Milk
Four of the five nominated films are set, wholly or in part, in the 1970s. Hmmm. So were four of the five Best Picture finalists in 1977: All the President's Men, Network, Rocky and Taxi Driver. The retreat of current movies from current issues is a leading indicator of Hollywood's social irrelevance. While the town's liberal elite devoted themselves to bankrolling the Obama campaign, they put few of their political passion on the screens they fill with light entertainment. Yes, Milk, by dramatizing the 1977 effort of newly uncloseted gays to defeat a homophobic initiative on the California ballot, has accidental allusions to last fall's crusade against Proposition 8. But this exemplary and emotionally acute film is nonetheless a period piece. And just now, California liberals have more severe worries than whether same-sexers can marry. Besides, they recognize that Slumdog, which mixes political and social comment with irrepressible good feeling, is just the movie antidote for our national glums. It's a stimulus package for the pop-cultural soul. Odds of winning: 30 to 1
Director: Gus Van Sant
Back in the '80s, he was making creepy-art gay films like Mala Noche. Now Van Sant has gone epic, on a meager $20 million budget, and made a gay film for the mainstream — if only people outside the metrosexual mafia had gone to see it. He did a handsome job organizing the masses of people, events and emotions in this sprawling, complicated story. But he was working from an excellent script by Dustin Lance Black; and it's Black who'll win an Oscar for Best Screenplay, not Van Sant for Best Direction. Odds of winning: 30 to 1