As "Oscar Run 2007" continues, I've been diligently working working my way through all of the nominees and I'm slowly chopping away at the list. Over the last few days I've watched so many of the nominees that they're all starting to blur together a bit. That's when I know it's time to take a breather and get a little writing done about the piece - if only to help my memory.

"The Black Dahlia" is Brian DePalma's latest noir-ish thriller, based on the novel by James Elroy. Like all pieces of film noir, "Dahlia" is fairly bleak. But like all noirs, it's a morality play about the consequences of sin and deception, grounded in the understanding that we have all fallen and that we all need grace. Not the greatest film, but it's still fairly compelling.

If I had seen "Letters from Iwo Jima" before I had made out my list of the best and worst films of the year, it would have made it up near the top. Eastwood's second film about the Battle of Iwo Jima is a phenomenal film. We're allowed to see our enemies as real people, not just faceless, inhuman monsters. It's one of the most powerful statements against the mindless brutality of war, and against fanaticism which asks us to surrender our faculties of logic and reason.

"Blood Diamond" really surprised me. Not because Leonardo DiCaprio turned in a really solid performance, but because there was a part of me that was expecting a self-righteous, "meaningful" movie that was nothing but Oscar-bait. And after the disappointment of "The Last King of Scotland," "Blood Diamond" was a surprisingly moving and touching film. And even if the movie does nothing more than help illustrate the problems surrounding the diamond industry, I'd say that it fulfills its purpose. It's a movie that needs to be seen, especially in the west.

"Iraq in Fragments," one of the nominated documentaries, does a wonderful job showing its audience the three major factions now existing side-by-side in Iraq: the Sunni, the Shia, and the Kurds. It's filmmakers certainly oppose the U.S. presense in Iraq, and this opposition is echoed in the men and women featured in the film. But the people profiled aren't terrorists, they are average men and women who are being hurt each and every day by the continuing conflict. The film may be a bit one-sided, but it's a side we don't hear much about here in America.

"Marie Antoinette" may only be nominated for its costume design, but it is a really wonderful, delicate little film. More about a collection of moments than a strict narrative plot, the film rather wonderfully shows us the loneliness and isolation of priviledge.

"The Lives of Others," Germany's entry for the Foreign Language Oscar, is a terse and gripping thriller. A German writer begins to fall under the surveillance of the East Berlin police and decides to write a critique of his government to be published in the West. It falls apart a little at the end, but it's still an engaging film.

From India we have "Water," a heart-breaking film about the plight of widows in India. These women - some of them quite young (our eyes into the world is only eight years old) - live in terrible poverty, the young prostituted out to make money for the community. It is a gorgeous, and ultimately hopeful, film.

Peter O'Toole has been nominated for his performance in "Venus" as an aging actor who becomes enamored with a young woman hired to look after a friend. O'Toole - as always - is magnificent. The film itself is fairly flat. At times it is very funny, but it doesn't quite translate into a solid film.

One of the other nominees for Best Actor, Will Smith, maybe turns in his best performance in "The Pursuit of Happyness," but the film is really terrible. Money is the ultimate objective. The main character that we're supposed to look up to and respect spends much of the film yelling at his son and dragging him from one run-down dive to the next. Sure, in the end he makes his dreams come true, but what was the cost of making those dreams happen? It's the fallicy of the American dream in all of its silver-screen glory.

I was also able to catch a screening of the short films up for Academy Awards this year. They animated shorts ranged from the delightful - "The Danish Poet" - to the absurdly funny - "No Time for Nuts" and "Maestro" - to the tragic - Disney's "The Little Matchgirl." Also included with the animated film program were the shortlisted shorts - the poignant "One Rat Short" and "A Wraith in Brooklyn," the hilarious "Guide Dog" and "The Passenger" and the sub-par "A Gentlemen's Duel." As far as the live-action shorts go, there was the ridiculous "West Bank Story" - essentially "West Side Story" set between two competing fast-food restaurants owned by Israeli and Palestinian shop-owners, respectively. "Helmer & Son" was a trite and poorly shot story of family relationships. In "The Saviour," a Mormon missionary has an affair with a potential convert. The resultant story was a bit interesting, but failed to fully deliver. However, "Eramos Pocos" was a wonderful story of two men looking for a mother-figure to take care of them. And then there was the delightful "Binta and the Great Idea," the best of the set from Senegal.

I finished my Oscar reading this week too, polishing off two books in a few days. "The Children of Men," by P.D. James has an intriguing premise, but James isn't able to craft a story around it that is very compelling. Her prose is flat and she has an annoying habit of telling us things rather than showing them to us. It's interesting that one of my favorite movies of the year could come from a book that I liked as little as this one.

While I enjoyed the film "Notes on a Scandal" quite a bit, after reading the novel, I can see just how bad of an adaptation it was. Sure, they got most of the plot points in there, but the novel is very clever in the way it handles the relationship between the two protagonists. It's only as the story progresses that we begin to see the sick, dysfunctional and co-dependant relationship between Sheba and Barbara. A really wonderful book.

I did get to have a little bit of un-Oscar-related artistic experience. In my church home group, we watched "Kill Bill, Vol. II," one of the more interesting stories of redemption in the cinema today. I'll go into more depth at some other time.

Well, now it's time to go back to the Oscar run. Just a few more films to watch before Sunday!