As if to deliver the coup de grâce to a lousy year for movies, shortly after Christmas the New York Times set out to calculate just how padded today’s “blockbuster” box-office totals really are, chiefly by inflated ticket prices. For instance, all those screaming fans who pushed the vampire soap opera Twilight to a $70 million opening weekend add up to roughly the same number of moviegoers who bought tickets to see Brendan Fraser don a loincloth for 1997’s George of the Jungle. The cultural landmark that was the Sex and the City movie drew no more ticket buyers to the multiplex than 1996’s First Wives Club. Even the record-shattering Dark Knight, which rivaled Titanic’s domestic grosses in unadjusted dollars, came in a measly 26th on the all-time list of tickets sold, sandwiched between Grease and Thunderball.

Now of course this sad decline in what we mean when we talk about a “hit” is primarily the result of forces beyond any filmmaker’s control: the fragmentation of America’s common culture, the rise of home video, the proliferation of video games, the ever-expanding Internet. But it would be a poor critic who didn’t use the Times’s figures as an excuse to trot out a specific complaint against how the movie biz is run, so here’s mine: More people might be buying movie tickets if Hollywood abandoned its increasingly destructive habit of releasing all the year’s Oscar hopefuls in a headlong late-autumn and early-winter rush.

Admittedly, the rush is worse for critics than for viewers, since at least half the movies “released” in November and December won’t trickle out to non-Manhattan multiplexes until January. (Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, which national publications had to review around its official December 12 release date, probably reached a theater near you some thirty-odd days later.) But I suspect that even filmgoers in Peoria partake of the overwhelm-ment that settles over cinephiles sometime around Christmas — a time when critics who’ve devoted dozens of column inches to The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor during the movie industry’s fallow months find themselves tackling what are supposed to be the year’s best films at capsule length, and when serious moviegoers wander cineplexes in a daze, rambling about whether Mickey Rourke should win Best Actor for The Curious Reader of Revolutionary Doubt.

It’s bad for the moviegoers, and it’s bad for the movies. Studio executives are a risk-averse lot in the best of times and, faced with the cruel Darwinism of the holiday season, they seem to have decided that the best way to hedge their bets is to green-light films within an ever narrower range. How else to explain this house-of-mirrors movie season: two Clint Eastwood movies released within 40 days of each other; a pair of Oscar-caliber Kate Winslet performances playing against each other in the local art house; and not one or two, but five films about the Holocaust and Nazis playing between mid-October and the New Year.

What does all this conformity and caution get you? It gets you Revolutionary Road. No film in this holiday season checks quite so many Oscar-season boxes: There are A-list stars (Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, together again a decade after they clutched at each other in Titanic), an Academy Award–winning director (Winslet’s husband, Sam Mendes), a sterling supporting cast, a handsome mid-century aesthetic, and a semi-famous literary novel as the source material. And no holiday-season film better illustrates the way that such box-checking curdles art.

There are things to appreciate in Revolutionary Road — Winslet’s performance, especially, and a great supporting turn by Michael Shannon as a truth-telling lunatic — but nothing new to see. If you’ve watched any high-toned Hollywood film about the suburbs (Ordinary People? The Ice Storm? Mendes’s own American Beauty, still less than a decade old?), you’ve watched this one: There’s no theme or idea that hasn’t been explored a dozen times before, no insight about the desperation lurking beneath the suburban façade that hasn’t been aired and aired again. (If you’re interested in meditating on the dark side of the American Dream through the lens of a dysfunctional suburban marriage, go Netflix The Sopranos.) As Frank and April Wheeler, ex-bohemians stifled in a Connecticut development, the two stars tear away at each other en route to an overdetermined doom, while the camera aestheticizes their misery: A rose of blood blooms on a woman’s skirt, and Mendes, as in every film he’s ever made, is more interested in the shot’s loveliness than its dramatic weight.

Consider, by way of contrast, one of the few recent films to escape pretension’s gravitational pull: Slumdog Millionaire, a Bombay-set fairy tale that lacks Nazis, A-list stars, a theme of alienation, and a downer of an ending, but somehow manages to be a better film than most of its Christmas-season competition. Slumdog’s plot, which features a street urchin turned game-show competitor, villainous gangsters, a tangled sibling rivalry, and a long-lost love, is the purest sort of melodrama. But then again, in its own way, so is Revolutionary Road; the difference is that, in Slumdog, the manipulativeness is upfront and unpretentious, driven by the urge to entertain rather than the quest to be high-minded.

The director, Danny Boyle, has spent his career blissfully unconcerned with the Laws of Oscar (he’s the anti-Mendes, in this sense), and the resulting variety — the junkies in Trainspotting, the zombies in 28 Days Later, the winsome treasure-finding kids in Millions — exemplifies what the movies ought to offer: the thrill of the new, rather than the comforts of self-seriousness. With Slumdog he’ll probably finally be rewarded for it: His movie stands a good chance of claiming the “little film that could” slot among Best Picture nominees that Juno captured last year, and Little Miss Sunshine the year before.

The good news is that Slumdog is a better movie than those two; the bad news is that unless the industry has the good sense to nominate Wall-E as well, it’ll be up against four rivals in the style of Revolutionary Road. Maybe if those numbers were reversed — if four out of the five Best Picture nominees were doing something new and strange and interesting, and only one were doing something predictable and pretentious — Hollywood would have a chance of getting more people to the movies. Or maybe not; but, at the very least, more Slumdogs and fewer Revolutionaries would make the year’s darkest season considerably more enjoyable.