Two stunning choices for Best Picture

I was fairly confident Letters From Iwo Jima would make the final five Best Picture nominees and that meant that one of the four movies on the bubble would get bumped out: The Queen, Dreamgirls, Babel, and Little Miss Sunshine (with a nomination reserved for The Departed). It ended up being Dreamgirls that lost out, but after seeing a few more films, I'm very surprised at the inclusion of two of the films. Babel and Little Miss Sunshine do not seem like Best Picture nominees, for entirely different reasons.

Little Miss Sunshine is an enjoyable, yet fairly insignificant film with good comic moments. It doesn't scream Oscar even before you factor in a weak dramatic element and a last half hour that drags. Usually Oscar doesn't pay much attention to films like this and I'm not quite sure why it did this time.

Babel, on the other hand, is a brilliant film. It is a unique, haunting, gut-wrenching film made using five different languages by a Mexican director. Amores Perros, the director's first film, was equally stunning and haunting and garnered only a Best Foreign Language Film nomination. Babel does have Brad Pitt, in a role of equal size to eight other parts, but he's hardly the attention grabbing star he was some years ago. This is the kind of original, intense film that usually gets recognized in the screenplay category if it gets noticed at all.

I'm thrilled with Babel being a Best Picture nominee but completely baffled by Little Miss Sunshine's inclusion. Dreamgirls would have been a much better choice.