Awards Features

Even the most lighthearted film of the bunch, "Juno," deals with a still-prevalent problem among today's youth: teenage pregnancy, as screenwriter Diablo Cody's razor-sharp script milks laughs from a situation with unmistakable consequences.

With "No Country for Old Men," the film's hardscrabble West Texas crime setting and suggestion of south-of-the-border complicity recalls recent gunbattles between federal forces and drug cartels in Mexico's Tijuana and Rio Bravo. The clash between good and evil in the Coens' godless universe takes on a larger relevance, which producer Scott Rudin refers to as "Melville-like themes of fate and destiny."

This dystopia triggered by greed and malaise is at least as oppressive in Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," whose turn-of-the-century oil baron Daniel Plainview makes Gordon Gekko of "Wall Street" seem like a bleeding heart. Given the heavy price the U.S. has paid for the invasion of Iraq, the film's blood-for-oil theme emerges as an allegory for all that's gone wrong in the killing fields of that country and Afghanistan.

"Michael Clayton," too, paints a picture of how greed and corporate malfeasance can place human lives below the bottom line. The movie was inspired by the '70s paranoid thrillers and anticorruption dramas of filmmakers like Alan Pakula and Sidney Lumet. One can't help but see elements of such former best picture nominees as "The Verdict," "The Insider" and "Erin Brockovich," as well as the transgressions of Enron and Halliburton, in the moral quandary of "Clayton."

"Atonement" might be the most traditional picture nominee of the bunch, with intimations of such doomed period romance classics as "The English Patient" and "Doctor Zhivago," both set against the backdrop of war. If the elements of a society torn asunder by class differences and the lunacy of battle in "Atonement" reflect timeless themes of literature and cinema, they are no less relevant in this election year.

THE JOURNEY

Ever since it hit Cannes, buzz has built for "No Country for Old Men," the most decorated of the five pic nominees to date. It has claimed more than a dozen critics group wins, including kudos from the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle. Its eight Oscar noms lead the field, along with fellow contender "There Will Be Blood."

"Blood" triumphed among two of the more respected critics orgs: the Los Angeles Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics. Its star, Daniel Day-Lewis, appears to be the consensus pick in the lead actor category, and its his ability to imbue compelling nuance to his unapologetically misanthropic oil prospector that holds the film together, even given the pic's bravura direction and production values.

"Juno" is the biggest b.o. success of the bunch, with its $120 million-plus domestic haul making it one of the more lucrative specialty titles on record. While "Juno" and "Michael Clayton" do not tout as many pre-Oscar triumphs as "No Country" and "Blood," they both have benefited from noms in directing, writing and acting.

Although the director and two leads of "Atonement" were left out of the Oscar equation, the film seems to have Acad-valued "prestige" embedded into its DNA.