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Victor Dwyer

I've got to ask you, Mr. Oscar, and give it to me straight: Has turning 80 got you peeved? Because you are in one strange mood this year. Your short lists are long on baseness, terror, regret, and on films whose titles alone — No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, The Savages, Atonement — point to your foul disposition. And the acting you encourage: Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem as psychopaths, Johnny Depp as a throat-slitting barber, Viggo Mortensen as an eye-impaling hit man, Julie Christie and Marion Cotillard each a doomed paramour. You've pretty much left it up to Juno's perky, pregnant Ellen Page to keep us from serving our guests martinis shaken with Zoloft on Sunday night.

Johanna Schneller: Well, maybe I need that Zoloftini (Victor, you should patent that now and retire), but I'm thrilled with this year's list. All 20 acting nominees deserve to be there; ditto the 10 screenwriters, five directors and most of the best-picture nominees. (I'm not a big fan of Atonement. To me it's like a local news anchor, handsome but hollow.)

This year's honorees are about filmmaking at its best. Not box office, not who's "owed" a nomination, no fake nod to some oldster. And about all this darkness in the material — well, guess what folks, life is dark. Spouses and parents die, greed makes people brutal, hideous accidents happen. Art is supposed to show us that stuff, to illuminate life's corners, to impress upon us that we're not alone. Obviously, not all movies can be classified as art. This list can.

Elizabeth Renzetti: The thing that I loved this year was the importance of artifice. The best films were so over-the-top, so rococo in their violence and baroque in their construction, so arch in dialogue, that it was like a big finger up to naturalism. Thank God for it. I think the most conventional Oscar-nominated movie I saw was Sweeney Todd, and when Tim Burton's delivering the normal, you know you should lock the doors. And yes, Atonement's a pretty show dog, but it won't make it to the ribbons with all these bloodthirsty terriers around.

Victor: Vacuous it is, but it won the Golden Globe for best drama, and the best-film BAFTA in Britain, although in a year when bleak's the new black, maybe that's because the first half-hour felt like a horror movie. As the snitch from hell, who knows whoopy when she barges in on it, saucer-eyed supporting-actress nominee Saoirse Ronan was right out of Village of the Damned.

As for there not being a single babe on the list, Johanna, two words: Viggo Mortensen. He's a good enough actor, but the academy would have been more forthright had it also nominated his (formerly) private parts in their supporting roles in the Turkish blood-bath scene.

Johanna: At the risk of being the most earnest panelist ever, Viggo (we're on a first-name basis, in my mind) earned and deserves his nomination. Bless him for not figuring out some way to coyly cover up in the sauna. Think of Demi Moore's ridiculously modest blow-drying scene in Striptease — she's a stripper, but she wears a towel while alone in her bathroom at home? Or the post-coital scene in Notting Hill, where Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant discuss her breasts for five minutes, but only peek at them under a sheet. In an honest film, these people would have been uncovered, and that insistence on the real made a huge impact in Eastern Promises.

Elizabeth: Yes, Viggo seemed authentically terrifying, not that I've ever met a finger-chopping Russian gangster. However, nothing I lived through this cinematic year was as heart-stopping and awful as the moment they sewed up poor Jean-Dominique's one eye in The Diving Be ll and the Butterfly. If they'd called it My Left Eyelid maybe actor Mathieu Amalric would have got the nomination he deserves. Every major character in the films we're talking about was trapped somehow — Juno by her growing belly, Julie Christie's Fiona by her deteriorating mind, Daniel Plainview by his psychosis — but no image was as potent as the impotent man flailing in his diving bell.

Johanna: That's the greatest thing about this year's nominees: They don't flinch. That is so welcome right now, not just because the world is chaotic or scary or at war; not because of the recession or the election. It's welcome because so much pop culture is willing, even eager, to dive straight into the toilet, to be as low, as mind-numbing, as flinch-y as possible. Pop culture is too often flattened by committee decisions, by pandering and compromise. These films don't compromise.

Elizabeth: Not one of them seems designed by committee. Even if There Will Be Blood or No Country seem crazed to the eye at first, both have a perfect internal logic. It's like looking at a Gaudi building and realizing the explosion is actually a set of rules. Think about some of the movies that have been nominated for best picture in the past — Fatal Attraction, Working Girl, The Prince of Tides, in the name of all that's holy — and you'll want to offer up a goat to the movie gods of 2007.

Victor: Actually, Michael Clayton did feel like committee work to me. It was suavely told and had a satin-finish look, but like best-actor nominee George Clooney, the film felt vaguely sucked of life. Clayton's family relationships, for instance, with his son and brothers, seemed tacked on for good measure.

Elizabeth: I thought Clooney's relationship with his son — especially that scene in the car where he's trying to make up for years of being a bad father — was the one true note in the movie. I knew he was more than just a pretty face under some artfully peppered hair.

Victor: He showed more emotional heft in Ocean's Twelve. And Tilda Swinton as the lawyer in the black power suit with the beige silk camisole was L.A. Law circa 1986, not best-supporting material in 2008.

Johanna: Hold on, that L.A. Law look was deliberate: Swinton's back story for her character, I read, is that she went to some dress-for-success seminar at the beginning of her career and stuck to its dictates ever after. I found that a very salient detail — this is a woman who has no idea how to live.

Victor: A movie I did really like: No Country for Old Men. Previously dishy Javier Bardem embodied evil, albeit with an axis or two of stark, raving mad (not to mention that hair uncannily like Stephen Harper's if Harper ever let it grow out a few inches, which thankfully he never will).

Johanna: No Country has the awards momentum — it cleaned up in all the guilds and critics' associations. And it is a great film, a wholly realized world. But I was even more astonished by There Will Be Blood. It distills American history — all history — down to its primal forces in such a brutal, majestic way. People will be watching that film for the rest of time.

Victor: I'm putting my loonies on There Will Be Blood.

Elizabeth: Those two films are miles from the rest of the pack. I'd give No Country the edge, if only because it's such an organic whole — the way the movie's pace absolutely mirrors Bardem's character's relentlessness, and the perfect ending. There Will Be Blood also ends on a thumping good note, though. Weirdly, people in the cinema where I saw it were incredibly polite when they were leaving — holding doors, saying "excuse me" — as if to refute its dark heart.

Johanna: I think what we're all applauding here is that each of this year's nominated films has a vision and sticks to it. That's partly because a significant proportion of them were made by writer-directors: There Will Be Blood, In the Valley of Elah, No Country for Old Men, Away from Her, Michael Clayton, The Savages.

Victor: "I don't need to be hearing about your wife's cervix right now!" Mistresses everywhere must have cheered when Laura Linney belted that one out. That said, I think Juno's Diablo Cody will beat out The Savages' Tamara Jenkins for best original screenplay.

Johanna: Writing and directing can lead to monomania and disaster, of course. But when it works, it's as close to a pure creative vision as a film — which is by necessity collaborative — can be. A special shout-out to Sarah Polley, whose budget for Away from Her was, I think, $12. It's a template for the kind of films Canadians can make, and should.

Elizabeth: Did either of you think anyone was ripped off?

Victor: I thought Kelly Macdonald's fidgety, heart-sore Carla Jean Moss ("I got a bad feelin,' Llewelyn") in No Country could have easily bumped Swinton's Susan Dey reprise. I'm also disappointed that Oscar didn't groove to Josh Brolin's Llewelyn, the bewildered everyman who stumbles on Bardem's drug money: Such a universal dilemma, it was almost impossible not to identify. I mean, who among us hasn't wondered if they should keep that extra change the cashier unknowingly offered up? It's not like she's going to track us down with a slaughterhouse stun-gun attached to an air tank, and then use it to fire plugs into our foreheads and pull them back out again.

Finally, twentysomething Emile Hirsch put supporting nominee Hal Holbrook to shame in their scenes together in Into the Wild. Johanna, that's one instance where I think the geezer may have gotten the nod largely for being as old as crotchety old Oscar.

Johanna: Pish-tosh. His scenes had a wonderful delicacy, and gave the film the heart it needed. If Holbrook didn't care about that kid so much, we wouldn't have, either. I also would have been happy to see Catherine Keener from Into The Wild and Vanessa Redgrave from Atonement on the supporting-actress list. And I think Christian Bale deserved a nomination for Rescue Dawn — for acting, and for surviving a trip to the jungle with Werner Herzog.

Elizabeth: Although he didn't threaten to shoot Herzog — he's not half the man Klaus Kinski was! I would happily have put Gordon Pinsent in the best-actor category — there was such sadness and weight and guilt there, so quietly done. Then I realized I don't actually know how the nominees/winners are determined, and that's always bothered me. Against the other performances of the year? Against towering performances of the past? Some Platonic ideal? Or just because you owe someone dinner at the Ivy? Maybe Johanna knows — she keeps an eye on this evil industry.

Johanna: All of the above. People start sticking names into the buzz-o-meter the minute a film comes out. As the year rattles along, some names get shaken out; others stick. Look at Ruby Dee, a best-supporting-actress nom for American Gangster. There's a case of an industry vet, overdue for her turn, in a fine but not beloved film. Nominating her ties up a lot of loose ends.

Now, contrast Dee's situation with her fellow nominee Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone. Ryan's paid her dues in theatre, but in film, that performance came out of nowhere. It was bravura, blistering — you couldn't not notice it. To me, that's an instance of a clean nod to that particular job. As for Marion Cotillard's nomination for La Vie en Rose, I can't help but think that Chris Guest and company had a chuckle over it. It mirrors so exactly what Catherine O'Hara's character in For Your Consideration says when she doesn't get a nod: "How did that French woman get in there?"

Elizabeth: Mais elle est fantastique! I think Oscar's going home with a French lady on Sunday.

Victor: Cotillard's definitely my own pick. She left me regretting rien. But she won't win. La Vie en Rose is too brazenly ponderous to allow for any victors amid its wreckage. That's why I'm rooting for Ellen Page. Yes, her rat-a-tat portrayal at times felt like Groucho Marx stomping around in a fat suit, but she was just so damn adorable. Besides, it would be fun to see a Canadian playing a Juno win an Oscar.

Johanna: Do either of you care about the so-called lesser categories? I'm glad that The Bourne Ultimatum showed up on the rosters, especially in film editing. I loathe action films that are edited to confetti, and Bourne was the opposite, so cleanly, elegantly made — a thrill ride for sentient adults.

Elizabeth: For once, I care about the music. It's criminal that Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood wasn't nominated. It was like an essential character in the film. It was the flipside of the incredibly annoying singer-songwriter chirping in Juno, which was one fey step too far.

Johanna: Greenwood was eliminated on a technicality, sigh. The academy ruled that too much of his music had been composed and released before it was used in the film. But I agree, it was the best score this year, truly gut-twisting, as opposed to the incessant typewriting in the score of Atonement. That was fine in the early frames, but after a few hours we got the point.

Victor: I'm a sucker for sets, and was impressed to see Atonement's credits include people whose careers can be boiled down, respectively, to "Drapes" and "Drapes Assistant." I'm rooting for it to take art direction, though either Sweeney Todd or The Golden Compass, both of which look like Xbox games, will likely win.

Johanna: Do you have rituals for watching the show?

Elizabeth: Yes: I don't. I used to dress up, have parties, but that show's been Nosferatu'd. All the blood's gone.

Victor: This year I'm inviting 20 neighbours I only vaguely know, and every 10 minutes or so I'm going to imitate the preacher boy in There Will Be Blood and yell, "We have a sinner with us here!"

Johanna: Ooh, I'm coming to your house. I'm usually quite dull, shushing people and studiously filling out my ballot.

Elizabeth: I say take two Zoloftinis and call me in the morning.