And the winner is ...

WHY do we still care about the Oscars? The world of cinema is so awash in awards shows that nearly every movie gets to call itself a winner: If your favorite film doesn't take the New York Film Critics Circle laurels, maybe the London Critics' Circle will smile upon it; if it doesn't get a Golden Globe, maybe it can grab an "Independent Spirit" prize instead. Yet even so, a dash of that old Hollywood glamour still clings to the academy's little gold statuettes. The show is overlong, overliberal, and designed to reward all the wrong people, but I still can't quite resist it--and as the big night approaches I always find myself dutifully trudging to the multiplex, to catch up on all the nominees I've missed.

This year, playing catch-up meant seeing four of the five Best Picture contenders in the space of a week, since (some critic I am!) I'd managed to avoid them all upon their initial release. I started with Little Miss Sunshine, this year's little-nominee-that-could--a slight tragicomedy about a dysfunctional family on a road trip to a kiddie beauty pageant, catapulted from art-house obscurity to Oscar glitz. Which is unfortunate, since Little Miss Sunshine is the kind of faintly charming movie that's built to exceed low expectations, not to endure any kind of serious scrutiny. The cast is stellar: Greg Kinnear, as the father, plays barely controlled desperation as well as anyone, and he's matched beat for beat by Toni Collette's long-suffering wife, Alan Arkin's profane, drug-abusing grandpa, and a radiantly bucktoothed Abigail Breslin as the pageant-obsessed daughter. But there isn't much there there: The humor is wry rather than uproarious, the road trip offers the same shaggy-dog amusements that we've seen from a thousand Hollywood odysseys before it, and the social commentary, such as it is, takes aim at targets so broad (the self-help industry, JonBenet Ramsey clones) that it wins little credit for hitting the mark.

Still, I'd take "slight" and "faintly charming" any day over the thudding awfulness of the next contender on my list, Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu's Babel. Named for the tower in Genesis and roughly as entertaining as Leviticus, Babel is the latest entrant in the burgeoning genre of globalization melodramas, in which several interlocking storylines are supposed to illustrate deep truths about our fragmented, miserable, multicultural world. Steven Soderbergh kicked things off with Traffic, which used the technique to good effect, but it's been downhill ever since. Babel is worse than Syriana, which was criminally stupid but relatively watchable; and it's worse than Inarritu's own 21 Grams, from 2003, which was tawdry and overwrought but rarely dull. It might be better than last year's Best Picture, the dreadful Crash, but at least the Los Angeles-set Crash had the decency to confine its vision of multiculturalism-as-Greek-tragedy to a single city. Inarritu's ambitions, by contrast, send him lurching from the Mexican border to a Tokyo high-rise to the Moroccan desert for a set of stories linked only by the certainty that terrible things will happen to nearly every character for no other reason than that the script demands it. In each case, the film thinks that it has something terribly important to say about America's relationship to the rest of the planet, and particularly to Mexicans and Muslims and other people with darker skin than the two main Anglo stars, Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt. Trust me, it doesn't.

It's rare to turn to a Clint Eastwood movie for a pick-me-up, but after Babel, Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima--the companion piece ...