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.

The bridge is yours.

-Gael Garcia Bernal will be your new Zorro, because why not.

-All these Avengers teases are killing me.

-In defense of Nicolas Cage, who really is pretty awesome.

-Downton Abbey paper dolls to get you through until Sunday.

-Michael Fassbender really doesn’t look like he’s following proper scientific procedures in this new trailer for Prometheus:

I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about Shame, a movie I think I admire more than I like. Other critics will and have said lots of things about Michael Fassbender’s performance, which is marvelously tormented (it struck me that one of the reasons he’s so powerful and unnerving in roles like this, or as Magneto in X-Men: First Class is that when he cries or gets angry or upset, his mouth tends to curve up in a rictus of a smile). For a man who spends much of his time pursuing an act that’s meant to be an expression of the life force, he looks frighteningly close to death. And there’s a debate to be had, I think, about whether Steve McQueen should have explored the roots of Brandon’s addiction, particularly the constantly-implied but never-specified “bad place” that Brandon and his sister Sissy come from. But I found myself struck more by things around the movie’s margins than at its center, by emotions other than the core of Brandon’s torment.

One thing I appreciated was the decision to have Brandon sleep with women of color as well as white women. There might have been something disturbing about depicting a very attractive white man using black and Asian women as disposable partners. But nobody ever exactly follows up with him — in some cases, because they’re pros, in some cases because he’s as disposable to them as they are to him. The most genuinely erotic sex scene in the movie happens between Brandon and his coworker, Marianne, an African-American woman he’s actually gone on a date with, and after an awkward beginning, seems to have made an emotional and intellectual connection with. Ultimately, he can’t bring himself to sleep with her. But I still appreciate that McQueen makes a non-white woman the most multi-dimensionally attractive person in the movie.

And while the Shame is about the fundamentally unsatisfying way Brandon sees the world, it’s also delicately about what it means to be the object of sexual desire. The opening sequence, in which he and a woman on a subway train trade increasingly intense glances, certainly communicates the ferocity of Brandon’s hunger. But it’s also a beautiful articulation of how it feels to be the object of that attention, in a way that respects ambiguity. In their initial encounter, the woman is first embarrassed, then reciprocates. His attention is both flattering and overwhelming, and there’s something honest in that lack of clarity. But when Brandon comes up behind her as she stands for her stop, chasing her through the commuter-clogged station, his behavior shifts from an implication of intimacy to frightening. There’s a difference between wanting to connect with someone and wanting to devour them.

Both Brandon’s failed relationship with Marianne and these subway encounters elevate the simple act of communication into an incomprehensible mystery. We can feel his fear. And even though Brandon is more sexually successful than his boss, a brutal caricature of a wannabe pick-up artist with a family at home, even all the practice he’s had doesn’t give him a fail-proof approach, or universally good instincts in selecting his partners. I don’t think a sequence where Brandon has a sexual encounter in a gay bar is actually as intense a symbol of his degradation as McQueen suggests it is. But it’s certainly testament to the persistent spur of his addiction, coming after he’s been beaten up by one of the boyfriends of a woman he’s trying to pick up, and before a night-ending threesome. Brandon may be more familiar with the varieties of human sexuality than a non-addict, but it remains a mysterious and unpredictable force for him.

And perhaps for us. I may have mixed feelings about the decision to leave the reason Brandon and Sissy’s boundaries are so disastrously degraded obscure. But I appreciate the decision not to pose a solution for Brandon’s addiction, or a model of functional sexual relationships. Is it a bad thing for the attractive blonde from the bar to have sex with Brandon under a bridge under any circumstances, or only unfortunate that it’s so easy for him to get his fixes? Shame doesn’t pretend to know, and doesn’t demand that we know either. Engagement is the only thing it asks for, whether of Brandon or of us.

The bridge is yours.

-I’m not a huge short story person, but the new Don DeLillo sounds fantastic.

-Michael Fassbender has ideas for a new X-Men movie, but I just want to see Wolverine fight the Spanish Civil War.

-I wonder what it would mean for TV storytelling if the Supreme Court dramatically limited indecency regulation.

-The IMDb age discrimination suit heats up.

-I can retire now. I have everything I’ve ever wanted:

First, thanks again to Kate, Tyler, Jess, and Kay for holding down the fort last week. I can’t say how much I appreciate it. And I missed you guys—it’s good to be back!

-Really excited to see Patty Jenkins’ spin on Thor.

-Remakes don’t always have to be bad things.

-As great as it would be to move away from the standard television season and its inefficiencies, Jamie Weinman is probably right that it won’t ever change.

-I feel like Shame is going to make a lot of us with crushes on Michael Fassbender feel less than great about ourselves:

As an aside in a Deadline piece about the deals coming out of the Toronto Film Festival, Pete Hammond notes something interesting about the difference between how studios planned to get Colin Firth and Michael Fassbender Academy Awards:

Most buyers I talk to are irritated by some sellers’ insistence that their film be released this year in time for Oscar consideration. That’s a tall order and leaves little time for creating a marketing campaign, much less an awards strategy. Nevertheless, that was one of the demands made by the sellers of the controversial Shame during negotiations. Fox Searchlight agreed, others didn’t. In fact I was told that Sony Pictures Classics, which wanted the picture, came up with a smart strategy they compared to The Weinstein Company’s for Colin Firth. That consisted of Firth doing a lot of campaigning and earning a nomination for A Single Man in 2010, thus laying the groundwork for his The King’s Speech win the next year. SPC was going to put Fassbender out there and get him recognition for their November release of David Cronenberg’s Dangerous Method and then release Shame later in 2012 for a one-two punch that the Academy would notice. No go. The sales people behind Shame insisted it be released this year, thereby throwing the Venice Film Festival’s Best Actor winner into an already overcrowded awards race that among others includes Clooney, Pitt, Oldman, and DiCaprio who are better known – at least at this point.

The approach to Firth was clearly conservative: he established credibility for playing gay, but the role everyone knew he was going to win for was much more conventional, a heterosexual monarch gearing up to fight Hitler with words. I would have liked to see a campaign for Fassbender go in the opposite direction, from a great man who crosses the line in service of what he sees as a higher good to what sounds like a lacerating deconstruction of what society sells as a heterosexual male fantasy, as much sex as you want and more.

Fans of the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Michael Fassbender, Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassel, moustaches, and the prospect of Keira Knightley gone wild, this one’s for you (trailer SFW if your work can accomodate spanking and Vincent Cassel getting handsy with a laundress):

All of that said, I do hope Knightley’s character is an actual person instead of the Hysterical Russian Broad Who Gets Between A Couple of Historical Bros. Between this and Sucker Punch, we’re one movie shy of a Crazy Ladies trend. I thought Sucker Punch was a hot mess, but it also had more ideas going for it than most critics acknowledged, including an acknowledgement of how insanely flawed our mental health system was so recently; an accurate depiction of the cavalierness with which people performed lobotomies; and an emphasis on female friendship and self-sacrifice that was depicted in a flawed way but still a welcome departure from the incentive structure of most action movies. My sense is that I’ll feel a similar ambivalence about A Dangerous Method, just directed differently. Sucker Punch tried to get inside women’s heads, even if it failed. In A Dangerous Method, Jung and Freud may care more about the welfare of the young woman in question, but the risk is that the only thing anyone will try to get inside is her body.