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.

My friend Neda Ulaby has a cool piece about how Fox has beefed up its investment in making movies overseas for the markets where they’re produced — and how that’s going to affect what we see on U.S. screens:

“China is the second or third biggest market in the world at 50 percent local,” [Sanford Panitch] says. “India the fourth biggest at 90 percent local, France at 40 percent local, Germany at 30 percent local, Korea a billion dollar market 50 percent, Japan — actually, Japan [is] the biggest international market in the world, 60 percent local.”

Fox International Productions actually started off three years ago with a Japanese version of the movie Sideways — that’s the one about two guys touring wine country. “When we originally got into the business,” Panitch says, we thought, ‘We’ve got this great library, let’s take advantage of it.’ And ironically, local markets don’t want recycled Hollywood content.”

And really, why would they? Bollywood hardly needs need old American ideas. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has refreshed Hollywood’s interest in stories from abroad. That’s not a Fox picture, but Panitch says his division is introducing foreign books, scripts and directors to the larger Fox system.

“There’s a new aesthetic that’s coming out of people that weren’t schooled in traditional Hollywood ways,” he says. “There’s an incestuousness creatively here where we’re all reading the same publications and listening to the same music.”

It’s always nice when economic incentives line up in favor of creative storytelling. We’re already seeing something like this on television in the melancholic dramas we’ve imported from Israel and remake as In Treatment and Homeland. And it would be fascinating to see what conventions developed in international market end up sticking with American audiences. Could an Indian norm of chaster but emotionally charged romances find favor with devoutly Christian or Jewish movie-going audiences? Could grittier action sequences like the ones in Miss Bala, which Fox brought to the U.S. after one of the company’s executives based in Mexico found it and promised the director it wouldn’t be changed for American audiences, take the place of pyrotechnics? I haven’t watched enough recent Chinese movies to speculate on patterns there, though Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon certainly suggests there’s an American market for Chinese martial arts movies, a steady supply of which have reached our shores since.

I’ve sung the praises of A Better Life here before, but I really think that to appreciate it, you should watch it with Miss Bala, a terrific movie out of Mexico based on the true story of a beauty queen who became the pawn of a drug cartel. As I explain in The Atlantic this week:

In Carlos’s case, the efficient machinery set up by the United States government to deport undocumented workers has essentially no room for appeal. The volunteer lawyer who visits him recognizes that Carlos has all the makings of a solid citizen, but none of the resources to fight for an incredibly rare exemption to the rules that say he must be returned to Mexico. The most the system can bend is to give Carlos a moment with his son before shipping the gardener off in shackles.

If a state with something to offer citizens its citizens can afford this kind of callousness, a state that couldn’t care less about its people can be all the more harsh and arbitrary. And it turns out not to matter to the Mexican government that Laura’s been coerced, threatened with death, and raped. Treating her as a collaborator with the cartel makes for a more interesting news story, so after she tips off a powerful general of a coming attack, she’s imprisoned, trotted out before the news cameras, and ultimately abandoned on the streets of Baja California

Miss Bala is a great, unnerving story about Mexico, but it’s also a fascinating antidote to the Strong Female Character trope. Laura does tremendously brave things, and survives through intense violence, but instead of a cool, detached competence, we feel the terror that would be ours if we found ourselves in the same situation. There’s a morality to feeling the horror of the bad things you do to stay alive because you have no other choice.

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