It’s Oscar time again and you know that means. Yes, it’s my annual Oscar snubs piece for MSN, a tradition I originally stumbled into six years ago and have happily been upholding every year since.

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, nominated for screenplay but not direction: the will of Hashem or Academy oversight?

I confess, it’s been a while since I’ve gotten myself worked up over anything the Academy has done, either at nomination time or during the awards itself, but I can still poke a stick at the egregious mistakes that the Academy makes every frickin’ year and have a little fun with it.

Is it just me, or is the awards season getting longer, busier and utterly exhausting? The flurry of critics groups and professional organizations and self-appointed awards groups beating a path to the Oscar door ends up wearing out the awards season before the Academy Award nominations are even announced. Every new press release proclaims a new prediction (“Avatar” is Best Picture? Really?) or a showdown (“The Hurt Locker,” baby!). The bets are made, the critical positions are staked out and the fans line up: Are you Team Cameron or Team Bigelow? Are there any surprises left for the early morning ceremony, especially when they expand the Best Picture category to 10 films? Is there enough energy left to whip ourselves up into a froth of indignation? Do we even care?

Well, yeah, we do. Somehow the Oscars still matter. We celebrate the worthy nominees and kibitz, complain and gripe about everyone the Academy missed. And, once again, even with the love spread out to 10 Best Picture nominees, there is no shortage of deserving artists who didn’t make Oscar’s cut, and we’re not shy about sharing our opinions on where they went wrong. So once again we offer our annual report card on Oscar’s slights and oversights. Call it: They shoulda been a contender.

Best Actor

Is there an actor who doesn’t belong here? Perhaps not, but for all the goodwill and gentle authority of Morgan Freeman’s Nelson Mandela in “Invictus,” his inclusion feels more like a goodwill gesture when compared with the discomfortingly unkempt angles and inarticulate anguish that Joaquin Phoenix embodies in “Two Lovers,” which arrived early in 2009 and was all but forgotten by the end of the year. I suppose Phoenix has no one to blame but himself, after his promotional antics upstaged the film and Ben Stiller turned him into a punch line at last year’s Oscar ceremony, but that doesn’t change the power of his performance.

Read the entire feature at MSN here, and if you are so inclined, stick around and take the time to explore the rest of the MSN Guide to the 2010 Academy Awards.

The Academy gave us Hugh Jackman, both a song and dance man and a costumed superhero, to host the 2009 Oscar ceremony and it was still the dullest on record. The big musical number was actually tackled by talented folks doing a respectable job, but the old-fashioned show-biz tribute was decidedly lacking in imagination or electricity. The “Best Song” had no credibility when Bruce Springsteen’s song didn’t even make the cut. I liked the classy touch of bringing out five previous winners for each acting category not just to introduce each nominee but to offer them praise directly – even if you didn’t win the statue, you got high praise indeed from Oscar royalty. But it was still probably better for the nominees than it was for us at home. The closest thing to an upset was Departures taking the Best Foreign Language Film (most of us had money down on Waltz With Bashir, but then again, most of us have never seen Departures), Sean Penn showing a sense of humor in his acceptance speech and Jerry Lewis, in contrast, showing great restraint in his.

Little man, what now? (copyright AMPAS)

But being a blogger I’m obligated to offer some opinion of the awards. So beyond the fact that 2008 was a thin year for American cinema (especially put up against the meaty line-up of nominees last year) and that Slumdog Millionaire is another overrated underdog story with glib social politics only marginally more interesting than those of Crash (Haggis, not Cronenberg), I’d like to say that the Academy did right in its performer awards. Mickey Rourke gave a hearty and beautiful performance as The Ram and his off-screen story only feeds the character onscreen. But Sean Penn’s performance was inspiring, a transformation that finds the heart and soul of a historical figure and sends blood pumping through a man who has become practically deified over the decades. His Harvey Milk is not a crucified messiah but a human being who found his calling and his passion. His Harvey Milk is not just an out-and-proud gay man, but a man who is no longer embarrassed at being himself, bad jokes and all. His greatest revelation: the way this goofy gay nerd won folks over with his sincerity, his passion and his complete lack of self-consciousness, and the way he showed them how to become a political force to stand up for their rights.

As for Kate Winslet, who Time Magazine proclaimed “Best Actress” on the cover of the issue I received the day before the Oscars, I say that she is very good in two 2008 movies that are not, and that  she won for the right performance. In Revolutionary Road, she is the sensitive would-be artist/intellectual with fantasies of a life beyond suburbia, married to a blithely self-aggrandizing husband (DiCaprio) who just doesn’t understand, or even notice, her disappointment at the compromises of their lives. After all, they’re living the middle-class dream, aren’t they? Winslet plays her character as a dam holding in the building waters of frustration and discouragement and discontent until the walls burst and everything flood out in a torrent of furious rage and hostility directed at her shallow, self-absorbed husband. Those scenes are explosive. The rest of the film is a glib commentary on lives that are not lived so much as acted as illustrations of unrealistic dreams and stifling conformity and even Winslet rarely breaks out of the quotation marks that Sam Mendes puts around the performances.

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My annual “shoulda been a contender” list is up at MSN now.

Best Picture

Academy voters have proven quite open-minded about hobbits and elves, serial killers, gangsters and all manner of eccentrics when it comes to handing out Oscar gold. So why is it that comic-book movies still get no love from Oscar? “The Dark Knight” has been racking up critics’ awards and guild nominations all season, only to be knocked out of Academy Award contention by the self-consciously serious “The Reader.” Literary pedigree and “important” themes trump pop-culture mythology. Apparently voters don’t know how to respond when the metaphors are masked in spectacular set pieces and Halloween costumes.

From the flamboyant to the sublime: It would have been lovely to see Kelly Reichardt’s quietly intimate “Wendy and Lucy” get a nom and some much-deserved attention. And although foreign films are rarely acknowledged in the top category, it would have been exhilarating to see “A Christmas Tale” (MSN Movie’s pick for best film of 2008) in that company, especially because it wasn’t even submitted for the Foreign Language Film category. At least “WALL-E” has its Animated Feature Film nomination (and is pretty much a shoo-in to take home the statue).

See the complete list here.