What the Oscars ignored

Did the Oscars actually get things right this year? Well, no, of course not, though they're closer than most years. The three best American films of the year ("The Hurt Locker," "Inglourious Basterds" and "A Serious Man") were all nominated for Best Picture, as was the year's best foreign film ("A Prophet"). Of course, most of the other nominations went to middlebrow crap and a film version of a Lisa Frank folder that made $2 billion. Here are a few alternate awards to make up for those deserving films that Oscar missed.

Best Performance by an Iguana in a

Supporting Role

Werner Herzog's "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" is, at its heart, a serious film about Hurricane Katrina and what it means to be a good man in a fundamentally corrupt system. It is also a film with an extended point-of-view shot of one iguana staring at another as soulful R&B music plays in the background.

Herzog has always been fascinated with exploring manifestations of human madness, and he turns this would-be-straight-to-DVD plot of a cop investigating a quadruple homicide into a delirious exploration of his tortured protagonist's corrupt soul. Working with Nicolas Cage, Herzog pulls off a lot of the same spark that his legendary collaborations with Klaus Kinski had, as his protagonist hallucinates the aforementioned iguanas, smokes his "lucky crack pipe" and cuts off an old lady's oxygen supply, all in the name of the greater good. The result is the most unpredictable film of the year, and one of the most exhilarating.

Most Fascinating Contradiction

It's no surprise that Lil Wayne withdrew his support from the tour documentary "The Carter" - the director, Adam Bhala Lough, shines a hard light on Wayne's self-destructive tendencies. But Lough's cinema-verite approach to this young rapper isn't a hatchet job. What the film gives us is a fascinatingly contradictory figure: a drug addict who writes and memorizes two songs a day, a rock star who says he doesn't have time for sex, a canny manipulator of image and brand who decides to make a terrible rock album. With its experimental approach to depicting a man and a new type of 21st-century stardom, "The Carter" might be the best hip-hop documentary ever made.

Best Performance by Gauze, Tin Foil and Saran Wrap

The things that stick with you the most from Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox" are the little details: the way fire is created through flickering little pieces of colored tin foil, the rising smoke that is made with gauze, the rain that is really rolling Saran wrap, the painting on the wall that seems to be a recreation of a Civil War battle with badgers.

Every frame of the film has a few of these details to marvel at, details that are impressive not because they set new benchmarks for CGI realism, but rather, because they reflect immense ingenuity by a director and crew clearly in love with even the tiniest details of their project. The fact that Anderson extended the same care to his hilarious and moving script and his subtle work with his actors only confirms that, instead of "Up," this should have been the animated Best Picture nominee.

Most Egregious Cinematography Snub

Michael Mann's "Public Enemies" is far from the year's best film, but it's easily the year's most impressive cinematographic achievement. Using high-definition digital cameras, Mann and cinematographer Dante Spinotti shot images that would be impossible to capture with earlier technologies. The ultra-sensitivity of the cameras to light, for example, allowed Mann to capture a dazzling night-time firefight lit only by the flashes of gun muzzles, a sequence that would have been a muddy, incomprehensible blur on regular film.

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Mann is also tremendously skilled with colors and textures (particularly in his use of smoke in this film), his handheld camera is bracingly kinetic even in conversation scenes, and the hyper-real clarity and harsh lighting of the images strip away the telltale Hollywood gloss from this depiction of history. The 1930s shot by Mann looks as real and as relevant as any digitally shot contemporary feature. The film has its flaws (read: Christian Bale), but the indelible images and the brilliant performances by Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard surely deserved some sort of recognition.

Best Film You Didn't See

Olivier Assayas' "Summer Hours" takes a spare, intimate story and finds the entire world within it. This story of a family dealing with the death of its matriarch and deciding what to do with the inheritance may seem simple, but in fact has a lot to say about globalization, the changing nature of French society and the meaning and importance of art itself. Assayas has been known for cinematic excess in the past, like his sleazy pulp film "Boarding Gate" or his corporate thriller "Demonlover." Here, he's after simpler - but no less powerful - pleasures, like capturing gorgeous vistas of southern France with his roving camera. He also showcases a number of subtle performances that are quite affecting in their evocations of mourning, reconciliation and adaptation to a new world.

Assayas is bursting with ideas about that new world. "Summer Hours" explores everything from the decreased importance of regional identity, to the complex dynamics of relationships between siblings, to the increased importance of family in a disconnected age. All of this emerges organically from a story that is incredibly moving at the personal level. Nowhere is this more evident than in the transcendent final 15 minutes, in which generations shift and symbols are destroyed, but the enduring artistic spirit of a family lives on. All of this, believe it or not, is expressed in the form of a walk by two lovers in the countryside.