Six years ago, I went on WBAL radio and boldly announced that if Brokeback Mountain didn’t win the Academy Award, I would eat my shoe.

Well, you know the rest: I was forced to blow 60 bucks on a chocolate shoe I found at an online candy store and was later mocked by a complete stranger at the dentist’s office: “Did you chip a tooth eating your shoe?” (For what it’s worth, the overrated Crash ended up getting the nod.)

Ahhh, good times. And times, I feel, that will no longer be replicated.

One of the many problems with this newish phenomenon called “Oscar season”—a season filled with not just a surfeit of award shows (including, full disclosure, one that I vote for: the Critics' Choice Award), but an endless chamber of mirrors of prognostication, analysis, praise, backlash, backlash against the backlash, Tweeting, and live-blogging—is that it has taken almost all the suspense out of the Oscar season.

Don’t get me wrong, there have always been people who were Oscar experts, who analyzed the trajectory of a particular actor or film’s chances the way brokers follow the stock market. But those were a somewhat rarefied bunch, insider types who subscribed to the...

With its found-footage aesthetic and regular-guys-get-super-powers plot, Chronicle will rightly be compared to Cloverfield or perhaps the TV show Heroes. But the film it really has the most in common with is Carrie.

As in Brian De Palma’s horror classic, our teen hero is a ticking time bomb, with a very dangerous weapon at his disposal. And like Carrie, we care about him more than we should and maybe even want to see him exact revenge on his tormenters—until we, well, don’t.

Then again, to call Chronicle a horror film isn’t quite right either. It’s a genre-mashup extraordinaire—seriously funny at times and exciting, too. For a little bit, it plays like a fantasy wish fulfillment picture—what if three regular high school kids found some sort of crazy radioactive cave (never explained, not that it matters) and emerged with super powers? What if they could control objects with their minds and then even fly? How cool would that be? (Cue Beavis and Butthead laugh.)

One of the things I loved about Chronicle is the fact that these guys have no actual clue what to do with their powers—in other words, they don’t immediately decide to don...

There is nothing cuddly about Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), the 9-year-old narrator of Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He’s fretful, voluble, socially awkward—obviously brilliant, but not entirely pleasant company. He confounds his mother (Sandra Bullock) and doesn’t seem to have any peer friends. The only person he can really relate to is his father (Tom Hanks), who sends Oskar off on elaborate reconnaissance missions, all in a sly attempt to get the boy to interact with the world.

The movie is about one last mission his father sends Oskar on—how even in death, the father is still showing his son how to live.

Yes, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is that film—the 9/11 one—and it attempts to negotiate the massive scope of our national tragedy with the tiny world of a socially isolated little boy. A few critics have lambasted the film for being emotionally manipulative—and it certainly is heavy handed at times (this is the same Stephen Daldry who gave us the operatically depressing The Hours, after all).

But when an answering machine containing urgent messages from the World Trade Center left by Oskar’s father—delivered with escalating...

It may seem astonishing that a black-and-white silent film, made by a French director with a nearly unpronounceable last name (Michel Hazanavicius) and starring two French actors that no one in the U.S. has ever heard of (Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo) would be the frontrunner to win Best Picture at this year’s Oscars.

To which I say: See the film.

Because, truly, once you see The Artist, it will all be clear. It’s made with such visual élan, such an obvious love for the medium, such joie, such wit—it’s about as irresistible as cinema gets.

When we first meet George Valentin (Dujardin), he’s a Hollywood silent film star along the lines of a Douglas Fairbanks (with a little touch of Gene Kelly thrown in). He’s almost drunk on his own swashbuckling charm—but who can blame him? Barrel-chested, light on his feet, possessing a quick, roguish smile—audiences can’t get enough of George, or his devoted sidekick, a scrappy Jack Russell terrier. (In fact, the only person who can get enough of him, it seems, is his put-upon wife, played with a perfect mask of exasperation by Penelope Ann Miller.)

One day, after a premiere, he has an accidental run-in with a wide-eyed...