Karina on SpoutBlog

I’m still catching up on RSS feeds after a week away, but as movie blog talk increasingly moves towards Oscar prognostication (because what else are we gonna talk about between now and Sundance –– Bride Wars?), I’m noticing a sort of two-headed theme emerge in the last week of the year. One the one hand: While Slumdog Millionaire, Milk and Benjamin Button all have their fans, no one seems crazy enough about the front-runners for the final two best picture slots (Frost/Nixon, Doubt and, um … Revolutionary Road? Maybe?) to label any of them as a lock; on the other: this year, to be contrarian seems to be equivalent to being populist.

Factors A + B first resulted in a mostly-online push for a Best Picture nomination for The Dark Knight. It might have seemed laughable before the movie opened (a comic-book cape flick blockbuster annointed for all time as one of the five best films of the year? Please!), but the campaign has gathered so much steam that the film’s worthiness is now a non-issue; in fact, it’s currently comfortably lodged within the top five on the Gurus of Gold predictions chart at Movie City News.

If it worked once, maybe it could work again. And thus, we find bloggers like Kris Tapley and Jessica Coen putting their weight behind a Wall-E Best Picture nod; AJ Schnack arguing that Man on Wire, one of the most popular and crowd-pleasing documentaries in years (not to mention the best reviewed film in any genre of this year) deserves the same; and, most interesting to me, David Carr arguing that Iron Man is more deserving of the Best Picture slot that may have already been ceded to The Dark Knight.

I still haven’t seen Wall-E (I know, I know), but I could definitely get behind an Oscar fight between Iron Man and Man on Wire. Both films would have made my 2008 top 20 for sure, and either would be a less embarrassing film to laud than Benjamin Button.

So what say you? What popular successes do you deem more worthy of a Best Picture nod than this year’s crop of humdrum prestige pictures?