Every year, there are so-called Oscar snubs, people we thought were shoo-ins, or at least deserving of a nod, who got passed over for the nomination. It’s inevitable, if not necessarily fair to those who did get nominated.

But I can’t remember snubs quite as shocking and unexpected as the three missing names in this year’s Best Director category.

Let’s start with the biggest snub of all—Ben Affleck for Argo. I literally gasped when his name wasn’t read this morning.

For starters, Affleck racked up a ton of nominations from most of the other big voting bodies (Golden Globes, Directors Guild of America, Critics Choice, etc.). Also, he’s got a famous name. While the Oscar voters aren’t necessarily drawn to glamour the way, say, the Golden Globe voters are (the Globes are often seen as less a serious voting body and more an excuse to throw a really awesome party), one would think that name recognition alone would bolster his nod. This film was meant to represent Affleck’s shift from “actor who’s surprisingly adept on a film set” to “serious director with legitimate filmmaking chops.” In my mind, it certainly did—it’s one of my...

He’s 49 years old, but in some ways, Quentin Tarantino is still that genius kid in the video store. We can still see him rubbing his hands gleefully as he makes his films, drunk on film’s possibility. He makes up his own rules, smashing through genres, audaciously blurring time periods, laughing in the face of cinematic convention. He’s the filmmaker reimagined as part Mozart, part Willy Wonka, and part Sid Vicious. The end product is almost always obscenely entertaining.

But don't make the mistake of thinking that Tarantino is all raging id. There's rigor and even scholarship in his work. Indeed, it takes a lot of discipline to be so brilliantly anarchistic.

Tarantino makes me laugh at and revel in things I generally don’t like—extreme violence, for one; offensive language for another—which is one of his great gifts. Like all talented filmmakers, he’s a con-man, a grifter. He gets away with things because he’s that good. (Kids, do not try this at home.)

But I do think that, for all his mad scientist tricks, Tarantino’s greatest (and perhaps most underappreciated) gift is writing dialogue. Each character gets his or her on own patois, his own idiom, and delights in his own language—whether it...

Let’s get the awkwardness out of the way first, shall we? This is 40 is essentially The Judd Apatow Story, written and directed by Apatow, with Apatow’s wife (Leslie Mann) playing his wife, Apatow’s two daughters (Iris and Maude) playing his two kids, and, well, Paul Rudd playing Apatow himself. And yes, there are sex scenes in this film. (Wonder if Apatow gave Rudd notes along the lines of: “No, that’s not actually how I do it.”) Okay, so it’s weird. Can we all just move on with our lives now?

Because, This is 40, which bills itself as the “sort of sequel to Knocked Up” is actually pretty great. It suffers from a lot of the same problems of Apatow’s other (also great) comedies: It’s overly long, a tad self-indulgent, and it never met a bit it didn’t want to milk to death. But it’s also sweet, smart, funny, insightful and, not surprisingly, feels remarkably lived in and real. (If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was an actual family up on that screen. Oh. . . wait.)

Indeed, the American film it most reminds me of is Parenthood (the Steve Martin version; not the TV series), which had a similar mix of insight into the joys and heartaches of...

Remember when that book The Secret came out? The idea behind The Secret was that positive thinking was the key to happiness and success. It literally suggested that if you wished hard enough for something, it would come true. Needless to say, it was wildly popular. Shortly after The Secret came out, I read a wonderful takedown of it that argued the book was a success precisely because it confirmed for Americans what they already believed to be true: That good things were coming their way. Americans aren’t pessimistic by nature. If anything, they are overly optimistic. They ALWAYS see the silver lining.

That, at its heart, is the essence of David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook. It captures two fundamental qualities of the American psyche: Our obsession with football (and our conflation of football with life, family, and happiness) and our relentless, sometimes logic-defying optimism.

As the film starts, Pat (Bradley Cooper) has just been released from a mental hospital. He’s been diagnosed as bipolar, with serious anger management issues. The triggering event was catching his wife, a high school English teacher, having an affair with a colleague—Pat beat the...