The inflation from five to ten in Best Picture Oscar nominees means that to have any hope of keeping them all straight in your head, you’ll need to group them. Fortunately, the Best Picture nods fall into five obvious pairings:Read the rest there and comment upon it below.—The Easily Confused Titles: Up and Up in the Air. —The Exes’ Action Flicks: James Cameron’s Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. —The Movies about 350-Pound Black 16-Year-Olds: Precious and The Blind Side. (Two films that, together, teach us that if you are going to be an impoverished but colossal teen, it’s better to be a guy than a girl.) —The Foreign Films That Won’t Win: An Education and District 9. —And, finally, The Battle of the Aging Wunderkinds: Quentin Tarantino’s violent Jewish heroes in Inglourious Basterds vs. Joel and Ethan Coen’s passive-aggressive Jewish villains in A Serious Man.
