Four for five...and three for four...

I've now seen four of the five films nominated for best picture at the 2007 Oscars, and I'm feeling okay about the choice.

Michael Clayton is outstanding, no doubt about it, but I'm going to stick with my choice of No Country for Old Men, though I'd put Clayton as a close second.

Michael Clayton tells - in case you weren't aware by now - the tale of a lawyer at a large law firm, a fixer whose courtroom days are long passed by but whose usefulness to the firm has rarely been higher, particularly when one of the firm's shining stars and senior partners cracks in the midst of a deposition on a half-billion-dollar case. Clayton is dispatched to reign his friend back in and bring him back into the fold, a rather challenging thing to do as Clayton finds that his friend's madness just might be catching and might not be madness at all.

Clayton is an impressive character sketch of a man pulled in a dozen different directions, all of which involve letting one of the others fall by the wayside. He is a divorced father trying to pay attention to a son who grows more and more distant from him by the day, a brother who is trying to help out his kin but finding that increasingly hard to do, a friend who wants to stay true, a cog in a giant money machine needing the machine to keep him on hand while the new owners take over, and a man hoping to make something more permanent of his life than a leased and - at the beginning of the film - destroyed Mercedes.

Focusing almost entirely on Clayton and showing him in utter isolation throughout the film (a wise choice in deleting a scene with a girlfriend - found on the DVD) and never moralizing the choices that he has to make, the filmmakers have crafted an outstanding character sketch and tied Clayton up in so many Gordian knots that his resolution stymied me until it was finally revealed - after a false ending seen when the film comes back to its beginning moments to find Clayton's aforementioned Mercedes in flames. The ending didn't ring false but yet left me with my mouth agape and even more impressed with the film.

Clooney (Oscar nominated), Swinton (Oscar winner), Wilkinson (Oscar nominated), Pollack, and the entire cast, honestly, give a masters class in acting in small ways, allowing their characters' emotions to dribble out in the smallest motions and briefest appearances.

This one should age quite well and certainly deserved its best picture nomination.

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And now I'm left with just Atonement, which just holds no interest at all for me. I can't possibly imagine the pain of sitting through what looks like an English Patient-rehash with Kiera Knightly in another of her costume pieces.

Good god...

The only years for which I've now seen every nominated film are 2005 (Crash - horrible choice by the Academy) and 1994 (Forest Gump - defensible, but I'd put three of the films above it). Four out of five puts this year up with 2001 (A Beautiful Mind - not my first choice but not a travesty), 2000 (Gladiator - I'd take Traffic or Crouching Tiger easily), 1997 (weak year - haven't seen Titanic), and 1991 (Silence of the Lambs - good choice).

I'm a little disappointed in myself at that smallist list...