In the epic battle between the elitists and the populists at this year's Academy Awards, the elitists came up big. THE HURT LOCKER, a movie almost no one has seen, vanquished AVATAR, the movie everyone has seen, for Best Picture. In fact, in the seven categories the two films went head to head in, THE HURT LOCKER won five and AVATAR only one. (The other category, Best Score, went to UP.) Kathryn Bigelow's tense Iraq War movie now becomes the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner ever, and in the process bests the highest-grossing film of all time.

There's sweet irony to be had in LOCKER's victory, especially this year when the Academy did all it could to appeal to a more populist crowd. The idea behind expanding the Best Picture category to ten films was to increase the chances of more popular films getting nominated. And then, during the show itself, have you ever seen a more blatant appeal to mainstream taste than that elaborate tribute to filmmaker John Hughes, a director who never got close to an Oscar nomination? I know he was loved by many, but I don't remember similarly extended tributes to much more important filmmakers like Robert Altman or Stanley Kubrick,. And what was the point of that lame recap of the history of horror films, other than to justify the presence of two of the young stars of the ridiculously popular TWILIGHT films?

THE HURT LOCKER wasn't the only small film to win big awards. A first-time filmmaker found a way to launch veteran Jeff Bridges to his first Oscar win in the tiny-budgeted CRAZY HEART. And the as-yet-little-seen PRECIOUS had a great night with a well-deserved Best Supporting Actress award for Mo'Nique and a surprise Best Adapted Screenplay win for another first-timer, screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher.

Sandra Bullock did strike a blow for populism with her predictable but undeserved victory in the Best Actress category for the embarrassing THE BLIND SIDE. But even an elitist like me has to admit that her speech was so gracious and winning, it's hard to fault her. And Bullock did make history of sorts, winning both an Oscar for Best Actress and a Razzie for Worst Actress (in ALL ABOUT STEVE) in the same weekend. As far as I'm concerned, however, Meryl Streep turned in one of her best performances ever as Julia Child in JULIE AND JULIA, and it seems an artistic crime for her to be bested by Miss Congeniality.

But given THE HURT LOCKER's big wins over AVATAR, I'm feeling rather generous and so won't begrudge the populists' lone big win. As Bullock said in her acceptance speech, "We're all deserving of love." Even Sandra Bullock.

Lewis Carroll and Tim Burton have different strengths but share a weakness: a sense of narrative. Neither of them knows how to tell a good story. Luckily, both of them have compensatory talents but still, imagine how great their work would be with a strong storyline.

Nonetheless, Carroll and Burton have incredibly wild imaginations that make for artistically distinctive work. In his Alice books, Carroll created one of literature's greatest menagerie of imaginary characters. And he invests that wonderland world with brilliantly clever wordplay and logical conundrums.

But Carroll's idea of a story consists of little more than a series of indelible characters verbally sparring - there's no real sense of narrative momentum. The books don't so much build to a climax as simply peter out.

Tim Burton, of course, has his own very particular take on Carroll's masterpiece. Burton is every bit as much a visual artist as Carroll is a wordsmith, so it should surprise no one that the film director strips ALICE IN WONDERLAND of its verbal fireworks in favor of visual ones. Thus, the witty and nonsensical repartee of Carroll's Madhatter is, for the most part, sacrificed to the visually resplendent look of Johnny Depp's Hatter. The lasting impression of this cinematic Madhatter, then, is not of what he says but of how he looks (his electric orange hair, elaborate eye make-up, and shabby-chic sense of fashion.)

To lose the verbal dimension of ALICE is a great loss, of course. It's what has kept ALICE IN WONDERLAND high atop the pedestal of great children's literature. But Burton does his best to compensate for that loss with a fully realized fantasy world. From tiny little rocking-horse birds to giant gryphons, from talking flowers with human faces to the bluest of dodobirds, Burton creates a visual overload to match Carroll's imagination overload.

His special effects are especially effective with the Cheshire Cat (the best movie version ever), Tweedledum and Tweedledee (looking like CGI identical-twin eggs) and the Red Queen (whose enormous head is played to great comic effect.) But curiouser and curiouser, other effects seem oddly off. Crispin Glover's dark knight is given such a weirdly distorted body that it's a constant distraction, Alice's lengthy fall down the rabbit hole is surprisingly primitive and bland, and Burton never seems to get a handle on proper size perspectives between Alice and those around her. (I realize she changes size repeatedly, but I swear those changes are not consistently held.) And finally, as good as many of the visual effects are, they can't compete with James Cameron's accomplishments in AVATAR. That comparison may seem unfair, but since Burton's 3-D film is bumping the 3-D AVATAR off many 3-D screens, the comparison is inevitable.

But if Tim Burton's ALICE IN WONDERLAND isn't as visually strong as one might expect, it's stronger than expected on the thematic narrative front. Burton and his screenwriter have devised a risky scenario that departs quite dramatically from Carroll. The risks, although not entirely successful, do pay off in the end.

Rather than Carroll's 6-year-old prepubescent, Burton's Alice is 19 years old and on the verge of marriage. This sets up an entirely different dynamic for Alice in Wonderland. She now finds herself in Underland, for instance. It turns out she's visited Wonderland a number of times, most memorably at age 6, and it's those 6-year-old eyes who saw that down-the-rabbit-hole world as a "wonderland." At age 19, that wonderland has given way to Underland, which becomes a pertinent but not insistent metaphor for the unconscious or sub-conscious work Alice must confront on her way to adulthood. The fact that the world is not quite as wondrous as it had seemed seems an age-appropriate revelation for this Alice and nicely explains the slightly decrepit world of Underland. This is all handled quite deftly until the end when it seems to turn into a swashbuckling confrontation more worthy of a videogame. Despite this somewhat jarring conclusion, the film for the most part remains nicely understated but clear. After Underland, Alice is ready to surface.

It's just too easy to call COP OUT Kevin Smith's cop out. Lord knows it's not a very good movie and it's nowhere near as witty and daring as his best work (CLERKS, DOGMA.) Of course, it's not really his in a traditional Kevin Smith kind of way, since he didn't write it. For the first time, he's just a hired gun - a director of someone else's material. And since it's pretty terrible, I can see how one might be inclined to blast Smith for selling out. But I prefer to see the film as a subversive effort to destroy blockbuster material from within. That's the best way I can figure out how to recuperate the once-blazing indie image of the New Jersey spitfire who's unfortunately better known at the moment for getting kicked off airplanes due to his weight.

COP OUT is a buddy-cop movie a la LETHAL WEAPON, with Bruce Willis playing the Mel Gibson role and Tracy Morgan doing Danny Glover. Or perhaps even more germane to the dynamic between the two, Willis and Morgan nicely mimic the 48 HOURS' pairing of Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. (Murphy's not a cop in those films, but he definitely has a comic sensibility closer to Morgan's than Glover's.) True to buddy-movie tradition, Willis is a tough guy cop and Morgan, his goofball sidekick. Willis' alpha male is gruff, stern, and easily irritated by the antics of his junior partner. Morgan, on the other hand, is a lovable nitwit, insecure in his lovelife AND his chosen profession, and justifiably so.

Over the course of the movie, Willis and Morgan get mixed up in a pretty standard drug ring plot that allows for lots of car chases, shootouts, and occasional bouts of gruesome violence. We're clearly in the wheelhouse of the typical action movie. But there's something so slack in the tension of the film, I can't help but think Smith is making it so intentionally. Of course, there's a fine line between incompetence and ingenious subversion and Smith may very well not be in as much command of his material as I want to give him credit for.

But there are a couple of clues that Smith is at least aware of the mainstream cliches he's swimming in. In the very first scene, for instance, Morgan goes through a police interrogation channelling lines from a half dozen movies, all helpfully identified for the audience by Willis - Al Pacino in HEAT, then something from STAR WARS, SCHINDLER'S LIST, and BEETLEJUICE. The punchline is then set up when Morgan gets around to saying "Yippee ki yay, motherf*****" and Willis says he never saw that movie. (That movie of course is Willis' huge hit, DIE HARD.)

By starting COP OUT this way, Smith seems to be putting us on notice that he's fully conscious of the cinematic arena he's now playing in. He even has Morgan mispronounce "homage" as "HOMM-age" to further underscore the film's high degree of self-reflexivity.

Amidst a lot of generally uninteresting plot developments, another seemingly random bit of absurdist dialogue crops up when our titular heroes arrest a smart-aleck burglar played by Seann William Scott. While in the backseat of the patrol car, Scott starts verbally sparring with Morgan in the front seat, eventually driving Morgan crazy with his constant repetition of everything Morgan says. No matter how many times Morgan tells him to shut up, he doesn't. Instead, he just keeps ragging on him until Morgan has to whine to Willis to make him stop. Scott caps off his verbal victory with a quick "Rabbit Season" taunt to which Morgan can't help but blurt out "Duck Season!." To culminate this brilliantly inane argument by invoking a famous Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck standoff represents the kind of freewheeling cracks Smith would regularly glory in in his earlier and much better films. It's as if a bit of CLERKS suddenly cropped up in the middle of a Bruce Willis vehicle. And when that happens, it can't help but change the way that vehicle is perceived.

I have to admit however that even if Smith is doing exactly what I'm suggesting, that is, taking on a conventional movie project in order to slyly undercut and/or undermine its conventions, I'm afraid it's still not enough. The cleverly self-reflexive moments cited are simply too few and far between to justify sitting through the film in its entirety. But what those few moments do do is convince me that Kevin Smith at least hasn't completely copped out with COP OUT. Yippee ki yay, motherf******!

Although a little too far from Hollywood to have the movies actually made here, Seattle would seem an ideal setting for film noir. Our weather alone should put us in top contention for the dark and brooding genre about hard-luck strivers and conniving femme fatales. But what we lack in filmography, we certainly make up for in consumption. The nation's longest-running film noir series is still going strong at 30 years (!) at the Seattle Art Museum and this weekend kicks off the Seattle International Film Festival's fourth annual noir series: Noir City: Lust and Larceny. Maybe Seattle works best as a natural breeding ground for film noir afficionados.

Almost as entertaining as the 14 noir films on tap this week is the man who will be introducing each double-bill at SIFF Cinema, Eddie Muller. Dubbed the Czar of Noir, Muller is the founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation which seeks to preserve as many examples of the genre as it can.

Every cause should have a spokesman as polished and eloquent as Eddie Muller. In a breezy and fast-moving 30 minute interview, Muller explained that he's never been interested in the Jack Webb (Dragnet) point of view on crime, which simply calls for "exterminating the vermin." Muller says "I want to know what the vermin are thinking." And that's what film noir delivers in spades.

THE WOLFMAN may be an odd release for Valentine's Day weekend but given the way some of us feel about the holiday, a horror film may seem more than appropriate. Unfortunately, the movie is so lackluster that many might actually prefer cringing their way through DEAR JOHN or Garry Marshall's VALENTINE'S DAY. It's kind of an aesthetic Sophie's Choice in which both options are losing propositions. Happy Valentine's Day.

THE WOLFMAN has a great cast - Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, and Hugo Weaving - but that can't make up for the weakest of scripts. Much like AVATAR, although infinitely less accomplished, this Universal Pictures remake is more interested in its look than in its storyline. It's really little more than a showcase for some CGI special effects and the makeup wizardry of Rick Baker. That should come as no surprise, I suppose, considering director Joe Johnstone has an Oscar on his resume for Best Visual Effects. But even so, I think there's been a major miscalculation here. Long gone are the days when an audience would be content with simply witnessing the on-screen transformation of Man to Wolf that this Wolfman seems to want to revel in. And the Wolfman's gory attacks are hardly shocking, no matter how loud and abrupt the soundtrack gets at the moment of impact. After Tarantino and all those zombie movies, it's hard to shake up an audience with a few wolf scratches and a disgorgement or two.

To be fair, the movie is long on atmospherics. Almost every scene is shot ominously, and it uses every spooky trick in the canon - the cheerless but enormous castle/mansion with its high-ceilinged rooms, richly embroidered furniture, and flickering candlelight; the constant heavy fog and the overcast skies; the dark, damp forests and the rustic taverns full of suspicious locals. The air is full of appropriate foreboding. And of course, you can't have a wolfman without an enormous full moon to shatter the darkness right on schedule.

The classic horror genre relies heavily on atmospherics, of course, but when that's all there is, it's little more than an empty exercise. Without enriching the atmospherics with an engaging plot, rich characters, or literate dialogue, a movie is like a beautiful table setting without any food to serve.

THE WOLFMAN leaves you very hungry. (By way of comparison, THE OTHERS, with Nicole Kidman, is an equally traditional genre picture, a ghost story with all the de riguer atmospherics, that works so well precisely because it operates on so many other levels.)

Curiously, even THE WOLFMAN's special effects, which comprise the only real reason to even make this movie, fail to do the job when it counts the most! In one of the film's climactic moments - when Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins both turn into werewolves and fight it out to the death - a visual tour de force veers dangerously close to tour de farce. Seeing two furry, full-bodied wolf-men with recognizably human faces - hey, isn't that Sir Anthony under all that matted hair? - it's hard not to laugh just a little. They reminded me of a couple of Fozzie Bears, with attitude. Not the image Rick Baker was after, I'm sure.

In fact, so self-conscious is this entire enterprise, that it seems to almost beg for parody. I swear I felt Monty Python or Will Ferrell warming up in the wings, just waiting for their grand deflating presence on the scene. The Wolfman is rightfully famous for his howl, but it's the howls from the audience that I'd be worried about.

I don't know whether the insult is greater to Paris or Love in this misbegotten movie. Outside of the opening establishing shots, there is very little Paris in FROM PARIS WITH LOVE. A quick lunch at the Eiffel Tower, a couple of visits to the projects on the outskirts of town - that's about it for the City of Light. The rest of the film takes place either on rather generic highways or inside equally indistinct buildings.

Love gets even shorter shrift than Paris. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a frustrated diplomat who yearns to be a special ops agent. On the very night he gets engaged to his sexy French girlfriend, this wanna-be is called away to partner with the baddest of bad-ass agents, Charlie Wax (John Travolta.) And that's it in the love/romance department until the film's climax when a suicide terrorist is about to blow up a United Nations gathering at the American Embassy. Preposterously, the action comes to a screeching halt so Rhys Meyers and his French fiancee can have an urgent talk about the true meaning of love ... in the middle of a crowded room! Never mind that she has a string of bombs strapped to her chest - we need to talk!!!

Of course, the movie doesn't really care about Paris OR love - it's all just an excuse for non-stop action. Wax is one of those cartoon characters (is that name a clue?) who can slay ten thugs with a few swings of a metal pipe, and kill dozens, if not hundreds, with his assorted weaponry. All in a day's work, mind you. And he stays completely unscathed. Since there's no nuance to his character, he's presented as "a character," someone who loves to berate the French just for being French, who lovingly sings to his gun (Me and Mrs...Mrs Jones) and admits to one and only one deadly vice - a softness for a "royale with cheese." Despite the nod to PULP FICTION, this movie lacks the wit to elevate itself above the standard issue shoot 'em ups. And that's a shame since director Pierre Morel once seemed to have such potential.

Morel's first film was the astonishing BANLIEUE 13, sometimes called DISTRICT 13. Set in the near future amidst the down-and out suburbs ringing Paris, BANLIEUE 13 introduced the heady rush of "parkour" to the big screen long before the 007 franchise did in Daniel Craig's first go-round, CASINO ROYALE. Much like DISTRICT 9 did this year, BANLIEUE 13 infused the action genre with a fresh approach not only to the action but to the context as well. If DISTRICT 9 layered its tale of alien invasion with a clear political message about apartheid and the treatment of immigrants, BANLIEUE 13 used its story of the state's war on drugs as a cover to skewer France's right wing politics. (When the film's rather evil minister brands the inhabitants of the banlieue "scum," it eerily foreshadowed Interior Minister (and now President) Nicolas Sarkozy's comments about the rioters on the outskirts of Paris one year later.) Both D9 and B13 remain, in essence, genre pictures, but they manage to bring something original to enliven the shopworn.

Morel then graduated to the English-language smash hit TAKEN. A film that surpassed everyone's expectations at the box office, TAKEN stars Liam Neeson as an aggrieved father whose teenage daughter is kidnapped in Paris by an Albanian sex-trafficking ring. It's such a straight-forward action film that when I happened to catch up with it on a plane, I watched it with the sound down and had no trouble following along! Full of ridiculous one-man heroics, TAKEN works primarily on the level of a full-blown vigilante revenge fantasy. It's just lurid enough to distract us from the fact that nothing very interesting is happening on the screen. For me, TAKEN is a step backward from the ingenuity of B13, but it's hard to argue with its box-office success. Morel clearly tapped into something in the zeitgeist.

And now comes FROM PARIS WITH LOVE, yet another retreat from Morel's auspicious start. Although he stays true to both the action genre and the Parisian setting, Morel seems to have lost interest in both. To remedy the situation, I'd like to suggest he go back to France, except he never left. So instead, maybe he should just return to his native language. Who knows, maybe there's something about the English language that vulgarizes his imagination??? In any case, here's hoping he finds something that will rejuvenate his creative juices and restore the lustre of his once promising career.

From Seattle with love.

This morning's Oscar nominations set up a battle royale between a former husband and wife.

Not only are James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow up against each other in the best director category for AVATAR and THE HURT LOCKER, those two films have the most nominations as well, nine apiece.

That's something of a moral victory for THE HURT LOCKER, to be able to garner the same number of nominations as a special effects monster like AVATAR. The two go head to head for Best Picture, Director, Editing, Cinematography, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing.

It would be hard to imagine two more different films, one a science fiction spectacular, the other a gritty, intense wartime drama. One has brought in 2 BILLION dollars and counting, and the other is out on DVD after pulling in a paltry 12 million bucks.

Despite aesthetic differences and a divorce, Cameron and Bigelow are reportedly on good terms with each other. And I noticed at the BFCA awards that when Bigelow was named Best Director, the first person jumping up to applaud was Cameron.

Why are so many romantic comedies dumber than dumb? Is it because the audiences for them don't demand them be smarter?

If WHEN IN ROME does any business this weekend, that answer will be clear. Like many of the romantic comedy heroines they identify with, audiences must be so desperate they'll take anything that comes along. WHEN IN ROME is akin to "what the cat drug in."

And in case you think this is just a typical guy's attack on chick flicks, I want to assure you I love a good romantic comedy. I consider most of the works of Richard Curtis, for instance, to be top-notch, especially FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL and NOTTING HILL. They're smart, funny, and yes, romantic. With roots going at least as far back as Jane Austen, romantic comedies have a tradition as rich and satisfying as any working genre. So why are so many of them so bad????

Case in point - WHEN IN ROME.

Kristen Bell plays a young, hard-charging museum curator who's been unlucky enough in love to decide it doesn't really exist. When her younger sister announces she's getting married to an Italian after a two-week whirlwind courtship, she's convinced her sister is nuts but agrees to be her maid of honor at the wedding in Rome. The wedding is marked by a lot of bad slapstick. It starts with the best man having his cellphone pop out of his pocket while it's playing an embarrassingly frank ringtone and he just CAN'T turn it off! Not to be outdone, Bell is supposed to smash a ceremonial vase, with the number of smashed pieces meant to symbolize the number of happy years the newly married couple can expect. But of course, she can't for the life of her break it - she drops it hard on the ground, she bangs it against the altar, she throws it against a wall, she knocks over a fountain of glasses, even knocks out an old lady with it but all to no avail. The vase remains intact. Oh, so not funny.

Naturally, after a lot of this unfunny stuff transpires, Bell and the best man (Josh Duhamel) have eyes for each other, but things don't quite work out. So, in a kind of impulsive last act before leaving Rome, she snags five coins out of the Fountain of Love and heads home.

The trick of WHEN IN ROME's plot is that each of the five men who threw those coins into the fountain are now instantly smitten with Bell. I understand that movies in general, and romantic comedies in particular, require some suspension of disbelief and I'm willing to grant a lot as long as there's a payoff, some psychological insight that burbles to the surface by show's end. After all, Shakespeare's comedies are at least as outlandishly premised as WHEN IN ROME. But nothing of interest rises out of Bell's connection with these random men. Will Arnett, Jon Heder, Dax Shepard, and Danny DeVito are all funny guys but their characters are so ridiculously broad and slapstick-y that none of them registers any real laughs. The screenwriter doesn't seem to care enough to give any of them - neither Arnett's goofball painter, Heder's goofball magician, Shepard's goofball model, nor DeVito's goofball sausage king - any lines worth delivering. And without a scriptful of witty lines to distract us, we have time to notice that it makes no sense at all, that those random coins Bell grabs in an ITALIAN fountain should all be connected to men who live in her hometown of New York City. That's not serendipity, that's lazy writing.

Picking apart a run-of-the-mill rom-com is not exactly rocket science, so I'll not belabor the point too much. But among the film's idiocies is the notion that a woman who's supposedly a skeptic about matters of the heart has NO trouble believing an Italian superstition that says coins from a fountain force a man to fall in love with the coin-grabber. Again, that's just lazy screenwriting. None of this would matter, of course, if the movie dazzled us with sparkling dialogue and genuine humor, but it doesn't. And I'm simply not desperate enough to take anything that comes along. I may be in the minority but I think it's about time to start demanding smarter rom-coms. Are you with me people?

2009 was a great year for animation, with above-average traditional fare like THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS, and UP sharing screen time with the brilliantly adventuresome likes of CORALINE, 9, and FANTASTIC MR. FOX. Even the box office champ AVATAR was mostly an animated movie. And now 2010 kicks off with an even more "out there" animated offering - A TOWN CALLED PANIC.

Based on a cult Belgian cartoon series, A TOWN CALLED PANIC uses intentionally primitive stop-motion animation to relate the crazy adventures of a plastic cowboy, a plastic Indian, and a plastic horse, all of whom happen to live together under the same roof in a small rural village in Belgium. Adopting a "puppetoon" animation style, in which the characters for the most part remain rigid, the film derives much of its humor from its necessarily clunky movements. The Indian and Cowboy, of course, have plastic bases, so they have to waddle whenever they move and the Horse can't move his legs so rather than galloping anywhere, he mostly just hops. That holds true for all the other characters as well - including humans like their neighbor farmer, his wife, the postman and the policeman AND the other creatures like the cows, sheep, and the pointy-headed alien fish-bats. That's right, I said pointy-headed alien fish-bats. More on that in a bit.

Despite its obviously limited movement possibilities, A TOWN CALLED PANIC is nothing if not ambitious. It may start out on a simple village farm but it journeys far and wide and deep - down to the center of the earth, then up again over an arctic wilderness, and even to an undersea world peopled by those aforesaid fish-bats who guard their upside-down habitats with vicious and well-trained barracudas.

In case it hasn't already become clear, this film has the quirkiest sense of humor imaginable. Many of the laughs simply come from the disconnect between the crude movement options and the outrageously outsized adventures the characters take part in. Cowboy, Indian, and Horse may not be able to move much, but that doesn't keep them from "walking" along the ocean floor, complete with snorkels. In fact, these supposedly limited characters constantly surprise us with their capabilites - Horse brushes his teeth, drives a car, reads the newspaper, and plays the piano. He even takes his horseshoes off before he goes to bed. Cowboy and Indian watch a lot of TV, use cellphones and computers, and play a mean game of ping-pong with oversize paddles.

The film's outlandish discrepancy in scale garners more than just a few guffaws. My favorite? The farmer's wife makes a piece of morning toast five times bigger than she is, and pours coffee out of a pot that towers over her into a cup that also dwarfs her. When her equally small husband then comes in and devours the entire toast in practically one gulp, you can't help but laugh. Other laughs come from the simple absurdity of the story ... and the endless imaginative leaps it forces us to make.

I'll grant you that as one farfetched tale grafts itself on to another and then another, it begins to feel as if the storyline is just one damn thing after another. But ultimately I see its arbitrariness as more purposeful than aesthetically sloppy. A TOWN CALLED PANIC ultimately reminds me of the kind of stories kids make up when they're playing with a random bunch of plastic toys: Let's see. What do I have laying around? Here's an Indian, a cowboy, a horse, a policeman, some cows, a tractor, a couple of houses, two beds, a pond with fish, some fences, a piece of toast, a broken down piano, three or four aliens and a bunch of toy bricks. Okay, so let's start by pretending the Cowboy and Indian live with the Horse and they forget to get the Horse a birthday present. In a last-minute rush, they decide to build him a barbecue out of bricks, but they end up ordering way too many bricks, so many in fact that it destroys the whole village ... Thus begins A TOWN CALLED PANIC, a beginning I would venture many an imaginative eight-year-old would recognize.

The stories kids tell themselves are arbitrary, preposterous, frenetic, and often out of scale, but they're always, always fun ... just like A TOWN CALLED PANIC.

This is a big weekend in Hollywood, with the two biggest pre-Oscar Awards show strutting their stuff. After a month's worth of various small, albeit prestigious, critics groups weighing in, it's now time for the higher profile, and televised, CRITICS CHOICE AWARDS and the GOLDEN GLOBES, on Friday and Sunday night respectively.

One of the perks of being a film critic is having a say on some of these year-end awards. As a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, I get to vote for the CRITICS CHOICE AWARDS, for instance. I get a kick out of knowing I had some small role in selecting the various nominees and eventual winners. Almost as much fun, though, is getting to bitch about what kind of "idiots" would have voted for this lame picture or that lousy actor as the best anything.

It's in that spirit that this idiot offers his CRITCS CHOICE AWARD ballot and tries to explain the sometimes convoluted reasoning that went into his various votes.

Let's start with the top category - BEST PICTURE. Like the Oscars this year, the BFCA chose ten nominees for BEST PIC:

Nominees:
• Avatar
• An Education
• The Hurt Locker
• Inglourious Basterds
• Invictus
• Nine
• Precious
• A Serious Man
• Up
• Up In The Air

This was a slam-dunk for me. THE HURT LOCKER was a near-perfect blend of the action-thriller with documentary-like boots-on-the-ground realism. As for the others, AVATAR was pretty but empty, AN EDUCATION was clever and well-acted but a little too pat, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS was a masterstroke of cinematic derring-do but a little too out of control, INVICTUS was history at its most wooden, NINE was frenetic but dramatically and musically limp, PRECIOUS was emotionally powerful but more raw than artistic, A SERIOUS MAN felt too slight to be provocative, UP was another fine Pixar film that ran out of imagination in its final third, and UP IN THE AIR was a slick and smart adult comedy that had too few surprises to be as profound as its proponents maintain. As a voter, I went with what felt like the most complete success as a movie - THE HURT LOCKER. That's not to say I don't wonder if I'm undervaluing both Tarantino's and the Coen Brothers' films. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is clearly the most daring of the films ... and with A SERIOUS MAN, I admit I'm a bit non-plussed by some of the critical raves the film is garnering. I need to see it again, I suppose, but for right now - there's nothing that comes close to Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq movie.

BEST DIRECTING - as with the BEST PIC category, this vote was easy too ... and for all the same reasons: KATHRYN BIGELOW, THE HURT LOCKER.

Nominees:
• Kathryn Bigelow - The Hurt Locker
• James Cameron - Avatar
• Lee Daniels - Precious
• Clint Eastwood - Invictus
• Jason Reitman - Up In The Air
• Quentin Tarantino - Inglourious Basterds

BEST ACTOR - as easy as the above two categories were for me, this category was that hard. I finally went with JEREMY RENNER, THE HURT LOCKER. I would love to see Jeff Bridges win an Oscar this year or any other year. He's been a great underrated actor for ages, and very well may be the frontrunner for this year's Academy Award. But I felt his performance as an over-the-hill, down-on-his-luck country singer was overly familiar. "The Wrestler" with a guitar, anyone? George Clooney plays detached but charming- gee, where have I seen that before? Colin Firth is actually very good as a suicidal gay professor but his performance eventually gets swallowed up by the art direction. Morgan Freeman manages to sap all the charisma out of Nelson Mandela! Viggo Mortensen is earnest and intense but otherwise unremarkable as a desperate father in a post-apocalyptic world. JEREMY RENNER, it could be argued, is merely a cog in Bigelow's expertly devised machine of a movie and I wouldn't strongly disagree. It's certainly not a showy performance but since none of the candidates stands head and shoulders above the rest, I decided to go with the actor in the best movie.

Nominees:
• Jeff Bridges - Crazy Heart
• George Clooney - Up In The Air
• Colin Firth - A Single Man
• Morgan Freeman - Invictus
• Viggo Mortensen - The Road
• Jeremy Renner - The Hurt Locker

Here comes another slam-dunk category: BEST ACTRESS. My vote goes to MERYL STREEP in JULIE & JULIA. Every time she came on the screen as Julia Child, I involuntarily would break out in a big grin. So perfectly did she capture Child's peculiar joie de vivre that it seemed to emanate off the screen and infect the audience. I can't think of a more winning performance, basically a brilliant comic turn that on occasion would give us a glimpse into the depths of her soul. As for the other nominees, Emily Blunt looks a little out of place in Victorian costumes and Sandra Bullock is, well, as perky as you'd expect her to be. Carey Mulligan is my runner-up choice; so layered is her performance as a precocious teenager who learns some valuable lessons about life that it's hard to imagine this is her first leading role. Saoirse Ronan is excellent as the murdered girl who hovers over her family (and her murderer) but she gets a little lost in Peter Jackson's cheesy afterlife. And Gabourey Sidibe is a powerful presence as the put-upon teenage daughter of anabsolute haridan of a mother but, for me at least, she can't quite pull off her big emotional speech near the end.

Nominees:
• Emily Blunt - The Young Victoria
• Sandra Bullock - The Blind Side
• Carey Mulligan - An Education
• Saoirse Ronan - The Lovely Bones
• Gabourey Sidibe - Precious
• Meryl Streep - Julie & Julia

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR is another category I mulled over quite a bit before I went with CHRISTOPH WALTZ, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. Waltz is front and center in Tarantino's movie and dominates every scene he's in. As the diabolically clever Nazi "Jew-hunter," Waltz is a terrifying figure who ends up as the comic butt of a wartime joke. His performance may be mercurial but he's always in control. Besides, he speaks four languages in the film! My hesitation in selecting him has nothing to do with the quality of his performance but rather a reflection of the quality of his fellow nominees. Matt Damon's South African soccer star is the least impressive work in this category - like Morgan Freeman, Damon is wooden. Woody Harrelson is very convincing as a troubled soldier whose job is to inform loved ones their beloved son or daughter or father or mother has been killed in action. Christian McKay is spot on as a young Orson Welles. Alred Molina is good ,albeit slightly cartoonish, as the overbearing father of a precocious teenager. And finally, my runner-up choice, Stanley Tucci who is so unnerving as the obsequious serial killer. That in the same year he winningly portrays Julia Child's sweetest of husbands and a dastardly murderer of children was almost enough to snatch my vote away from Waltz. Almost.

Nominees:
• Matt Damon - Invictus
• Woody Harrelson - The Messenger
• Christian McKay - Me And Orson Welles
• Alfred Molina - An Education
• Stanley Tucci - The Lovely Bones
• Christoph Waltz - Inglourious Basterds

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS - As far as I'm concerned they might as well just go ahead and give the Oscar to MO'NIQUE right now. I mean it, skip all the preliminaries. No one deserves an award this year more. Not since Daniel Day Lewis eviscerated his adult son in THERE WILL BE BLOOD has there been such a ferociously dark performance. Mo'Nique manages to portray evil without becoming cartoonish, a tricky proposition. Her character's humanity manages to shine through despite the most abusive of exteriors. The other nominees are respectable also-rans: Marion Cottillard is the best thing in NINE, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick are perfect foils to George Clooney, Juliane Moore is entirely believable as a desperately lonely socialite, and Samantha Morton is so true as a grieving war widow. But this should be Mo'Nique's year.

Nominees:
• Marion Cotillard - Nine
• Vera Farmiga - Up In The Air
• Anna Kendrick - Up In The Air
• Mo’Nique - Precious
• Julianne Moore - A Single Man
• Samantha Morton - The Messenger

So this entry doesn't go on too long, I'll just mark my votes on the rest of the categories. And feel free to let me know when I am being a complete idiot with my vote.

BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS

Nominees:
• Jae Head - The Blind Side
• Bailee Madison - Brothers
• Max Records - Where The Wild Things Are • Saoirse Ronan - The Lovely Bones --- MY VOTE • Kodi Smit-McPhee - The Road

BEST ACTING ENSEMBLE

Nominees:
• Inglourious Basterds
• Nine
• Precious ---MY VOTE
• Star Trek
• Up In The Air

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Nominees:
• Mark Boal - The Hurt Locker ---MY VOTE
• Joel Coen & Ethan Coen - A Serious Man
• Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber - (500) Days Of Summer
• Bob Peterson, Peter Docter - Up
• Quentin Tarantino - Inglourious Basterds

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Nominees:
• Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach - Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell - District 9 ---MY VOTE
• Geoffrey Fletcher - Precious
• Tom Ford, David Scearce - A Single Man
• Nick Hornby - An Education
• Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner - Up In The Air

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Nominees:
• The Hurt Locker --- MY VOTE
• Nine
• Avatar
• The Lovely Bones
• Inglourious Basterds

BEST ART DIRECTION

Nominees:
• A Single Man ---MY VOTE
• Avatar
• Nine
• The Lovely Bones
• Inglourious Basterds

BEST EDITING

Nominees:
• Up In The Air
• Inglourious Basterds
• The Hurt Locker --- MY VOTE
• Avatar
• Nine

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Nominees:
• Nine ---MY VOTE
• Bright Star
• The Young Victoria
• Inglourious Basterds
• Where The Wild Things Are

BEST MAKEUP

Nominees:
• Avatar
• District 9 --- MY VOTE
• Nine
• The Road
• Star Trek

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Nominees:
• Avatar --- MY VOTE
• District 9
• The Lovely Bones
• Star Trek
• 2012

BEST SOUND

Nominees:
• Avatar
• District 9
• The Hurt Locker ---MY VOTE
• Nine
• Star Trek

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Nominees:
• Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs
• Coraline --- MY VOTE
• Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Princess And The Frog
• Up

BEST ACTION MOVIE

Nominees:
• Avatar
• District 9
• The Hurt Locker --- MY VOTE
• Inglourious Basterds
• Star Trek

BEST COMEDY

Nominees:
• (500) Days Of Summer ---MY VOTE
• The Hangover
• It’s Complicated
• The Proposal
• Zombieland

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Nominees:
• Broken Embraces
• Coco Before Chanel
• Red Cliff
• Sin Nombre
• The White Ribbon --- MY VOTE

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Nominees:
• Anvil
• Capitalism: A Love Story
• The Cove
• Food, Inc.
• Michael Jackson’s This Is It --- MY VOTE

BEST SONG

Nominees:
• "All Is Love" - Karen O, Nick Zinner - Where The Wild Things Are
• "Almost There" - Randy Newman - The Princess And The Frog
• "Cinema Italiano" - Maury Yeston - Nine --- MY VOTE
• "(I Want To) Come Home" - Paul McCartney - Everybody’s Fine
• "The Weary Kind" - Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett - Crazy Heart

BEST SCORE

Nominees:
• Michael Giacchino - Up
• Marvin Hamlisch - The Informant! --- MY VOTE
• Randy Newman - The Princess and the Frog
• Karen O, Carter Burwell - Where The Wild Things Are
• Hans Zimmer - Sherlock Holmes