2010's Oscar contenders raise some questions

For just a moment, stop obsessing about which 10 movies the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who are now in the middle of marking their ballots, will nominate for best picture.

Amid the year-end rush of new releases and blizzard of screeners, we have all been on a movie binge, so let us sort through some of those titles before they blur together. Because there are plenty of other questions to obsess over as the awards races move into high gear. Such as:

What has News Corp got against trees?

Rupert Murdoch's media empire, built on the back of his print business, certainly has turned many a tree into wood pulp, but now, in what could be read as an act of reparation, its Fox Filmed Entertainment unit has launched two movies that tree-huggers can embrace.

First, in Fantastic Mr Fox, farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean, an agribusiness in the making, team to destroy the mighty oak that houses Mr Fox and his family.

Then, in Avatar, futuristic military-industrial complex guns take aim at the Na'vi's monumental Hometree before turning its big weapons on the Tree of Life. Both movies side with forest creatures and indigenous people, which, if nothing else, should burnish News Corp's green credentials.

Why should filmmakers apologise for making musicals?

Nine director Rob Marshall might have just filmed a movie musical, but he seems uncomfortable with the genre, telling TheWrap.com, for example, that characters breaking into song on film can trigger a cringe moment." His solution, in both Chicago and Nine, is to turn the musical numbers into stylised fantasies.

But audiences do not automatically recoil at every musical moment onscreen. Certainly, one of the year's most elating film scenes was Joseph Gordon-Levitt's loose-limbed, morning-after dance to the tune of Hall and Oates' You Make My Dreams in (500) Days of Summer. (True, the actor himself did not sing, but with the world around him giving him a high-five, who would have blamed him if he did?) Even though most of the country tunes in Crazy Heart are presented as part of staged performances, they too function as heartfelt musical confessions for Jeff Bridges' character Bad Blake.

And, yes, it is animated, but Randy Newman's New Orleans in The Princess and the Frog is a place where inhabitants naturally break into song – no questions asked.

Why is the female species obsessed with kitchens?

In Julie & Julia, Amy Adams' character understandably struggles to master the art of French cooking in her cramped New York walk-up apartment.

In It's Complicated, Meryl Streep's Santa Barbara-based pastry chef already has a prettily outfitted kitchen, but she wants an even bigger space as part of the addition Steve Martin's architect is hired to build. Contrast that with Streep's Julia Child, who seemingly needed only a sharp knife and mixing bowl when she set out to conquer the food world.

When her husband does build her a kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is an entirely utilitarian affair, right down to its famous pegboard, which eventually ended up in the Smithsonian. Child's example might not have influenced kitchen design, but her cookbook did acquire iconic status. Witness the fact that it shows up in the beside stack of books that Rachel Weisz's character has amassed near the start of The Lovely Bones.

Why are characters always leaving their children?

Up in the Air has been justifiably hailed as one of the best screen adaptations of the year, but Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner's screenplay throws a major curveball late in the third act when it reveals the secrets behind Vera Farmiga's Alex.

She is introduced as the female equivalent of George Clooney's no-strings-attached road warrior.

But even though when queried about the qualities she looks for in a man, she says he has to be good with kids, the movie barely hints at the actual woman behind the one-night stands – and when it does, it throws her character somewhat out-of-whack. Similarly, the filmmakers behind Bones do not offer much explanation when that film's mother, played by Weisz, disappears from the film. Certainly, the death of a child, especially the sort of horrific death depicted in Bones, is traumatic and can break up a family. But Weisz's mom simply seems to abandon her two surviving children. Not the film's most convincing plot choice.

And they say women are vain…

This year, it was the men who resorted to body doubles. Although Alec Baldwin shows a fair amount of skin in It's Complicated, he made one thing clear while promoting the movie: That is not his derriere on film. A body double was recruited.

Actor Nicholas Hoult, who plays Kenny in A Single Man, looks like he has got nothing to worry about in the physique department. But that film's end credits also make mention that a body double stood in for him.

In fact, one of the few actors who let it all hang out was The Hangover's Ken Jeong, who bravely displayed his shortcomings, all for the sake of a laugh.

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