Best Picture, 2006

Awards presented February 25, 2007

The nominees were... 

• Babel 
• The Departed 
• Letters From Iwo Jima
• Little Miss Sunshine
• The Queen 

... when they should have been ...

• Children of Men 
• The Lives of Others 
• Pan's Labyrinth 
• The Queen 
• Volver 

And the Oscar went to ... 
The Departed. Martin Scorsese finally got his directing Oscar for this film -- how many years too late? It's a solid, gritty cops-and-mobsters movie, but it seems overloaded with actors: Jack Nicholson (pulling out all the stops), Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Vera Farmiga, Alec Baldwin, and so on.They're all good, but I feel like I've seen the movie before. I keep getting it mixed up with Mystic River (a better movie with a similar setting).

... when it should have gone to ...

The Lives of Others 

A terrifically involving, chilling story about East German surveillance of its citizenry, which won the foreign language film Oscar. It was writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's first feature, and should have earned him nominations in those two categories. Ulrich Mühe's portrayal of the Stasi snoop who begins to develop a capacity for empathy also deserved a nomination. If anything, the film has only grown more disturbing as revelations about contemporary American electronic surveillance appear.