The Hurt Locker is directed by Kathryn Bigelow — James Cameron’s ex-wife — and deserves to beat Avatar for Best Picture. It’s an amazing accomplishment in today’s Hollywood: an Iraq War movie that isn’t devoted to pious recitation of the anti–Iraq War catechism. (Questions about the mission are limited basically to one throwaway line.) More important, it’s a very good movie — uplifting, moving, and suspenseful.

I was fully expecting The Hurt Locker to be nominated, though, so the (pleasant) surprise for me today was that the satire In the Loop was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. This fictionalized treatment of the Iraq War does, it is true, take the line that America and England were rushed into war by the malicious use of fraudulent intelligence. But the film is a) laugh-out-loud funny, b) exceptionally well-written, and c) the most accurate depiction of the moral and cultural climate of Washington, D.C., I’ve ever seen in a movie. (I lived in Washington for almost two decades, and worked in the Senate and the White House. The closest match before In the Loop was Robert Altman’s The Player — which wasn’t even set in Washington at all, but in its West Coast counterpart: another shallow company town obsessed with the pecking order in a particular industry.)