Yeah, yeah, the ceremony’s over, and there’s not much point wondering what could have gone differently. But given all the moaning about how predictable and moribund this year’s Academy Awards were, here are ten performances and films that, had they been nominated, could have forced members of the Academy to make a clearer choice between nostalgia for movies’ past, and excitement for their vital future.

1. Contagion, for Best Picture and Jennifer Ehle for Best Supporting Actress: Stephen Soderbergh’s near-future nightmare of a world where hundreds of millions are killed by a fast-spreading plague was eerily familiar, a crisis managed and influenced by well-intentioned but limited bureaucrats, bloggers and vaccine deniers, and cured by a serene scientist willing to take an absolutely insane risk. And it was anchored by terrific performances, from Jude Law as a repellent hawker of a miracle cure to Jennifer Ehle as that scientist. Ehle takes a small role and makes it shine, gives us a whole, and highly unique, person out of the few scenes she has.

2. Michael Fassbender, Shame, for Best Actor: I tend to think Shame is somewhat overrated. But if a handsome white dude was going to get nominated for going to an emotionally risky, soul-bearing place, that handsome white dude should have been Fassbender for his portrait of self-loathing, rather than Clooney, composed and noble in grief.

3. Miss Bala, for Best Foreign Language Film: I don’t remotely begrudge A Separation its win, especially given the resulting acceptance speech. But just as I’m glad Demian Bichir’s surprise nomination for Best Actor got more people to see Chris Weitz’s extraordinary immigration movie A Better Life, I’d have liked to see Miss Bala, about why people might want to leave Mexico, get a similar bump.

4. Vanessa Redgrave, Coriolanus, Best Supporting Actress: All words feel too poor to do proper honor to Redgrave’s turn as a war leader’s mother in Ralph Fiennes’ passion-project adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. But in a movie full of strong performances, Redgrave is magnificent. It’s a huge disappointment that this movie’s December qualifying run means it can’t get the consideration it deserves for next year’s awards ceremonies.

5. Andy Serkis, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, For…Something: If the Academy can find a way to give an award to Oprah, who sure needs it as her OWN network struggles, surely they should have found a way to recognize Serkis and the folks he worked with to create one of the most indelible characters of the year. Matt Zoller Seitz even laid out a way they could do it. And having Serkis in the mix would have been a particularly good thing on a night when the Academy seemed to fetishize its past while expressing some real contempt for the consumers and tastes that will shape its future.

6. Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt, Young Adult, for Best Actress and/or Best Supporting Actor: Another pair of extremely un-vain, vulnerable performances that cleverly reveal the rot at the heart of our fantasies. The Academy found Theron’s transgressiveness when she played a lesbian serial killer compelling, but seems to have been discomfited by this movie, a direct attack on a culture of looks.

7. The Trip, Best Picture: I realize this is kind of a wild card, but if the Oscars wanted to go international and to go with movies that reflect on show business, why not take a flyer on this totally charming, cutting British movie about friends in show business and the diminishing rewards of fame? Oh wait: because a true comedy (not counting Crash, people) hasn’t won since Annie Hall.

8. Dee Rees, Pariah, and Steve McQueen, Shame, for Original Screenplay or Best Director: Sooo many white dudes in those categories. It would have been interesting to see how the Academy responded to a situation where there were a lot more people of color in the mix. This year, they appear to have picked one, Octavia Spencer.

1. Most obviously, this is a deeply conventional list of nominees. Shame is a daring movie, but given its critical acclaim, Putting it somewhere in the mix wouldn’t have been so hard. The best director list is all dudes. And seriously, War Horse for best picture?

2. That said, if the Academy was going to take a risk with acting nods, I’m thrilled that it did so with Demian Bichir, whose performance as a immigrant father who risks deportation to get his truck and gardening equipment back after they’re stolen was one of the movies that moved me most deeply last year.

3. I’m glad to see the love for Bridesmaids, but frustrated by the lack of attention for Young Adult, which may lack toilet humor, but pushes into vastly different and more difficult places than the former. It’s very hard to watch Charlize Theron play the wildly selfish Mavis Grady, but she’s a much more daring and challenging so-called difficult woman than Lisbeth Salander or Maggie Thatcher.

4. Margin Call‘s Best Original Screenplay nod is fantastic news. It’s not just that this nervy, restrained financial thriller is a great, timely movie. It’s that the movie scraped forward on a combination of theatrical distribution and VOD, a triumph for a new model that could help more movies get to the audiences they deserve. Next to this, the nods for Ides of March for Adapted Screenplay is a disgrace.

5. Rise of the Planet of the Apes gets nominated in visual effects, rather than acting (not that it doesn’t deserve that nod, too) and Hollywood avoids a pressing question about its future yet again? At this point, I think another actor needs to give an undeniable performance in motion capture before the Hollywood community will come to consensus about how to define this new form.

James Franco mostly annoys me when he makes headlines these days, but in our ongoing debate for how to properly weight the recognition for Andy Serkis’s Performance Capture work, this is a useful contribution:

Performance Capture is here, like it or not, but it also doesn’t mean that old-fashioned acting will go the way of silent film actors. Performance Capture actually allows actors to work opposite each other in more traditional ways, meaning that the actors get to interact with each other and look into each others eyes. For years computer technology forced actors to act opposite tennis balls if a movie wanted to have CG creatures, but now the process has come full circle so that actors playing CG creatures can perform in practical sets, just like the “human” actors. In acting school I was taught to work off my co-stars, not to act but react and that was how I would achieve unexpected results, not by planning a performance, but by allowing it to arise from the dynamic between actors, and on The Rise of the Planet of the Apes that’s exactly what I was able to do opposite Andy as Caesar.

Now, your ability to coax good performances out of the people you’re working with is a skill that directors are generally recognized for, not actors (though I wonder if folks think about that when they’re casting their Best Supporting votes). But it’s a reminder that the effects folks couldn’t produce Serkis’s performance and the scenes as a whole he’s in without them, just as he couldn’t do what he does without their critically important work. We have to figure out a way to recognize these hybrids. They’re not going away.

We’ve talked about this a bit before, but Andy Serkis makes the case for why he should be eligible for acting awards — which I agree with, I just don’t know that we can nominate him alone:

There is no difference. Acting is acting. Performance capture is a technology, not a genre; it’s just another way of recording an actor’s performance. It’s very interesting being in two movies this year that are manifested completely differently but use the same process. The same visual effects company, Weta Digital, produced apes that look entirely real and a palette and a style that honors the source material of Tintin. What Steven was trying to do was to have the best of both worlds, where you can create the look and the feel and the sensibility of Herge [Tintin's cartoonist creator] but have emotionally truthful performances. The technology allows the actors to enter into those worlds…The technology has come to the point where we could shoot Gollum and the Hobbits in the same moment, as we did in Apes. In the original, I’d have to shoot against empty plates that were shot on the day, then repeat the process on the performance-capture stage, sometimes months later. Now we get it in one hit, so it’s much more actor- and director-friendly.

Obviously post-production and effects work exist on a continuum. But there’s a difference between technological alteration without which a performance could not exist, and post-production work that tweaks or modifies a performance or a set but that does not constitute the core of the work. Our current awards categories don’t provide appropriate recognition to the first category of technological and post-production work. I want Serkis to get piles of statues. I just think we have to find a way to acknowledge the interactive nature of the work. The fact that visual effects artists often don’t get properly credited is part and parcel of a system that involves visual effects studios giving up not just credit but profits in order to keep work, even though the industry increasingly relies on their work to satisfy audience expectations.

Maybe if Serkis gets a nomination or an award for a role where his face isn’t actually on-screen, it could trigger a special citation for the visual effects folks who translated his performance. I don’t know that it’s a perfect solution. But I think we need to reconsider the awards categories themselves, not just who fits into them.

I don’t blame Andy Serkis for wishing he’d be eligible for acting awards. He hasn’t just pushed forward the use of motion-capture technology; he’s challenged the idea that the only thing that humans can convincingly and compellingly play is other human beings, which I think in the long run will help us develop, in particular, much more sophisticated science fiction.

But I think it’s impossible to nominate Serkis alone for an acting award, just as it would be inappropriate to nominate his effects team and not nominate him. Without Serkis, there’s no performance to build on top of, no facial expressions and no physicality to transform into something else. But without the effects team, there’s just a dude in a funny suit. It’s like nominating an actor’s bones but not his skin, or vice versa. And because the interdependence is so much deeper than, say, an actor and a makeup artist, or an actor and wardrobing, any solution that recognizes only half the team responsible for the performance isn’t really acceptable. It’s not like the use of motion capture’s going to decrease over time, so delaying some sort of definitive ruling will only make the clamor more intense, not less. Could you nominate an entire team for an acting award? It’s probably an imperfect solution, and I’d be curious to hear other thoughts. That people should get credit is an important principle — and not just in small, fast-running type at the end of credits sequences.