Indulge me here.

As a lifelong movie fan, I'm always a sucker for the Oscar race. It's great, escapist fun. Hell, my old Twin Cities Reader crony, David Carr, is in expense account heaven covering the month leading up to the nominations (out last Thursday) and the month until the awards themselves. (I've reminded him how cruelly he used to mock me back in my cozy-with-the-stars days.)

As a media watcher though, I never cease to be stunned at how much ink a "local, local" daily newspaper will throw at supremely redundant Oscar coverage. Put simply, you can't produce enough of it. Got an Oscar "trend" angle? Run it. And while you're at it, go heavy on the graphics, too. No more guilt trips about running the Brangelina photo du jour. They are nominees, baby. One of their peers is melting down? Glory! Get three different wire photos and a local reaction. And a poll. Gotta have a poll. If it chews up every inch of the feature hole for a week, stop whining and run it. Somewhere, "research" (i.e. eight bored housewives from pre-selected zip codes) says "our readers" desperately need our take on the Oscars.

So, yes, I'm adding to it. Jumping right in the deep end. If only to make a principled argument in favor of WALL-E, which is, without question, the most spot-on and delicious cultural satire out of Hollywood since Flirting With Disaster. It got screwed. It should have nominated for Best Picture. But Hollywood, which will reward the most treacly, sentimental claptrap—can you say, Rocky?—with no end of awards, has a tough time with comedy and, God forbid, satire. I mean, this film—which had made $260 million in the U.S. and Britain alone before the DVD release—dares to suggest that high-consuming people/Americans will so badly denude the planet in their obsessive acquisition of anything the retail culture markets to them that they will evolve into porcine slugs floating in a perpetual bliss of 80 oz. Slurpees, endless buffets, Lido decks, and the good life as projected to them by the Buy n Large corporation.

I had a beyond-parody moment last week walking into a Buy n Large, I mean Costco, in Phoenix (the sister-in-law needed a new wireless router). There, in a store the size of eight football fields, filled with hundreds of people pushing triple figures on the body mass index, were fifty flat screens playing the same clip of little WALL-E and his cockroach buddy, stacking garbage from humankind's terminal buying binge. (Hey, it struck me as funny.)

The right wing went bonkers when WALL-E was released last summer. And anything that sets off Glenn Beck has to be a good thing.

I am, however, also big fan of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which scored a near record number of nominations but stands no chance at all since Hollywood and the rest of the chattering classes are smitten by Slumdog Millionaire.

This too is easy to understand. Hollywood trades in well-turned sentimentality, and Slumdog's fairy-tale rise from squalor to reality TV superstardom and wealth is irresistible, especially when it feels like it is saying something about modern India. (I'm not quite sure what.) Moreover, director Danny Boyle and his team were extraordinarily canny about that closing, Bollywood line dance sequence in the train station. Everyone went home happy after that. A knockout ending is at least half the game.

Button, though, is a far more interesting and ambitious movie, and I say that not just out of admiration for director David Fincher's meticulous attention to production detail and quality (much as he did with Zodiac) but his palpable fascination with the narrative concept. Which can be read as being about any person's sense of himself as the anomaly in his immediate culture or the brief moment when two people are actually right for each other or the irony of wisdom and physical vitality rarely—if ever—achieving confluence.

The nitwits who complained that Brad Pitt seems "so passive" apparently missed the cues about Benjamin being a fluke of nature, infirm, and physically cautious while his peers are robust. If our youth sets our clock and emotional boundaries, consider where Benjamin begins.

I enjoyed Frost/Nixon for its fascination with the unholy alliance of show biz and politics and how the two forever attempt to exploit and "cross purpose" each other. But Ron Howard, God bless Opie, doesn't have a sharp arrow in his quiver. Although Richard Nixon may have been a pathetically insecure character, lacking most normal social skills, he was also appallingly cynical and destructive when it came to this country's moral standing. I think "true balance" required a bit more historical perspective and "edge" than the movie dared.

Milk is an unabashed piece of advocacy moviemaking from an unabashedly gay director . . . who has never had much of a talent for visual style. (Gus Van Sant and Kevin Smith need to sit down and watch a few old Bernardo Bertolucci movies just for what might rub off.) The story, driven by Sean Penn, who I predict will beat out Mickey Rourke for Best Actor, is everything. The movie is valid, heartfelt, at times poignant, and smart about its relationships. It just isn't in Button's league as art.

Finally, The Reader is compelling stuff, and Kate Winslet will win an overdue Oscar for this. (She should have won for Little Children two years ago.) But Winslet, ironically, was my biggest issue with the movie. Actors with her kind of intense, native intelligence have a huge challenge trying to play someone as common and unreflective as her character, Hannah Schmitz, if only because audiences assume intuitive powers based on her being . . . well, Kate Winslet.

The character Schmitz is fundamentally uncomprehending of her deed and situation. She is the embodiment of all the good Germans—and good patriots everywhere—who do as they are told without sufficient question. Kate Winslet would know better.

If WALL-E had made it into the Best Picture five, I'd have a tough time choosing between it and Button, but WALL-E might take it, if only to encourage more of its kind instead of the usual Disney animated princesses, kings, and fairy queens.