Taking a break from Oscar blogger bashing yesterday, Patrick Goldtein of the Los Angeles Times pondered the peculiarities of this year's Oscar line-up.  He sees the 2007 as further evidence of a paradigm shift away from the status quo of Hollywood dollars and the continued enbracing of maverick visions.

He starts out like so:

When I took a bleary-eyed glance at the nomination results early yesterday morning, I have to admit that my first reaction was -- is this the Oscars or the Independent Spirit Awards?

Four of the five nominees for best picture are films released by studio specialty divisions, which largely focus on movies with a limited commercial reach. The fifth film, "Michael Clayton," was released by Warner Bros. but financed by Steve Samuels, a real estate developer from Boston who bankrolled the project when no studio would put up the money.

And later, he really digs in:

Most telling of all, the best picture nominees are not films that could have endured the "Survivor"-like experience of receiving notes from today's studio executives, cautious overseers obsessed with establishing character motivation and ensuring that the audience is never confused or particularly challenged. I won't give away any spoilers, but both "No Country for Old Men" and Anderson's' "There Will Be Blood" have striking endings that have confounded or even outraged viewers, but they've remained intact, since when you throw your lot in with these guys, if you're in for a dime, you're in for a dollar.

One can only imagine what would've happened to any of these nominees if they'd been forced to run the gauntlet of research screenings, with "No Country's" unflinching lack of emotion, "There Will Be Blood's" baldly unsympathetic lead character, "Atonement's" fractured flashback-and-forward narrative, "Michael Clayton's" elusive storytelling and "Juno's" casual acceptance of a 16-year-old girl's unplanned pregnancy. Although distributed by Fox Searchlight, "Juno" was independently financed by Mandate Pictures, which specializes in low-budget art-house and horror movies. If the film had been at a major studio it wouldn't be a stretch to hear a studio executive saying to Diablo Cody, who wrote the script, "I really love the cool slang and the funny phone, but does Juno really have to be pregnant?"

Read the rest.