Departures eluded most Oscar pools. Awards-obsessed street urchin Tom O'Neil, the Los Angeles Times Oscar expert, managed the correct final answer after a tipster told him that The Class wasn't even one of the original nominees—and that Bashir might not have been, either. So how did they make it through?

Outrage over a snub of Romania's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days prompted the creation of an oversight committee made up of 20 Academy members last year, with the ability to ram three of their own nominees in, regardless of what all the general votes have indicated. The committee's unpopular picks, as O'Neil divined, were automatically disadvantaged, which helps explain why the idea hasn't seemed to work. So forget the committee approach! There are three bigger problems that need to be addressed—and cleverer solutions to them:

1. The voters: Despite the creation of a blue-ribbon panel to override bad nominations (an idea the Emmys adopted recently, then did away with), the Foreign Language Film category is still set up in a way that encourages bad picks. In order to vote, members must have seen all five films, and they need to have gone to special Academy screenings to have done so. While that seems like a fair rule, it's one that isn't applied to, say, the acting categories (when people can and do vote for performances they haven't seen). Thus the pool of Foreign Language Film voters tends to shrink to elderly, conservative voters with enough time to attend all five theatrical screenings. The Academy provides DVDs for members who miss the Best Song screenings—why not do the same here?

2. The eligibility: Each country can submit only one film, which means that some countries will sacrifice their strongest work for a more conventional choice, as Spain did in 2002 when it notoriously snubbed Pedro Almodóvar's Talk To Her. It's time to reward countries with flourishing film industries by allowing them to submit more films.

3. The new international film climate: Movies nowadays draw their financing from a full range of sources—but if those deep pockets come from different countries, none can have enough say to submit the result as their own. The Motorcycle Diaries was one of 2004's most acclaimed foreign films, but due to its eclectic, globe-spanning financiers, the rules disqualified it for a Foreign Language Film Oscar.

It doesn't matter how many oversight committees are put in place—until the whole voting system receives a radical overhaul, too many worthy films will never get a chance at nabbing the award given to such notable luminaries as Roberto Benigni, Renee Zellweger, and Crash. This injustice cannot stand!

Ari Folman's autobiographical exploration of his role in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon — literally painted from repressed memories corroborated by his Army mates — had settled into about a thousand Top 10 lists since its release on Christmas, but had managed only also-ran awards status since failing to win the top prize in May at Cannes. Its Oscar chances were equally endangered, facing WALL-E in the Animated Feature category and French sensation The Class in the Foreign-Language running. (It wasn't released in time to qualify for Best Documentary.)

But with Israel now embarking on another bloody military foray and WALL-E safely recognized in second place, the NSFC went topical in Bashir's favor. The rest of the list offered yet another boost to Happy-Go-Lucky, which tied WALL-E as Best Picture runner-up and claimed four prizes for Best Actress (Sally Hawkins), Best Supporting Actor (Eddie Marsan) and Best Director and Screenplay for Mike Leigh. All will go to the Oscars, where Hollywood will commence vanquishing them in favor of Kate Winslet or Heath Ledger or Christopher Nolan and/or whomever else the Academy is more comfortable putting in front of a worldwide viewing audience. The run was fun while it lasted.

Elsewhere, Sean Penn claimed Best Actor, and German actress Hanna Schygulla came out of nowhere to score Supporting Actress for the Turkish film The Edge of Heaven. Best Documentary went to Man on Wire, which is having its own Oscar engraved as we speak. Congrats to all, and may other international current events conspire less violently to prod Academy voters to their recognition in February.

• National Society of Film Critics Awards 2008 [DaveKehr.com]

And why bother traveling thousands of miles and spending thousands of dollars just to hear Glenn Kenny call Sean Penn a dick in person? Look at it this way: Spout's Karina Longworth is doing some of her best writing from the airport, and her subject — Vogue's recent Sex and the City issue — addresses a movie not even screening at Cannes:

The Vogue spread restores a bit of the legitimate, grown-up class that has seemed to be lacking from the SATC campaign all along. ... Cannes likely would have been able to accomplish the same thing; the Vogue spread is probably cheaper, and it has the affect of reaching an audience of comparable demographics as those who would be exposed to as Cannes coverage, without ever having to make the actual quality of the actual film an issue. ... New Line just fired hundreds of people. Such frugality on their part is almost respectable.

There are some actual reviews floating around as well — Jeffrey Wells loves Three Monkeys, while Manohla Dargis is over the moon about Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary about a massacre at Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. The grim gets grimmer at Variety, where Leslie Felperin has a long shrug over Hunger, which chronicles IRA leader Bobby Sands' imprisonment, hunger strike and eventual death in 1982:

McQueen really overeggs the pudding is in the final reel, where (and this is no spoiler for anyone glancingly versed in Sands' story) the protagonist wastes away, the camera focusing intimately on his bedsores and emaciated frame. Tawdry, cliched images include Sands' vision of himself as a child sitting in the room, topped by a near final image of a flock of birds — free at last! — that seemingly symbolizes his soul's last flight. It's a disappointing last gasp for a film that otherwise demonstrates confidence, guts and the abundant promise of its helmer.

And which will likely be coming to a theater near you as distributors kick its tires today and tomorrow. The busy weekend ahead brings the world premiere of Indiana Jones 4, followed by another throng of reviews carrying over into Monday. We'll have ours then as well — we know, we're not holding our breath either.

[Photo Credit: Hollywood Elsewhere]