WHY do we still care about the Oscars? The world of cinema is so awash in awards shows that nearly every movie gets to call itself a winner: If your favorite film doesn’t take the New York Film Critics Circle laurels, maybe the London Critics’ Circle will smile upon it; if it doesn’t get a Golden Globe, maybe it can grab an “Independent Spirit” prize instead. Yet even so, a dash of that old Hollywood glamour still clings to the academy’s little gold statuettes. The show is overlong, overliberal, and designed to reward all the wrong people, but I still can’t quite resist it-and as the big night approaches I always find myself dutifully trudging to the multiplex, to catch up on all the nominees I’ve missed.
This year, playing catch-up meant seeing four of the five Best Picture contenders in the space of a week, since (some critic I am!) I’d managed to avoid them all upon their initial release. I started with Little Miss Sunshine, this year’s little-nominee-that-could-a slight tragicomedy about a dysfunctional family on a road trip to a kiddie beauty pageant, catapulted from art-house obscurity to Oscar glitz. Which is unfortunate, since Little Miss Sunshine is the kind of faintly charming movie that’s built to exceed low expectations, not to endure any kind of serious scrutiny. The cast is stellar: Greg Kinnear, as the father, plays barely controlled desperation as well as anyone, and he’s matched beat for beat by Toni Collette’s long-suffering wife, Alan Arkin’s profane, drug-abusing grandpa, and a radiantly bucktoothed Abigail Breslin as the pageant-obsessed daughter. But there isn’t much there there: The humor is wry rather than uproarious, the road trip offers the same shaggy-dog amusements that we’ve seen from a thousand Hollywood odysseys before it, and the social commentary, such as it is, takes
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