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.

Over at the Hollywood Reporter, Scott Feinberg argues that the move to an electronic voting system could allow the Academy Awards to move dramatically earlier in the year, putting pressure on the competing awards shows that have sapped the Oscars’ momentum in the run-up to the big night. I actually wonder if what would help even more than the schedule change would be that electronic voting might make younger Academy voters more likely to participate.

This year’s Academy Awards nominations seemed decidedly creaky in most of the major categories, whether it was the odd nods for War Horse or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, or the fact that Jonah Hill was almost bizarrely young in comparison to the other men up for acting awards. A movie like Bridesmaids, which probably resonated much more with younger viewers than with older ones, picked up some smaller nominations but didn’t make the cut for Best Picture — it would also be interesting to see whether comedies in general would do better with younger Academy viewers than older ones. And Shame, which I imagine would have been a hard sell to get the Academy’s most conservative older viewers to even watch, was shut out entirely.

I’m not saying that the Academy should become the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards or anything. And paper ballots should be available to older voters who want to use them. But if you’re worried about declining viewership for the Oscars, it’s not just a matter of timing. It’s a matter of viewers in the demo feeling like they have skin in the game.

It seems more likely that Michael Fassbender will win a lot of awards this winter for his tortured performance as a sex addict in Shame than that Charlize Theron will take home hardware for her performance as a toxic, alcoholic author of YA literature who pursues a doomed romantic quest in Young Adult. That’s too bad. Theron and costar Patton Oswalt are remarkable in this acid little comedy, a reteaming of writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman that sloughs off all the irritating tics of their previous collaboration in Juno and leaves behind something sleek and venomous. And both Shame and Young Adult are critiques of highly gendered fantasies: for Shame, the idea that unlimited access to sex is paradise, and for Young Adult, the idea that a sticky-sweet fantasy of true love and destiny is the surest path to happiness.

Even before she humiliates herself trying to win back her high school boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson), Mavis Gary (Theron) is in a bad place. She’s parlayed her life experience as the kind of girl who wins best hair in her high school yearbook into a job ghostwriting a YA franchise with a star character who says things like “I’m the hottest girl in the world.” But that golden sheen isn’t preventing the series from coming to an end. Mavis wakes up from alcoholic stupors in a filthy, cluttered apartment in a drab Minneapolis apartment building, does desultory Wii Fit workouts, and shows occasional affection to her dog, named Dolce. When a high school friend who’s also made it to the big city tells Mavis, “We’re lucky we got out. We have lives,” it sounds less like an affirmation and more like a sick joke.

But it’s not until Mavis, spurred on by the announcement that Buddy and his wife have had their first child, decides to go back home, win Buddy back, and in doing so, return to the last time she felt worth anything, that things really get grim. There’s a tooth-rotting sweetness to Mavis’s conviction that she and Buddy are destined to be together. “Love conquers all. Have you not seen The Graduate? Or, like, anything?” Mavis snaps at a doubter. Buddy uneasily reconnects with Mavis, who shows up in revealing designer clothes to suburban bars and fakes an affinity for his child in an effort to get close to him. “You sound like one of your crazy characters,” he jokes at one point, trying to turn her delusions and stasis into good things. “It’s like the rest of us changed. You just got lucky.” But when she tells him tipsily, “These past few days have been some of the best of my life.” He’s unnerved. “They have?” he asks her. It’s a truly awful prospect. There’s nothing wrong with Mavis incorporating snips of overheard conversation into her novels to give voice to her teenage characters. But mistaking coincidence for profound connection and willfully misreading signals is a recipe for misery.

It would be easy for Young Adult to either punish Mavis, turning her into someone who deserves her despair, or to redeem her, giving her opportunities to learn and rewarding her for succeeding. The movie walks a very fine line between those options, producing something vastly more interesting in the process: a story about the inability of people to see each other and themselves clearly and with humanity. Mavis’s parents deflect her when she tells them bluntly she believes she might be an alcoholic. The younger sister of Matt (a marvelous Oswalt), Mavis’s one-time locker-mate, sees Mavis as extraordinary and worldly even when she’s marinating in shame. Matt, who walks with crutches after a violent attack in high school almost crippled him, isn’t much more satisfied with his life than Mavis is with hers. But at least he knows the reasons for his dissatisfaction. Matt is the only person who believes Mavis when she tells him, “I’m crazy. And no one loves me.” And because of that he’s the only person who can actually engage with Mavis’s self-image dysmorphia and neediness, but also with her cruelty and dismissiveness to other people. “Guys like me were born loving women like you,” he tells her, in desire and regret.
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One of the best things about writing about multiple media is that you’re not subject to the tyranny of Best Of lists. I could no more decide between Shame and Hugo for a numbered slot than I could pick between Revenge and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (though can we please get Kanye writing rhymes for and about Emily Thorne? I need an update on Snoop Dogg and his Sookie Stackhouse obsession). However, there were a lot of things that made me happy this year, and because Oprah’s not rockin’ it anymore, here is a semi-chronological-but-unranked list of my 26-odd favorite things to consume or discuss in 2011. A similar list of my least favorite things will follow tomorrow.

1. Frank Ocean makes us all hurt so good: I’m more irritated than anything else by the antics of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. But it’s worth it for Frank Ocean, who rocks specific melancholia like nobody’s business. “Novacane” was one of my favorite songs of 2011.

2. Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch: Before y’all accuse me of getting all Armond White up in the business, let me be clear. I don’t think Sucker Punch is an affirmatively good movie or that Snyder is a visionary director (though I appreciate that he actually has a distinctive visual style). But as aestheticized meditation on the horrors of lobotomy, a frightening and overlooked part of American mental health history, I found it unexpectedly moving. Plus, Snyder circumvented a ban on female leads with the movie.

3. Cedar Rapids sets Ed Helms loose: Up In the Air, but for people who actually live in flyover country, and Parks and Recreation with a deeper undercurrent of bitter darkness and isolation. There should be more popular culture about the struggle to be fundamentally decent.

4. War photographers movie The Bang-Bang Club and HBO’s biopic of the Louds, Cinema Verite: After the death of Tim Heatherington and as Joao Silva recovered from his injuries, The Bang-Bang Club offered a look at what it takes not just to put yourself in danger as a war photographer, but at what it means to be an observer rather than someone who intervenes. Conversely, Cinema Verite went back to the invention of reality television to explore what it means to be watched — and dissected — by a mass audience.

5. Game of Thrones is brilliant, and even the frustrating A Dance With Dragons is grist for the mill: I worry that George R.R. Martin’s universe is spiraling completely out of control, too big for any series to contain. But the first season of the HBO adaptation featured great performances, particularly by a host of very young actors and a smart sense for cuts and world-building. I don’t know if we’ll reach the end of this fascinating, maddening saga any time soon. But the ride looks like it’s going to be delightful.
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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.