” can be considered praise) for a few weeks now, while it inches closer and closer to cancellation. Well, it’s too bad this season (probably series) finale went full circle back 6 episodes (Shortest. Season. Ever) to the show’s pilot in its infinite badness. There was nothing in this episode that wasn’tpredictable. Of course Malcolm and Addy’s case wasn’t over at the 15 minute mark. What would the rest of the episode be about? Of course when we see Cliff and Susan at couple’s therapy, and then there’s a break-in at Susan’s house and Cliff moves back in, there’s going to be an episode-ending reveal that Cliff hired the intruder. I was happy to see Kevin Alejandro (Hilda’s baby daddy on Ugly Betty, Rudolpho on Weeds, Anton V. on nuMelrose, and Moretta on Southland), and pleased some storylines were resolved (Addy and Jason broke up, Beth and Liam publicly revealed declared their love of eachother), it’s too bad this was such a dismal end to the show. I guess it makes it helluva lot easier it’s probably not coming back.

Lost: “Lighthouse”
When watching this week’s episode with a few of my friends, I actually remarked that I don’t know why anyone invites Jack anywhere. Dude always throws a tantrum (in this case, breaking all the freaky mirrors in the island lighthouse). I bet a kid he always ruined everyone’s birthday party. Least it seems this was all part of Jacob’s master plan to begin with. Can’t Mark Pellegrino be in every episode? I enjoy him so, and this show seems to be short on new faces this year (sorry Ilyana, still not caring about you). Maybe instead of that Locke & Ben spin-off Terry O’Quinn is rumored to shopping around, ABC can greenlight The Jacob and UnLocke Variety Hour? If anything can bring the variety show to the new millennium, it’s Mark Pellegrino and a smoke monster.

Today Universal announced a rather interesting promotion in partnership with Wired and Lone Shark Games for the upcoming Repo Men. The sci-fi actioner starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker as body organ repossessors puts a new spin on the “man on the run” theme, but this contest blends aspects of ARGs, social media and good ol’ sleuthing in the hopes that you’ll also get in on the action.

Inspired by the story of writer Evan Ratliff who attempted to elude and evade readers, trackers and hackers for 30 days (and who actually managed to keep out of sight for 25 of them), the Repo Men contest puts four selected “Runners” on the run starting at different locations across the country. The goal? Use whatever technological and social resources available to find one or all four of the Runners by the deadline. The reward? A cool $7,500 goes to anyone that can find them. If no one finds them, the Runners collect up to $10,000 each for their troubles.

Considering there’s only four Runners and an audience of millions looking for them, their chances are slim, but that’s the fun, isn’t it? Check out more and sign up for the hunt at the official contest site.

Also, in case you haven’t seen it, here’s a trailer for Repo Men so you know what you’re dealing with.

Another perplexing episode filled with a few answers and yet more questions. This week’s Jack-centric “Lighthouse” shows us what’s different about Jack’s life after landing safely at LAX and also brings two other oft-neglected characters to the forefront for big developments on the island.

Scott

Another week, another fine final LOST episode. Like last week’s “The Substitute”, the flash sideways provided a happy but not idyllic alternate path for one of the show’s most tortured characters. Though Jack didn’t get the perfect career and family he yearned for, he had a good kid who loved him. In an early scene, we also got a bit of the two timelines beginning to merge with Jack unable to remember getting an appendectomy as a kid. I’d be surprised if we didn’t start seeing a lot more of this.

We also got a loud reminder of the petulance that makes Jack such a frustrating character when he encounters an ageless, mystical lighthouse that seems capable of incredible things and, within three minutes of the discovery, flies into a rage, physically threatens an especially charming Hurley, and smashes it all to hell. Though Jacob suggests Jack’s temper tantrum is no big deal, it’s yet another moment when it seems a firm, hard pimp slap would do Jack a world of good. There will be a lot of talk about the additional locales we glimpsed as Hurley adjusted the mirrors, but I really think it’s just Darlton showing us the massive global, time-bending reach of the lighthouse, which is now useless thanks to Manchild Shepherd.

The biggest development of this week, though, is the weirdness related to Clairesseau. Season 6 is serving as a mirror image to Season 1 in many ways, with biggies like Maggie Grace and not-so-biggies like Greg Grunberg being brought in to stage revisionist scenes from LOST’s extremely popular first season, so I’m currently re-watching it to get the full effect. I’d forgotten what a sweet, sunny presence Emilie de Ravin was early on, so it’s great to compare that to who she is now, a rugged survivalist who kills in cold blood and pals around with terrorists like Smokey. I’m hoping we get more clarification next week as to this season’s most confusing element to me, the difference between Smokey’s assuming the appearance of dead bodies and the “darkness” that literally reanimates dead bodies, like Sayid, Christian and I’m guessing Claire (I knew she didn’t make it out of that Season 4 house explosion unscathed!).

Chris

I’m just gonna say it — how great is Hurley this season? Providing awesome comic relief plus acting as the spokesman for the audience and asking some pertinent questions like the whole “You mean I did this and it didn’t work but it doesn’t matter?” exchange with Jacob at the end. I cannot wait until they get to a Hurley-centric episode because I know it’s going to be completely epic. Jorge Garcia is the man.

Overall, this episode felt like a bridge. Reintroducing Claire as a crazy person (shades of Stephen King’s Misery there, I think), Hurley and Jack leaving the temple…that was all that happened on-island right? Not a whole lot there. But what I think we did get in the flash-sideways is Jack’s realization/acceptance/healing of his “daddy issues” that the show’s been steeped in since Season 1. I wonder if that’s going to be a trend for these sideways flashes. Last week we had Locke’s acceptance of his situation instead of “don’t tell me what I can’t do” as well — very interesting stuff. The dominoes are being set up, but I wish it was clearer when things were going to start getting knocked down. I’m not really getting the point of the Temple stuff or Dogen’s usefulness other than to get Hiroyuki Sanada in the show.

Couple more random observations: I thought for sure when Jack was in his son’s room that he was gonna grab those photo booth pics and we’d have a Back to the Future style look at them later where the son was half-disappeared, but then it didn’t happen. Aw. Is Sarah David’s mom? One would assume so and I was hoping we’d get a better shot of those family photos while Jack went up the stairs but no-go. Would’ve been great to see Julie Bowen come back for a cameo. Oh and how about that appendix scar popping up, huh? That happened on-island—timelines merging?

Robert

For me, the biggest surprise (no pun) of this episode was just how instrumental Hurley was to driving the action on the island. I don’t think it’s ever been clear why only Hurley can communicate with the ghost of Jacob (or Dave or Charlie or Ana Lucia) but that’s not stopping the writers of LOST from running with the idea. I’m just glad that it actually served a purpose this time. My only problem with it came in the conversation near the end when Jacob tells him that he had to bring Jack to the lighthouse and couldn’t know why or else he wouldn’t do it in the first place and yadda-yadda-yadda. Moments like that are about as frustrating as this show has ever been.

On the other hand, getting Jack to the lighthouse is important because Jack needs to realize something about himself. What that something is exactly isn’t clear, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it could be a clue to how the show might end. Something tells me that ultimately Jack will have to sacrifice himself. Thinking back through all the seasons, Jack has always been the stubborn “fixer” that just can’t seem to actually fix anything. His determination to keep his fellow survivors safe and get them off the island drove much of Seasons 1 through 3, his regret and longing to go back drove much of Season 4 and his belief that he could “reset” everything drove us toward the climax of Season 5 to end up where we are now. For Jack, none of it has worked as he’d hoped. Most of the original survivors of Oceanic 815 are dead, only six were actually rescued with his help, he could only convince Kate to come back and nothing’s back to the way it should’ve been.

Just like the last two episodes, the flash-sideways are proving to be important to how the characters are evolving. We find out that alt-Jack’s life is almost completely different than the one we knew. He had his appendix removed when he was age 7 and has a teenage son named David who he’s having as hard a time as ever trying to figure out. And when it seems like Jack might have pushed it too far causing him to disappear, he finds out that David is only trying to live up to his father’s expectations—just like Jack did with his own father. For alt-Jack, it’s only through understanding and acceptance that he’s able to truly set things right and find a bond with his son, and since LOST famously deals in parallels and metaphors, I think it stands to reason that this is where on-island Jack might end up as well. The quest to the lighthouse to find/confront/slap Jacob turned up fruitless and ended in a fit of rage and frustration, only to cause Jack to finally stop and reflect. Wouldn’t it be something if all Jack was ever supposed to do was die (die-hard fans know that Jack was supposed to die at the end of the very first episode) rather than try to steer everything that’s happened since Oceanic 815 crashed?

So what’d you think? Not clear on what this is all leading up to, or do you have it figured out already? Discuss!

Chris Johnston talks about video games old and new at Player One Podcast.