The lesson for this year's Oscar nominations? Don't be an R-rated film!

For a list of the complete nominations, go HERE.  As always, click on the movies with links for the original theatrical review.  I write a lot about the inexplicable trend of how the various year-end awards groups only consider 'appropriate' movies to be considered awards-material.  There is and always has been a certain disdain for populist entertainment, a trend that's only gotten worse as the independent film movement exploded in the early 1990s and the year-end Oscar bait-calender got more jam-packed over the last five weeks of the year.  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II may have received almost unanimously rave reviews (96% positive on Rotten Tomatoes), but it doesn't count because it was a big-budget fantasy drama that is considered 'popular' entertainment.  Bridesmaids may have been one of the most successful R-rated comedies of recent years, a well-reviewed (90% on Rotten Tomatoes) comedy that may have been a game-changer in terms of how mass-market female-driven entertainments are viewed in terms of their commercial potential.  But no, it's not a character-driven dramedy that's one of the best films of the year, it's just that 'women shit in a sink' movie, so it's not worthy.  But a drama with Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock that's gasp... about 9/11?!  That's EXACTLY the kind of film that is supposed to be among the year's best, right?  And so it is that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a film with a 48% positive ranking on Rotten Tomatoes and a 46% score on Metacritic is now considering by the Academy to be one of the nine best films of the year.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close gets extremely cloying and incredibly pandering Oscar-bait trailer.

There is a Law and Order episode from late 2002 that deals with a woman who was murdered right before 9/11 and dumped around the World Trader Center wreckage, creating the impression that she was another victim of said terror attacks.  As the truth slowly comes out, there is resistance from the victim's mother, who doesn't want to believe that her daughter was merely a victim of infidelity gone wrong.  Point being, the grieving mother wants to believe that her daughter died in the 9/11 attacks, as if that specific violent end would give her death more importance than if she were merely a victim on a 'normal' murder.  I bring this up because the trailer above, as well as the hoopla surrounding it, is a prime example of what is arguably '9/11 porn'.  In that, I merely mean that it (this trailer and apparently the original Jonathan Safran Foer book as well) uses the 9/11 attacks to add a level of 'importance and prestige' that the story itself does not earn.  Whether the movie is good or not, ask yourself this: Would the film be getting the same sheer amount of preordained Oscar buzz and/or presumptions that it's a 'very important movie' if Tom Hank's character was shot to death in a convenience store robbery?