I think the 11 nominations for The Aviator may have already reminded us how silly this exercise is.

incredibles not getting in to best pictures.

eternal sunshine not getting in to visual effects.

before sunset getting only ONE nomination.

the oscars is as silly as they come k?

Most of the comments I made on my own blog's Oscar recap echo those made here, but I'll add, or repost, what I wrote about the foreign category.
"The Foreign Language category is the usual mysterious, head-scratching bunch. I only know about one of them, The Sea Inside, and haven't seen any of them, so I can't really comment. But there do seem to be some glaring omissions... No Motorcycle Diaries or Almodovar, though the latter got squeezed out by Sea Inside as Spain's representative. Nothing from Asia, nothing from Latin America, the one from Africa wasn't Moolade, but a South African film. Overall, that category looks on the surface like a bunch of weepie white people movies that the schmaltz-loving voters in that category eat up, but I'll withhold judgement on 'em til I know more."

David, you probably know about the German picture nominated, ja? DOWNFALL. I know about Oliver Hirschbiegel and assume it's pretty good..

Craig, I keep meaning to come back to this, thinking I'll have more than a few moments to respond, but even though I do now, I still find it hard to come up with something succinct. I'd hate to be asked by a paper to assign Der Untergang a certain number of stars; I simply find it impossible to evaluate that way, to place it somewhere on a scale between "bad" and "good."

As a project, it's fascinating in all sorts of ways, and the simple fact of its existence is most fascinating of all. But you've probably caught most of all that: first full-scale portrayal of Hitler in a commercial German film, the role the film presumably plays in a new generation's coming to terms with the Third Reich, all that (and I can't help noting: seeing American critics rather bored with the heap of biopics dumped on them at the end of this year, I kept wishing, for their sake, that they'd had the opportunity to write about one that set off a national debate in the way that Passion and Fahrenheit did).

I'll be interested to see how Der Untergang plays in the US. Reactions in other European countries have varied according to each of their unique relationships with Germany and to the degree to which they suffered in WWII. I wonder if it'll be seen as an exclusively German story or one consigned purely to history or if it'll raise questions about the nature of nationalism and the danger of fervor of any sort to spill over into madness.

On that note, by the way, Bruno Ganz's performance is, of course, the centerpiece of the film and that performance alone would earn the film a full extra star if I were handing out stars. But at the same time, the film as a whole is a bombastic piece of work - not necessarily in the American sense, either, but more along the lines of the sort of bombast with which Eichinger approaches all his historical pieces, which falls into the long tradition of European epics - and that distances us from even the intimate horrors of, for example, the deaths of the Goebbels children, whose innocence is disturbingly complex precisely because of who they are - as opposed to the unquestionable innocence of tens of millions of others murdered by the Nazis.

All in all, marketing has demanded that the film sell itself as a vital but as yet untold chapter in the story of the defining course of events of the 20th century. And indeed, we've all wondered at some point: In those last days, what on earth was actually going on in that bunker down there?

But ultimately, you walk away with a sense of unfulfillment because you were hoping for big answers to big questions, and the fact of the matter is that, of all that went down between 1933 and 1945, this is one of the least vital and most trivial of all the stories to be told.

That's great, David. Wow, thanks for the report. Since I first asked about it, a friend of mine (from Germany originally) saw Downfall at the Berlin and Beyond festival here in SF and gave me a bit of this, too. Though she was more taken with Bruno Ganz and spokle to me mostly of his performance and that he was there speaking afterwards. So she certainly got something out of it and was interested to see this angle of Hitler. But I got the sense that it wasn't a run-out-and-see film, either, and your capsule of it kind of seals it. I would like to see it though, given my interest in WWII. On the other hand, I'm burned out on WWII. Heh.