Recently, David Denby of The New Yorker complained that this year's Best Picture nominees were light-weights in comparison to heavy hitters like last year's No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. I am wondering if Denby has been eating spiders and worms instead of popcorn at the movies. Despite their technical achievements, both No Country and Blood were two of the most depressing, demoralizing films I have ever witnessed. The Coen Brothers have proved their ingenuity again and again with much finer films, especially O, Brother, Where Art Thou and Fargo. As for Daniel Day Lewis's one man orgy of hatred, I found the film and his performance one-note and ultimately exhausting.

As for this year's group, I can't fully speak yet. But I can say that I will definitely watch Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button again. Since both have the element of sentimental fantasy, you probably think I only enjoy noble endings. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Mike Nichols' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a far better film than the uplifting but worthy A Man for All Seasons, and its scathing humor and insights into American morality are still relevant today. No, the nominees this year, except for The Reader, are not on the "must be taken seriously" scale of last year's winners, but some of them are better films.