Davis, a Best Actress nominee for The Help, arrived at the awards ceremony in a stunning emerald-colored gown and a natural, curly Afro, instantly lifting the lid from the bubbling pot of anger, judgment, and debate often directed toward African-American women and the varying states of their textured tresses.

Through most of the awards season, Davis had donned a dizzying array of wigs and hairpieces to complement her tasteful choice of vibrant-hued cocktail dresses and elegant evening gowns. Many were attractive enough, but some of the follicle support had appeared stiff, ill-fitted, and aging to her lean frame and glowing ebony skin.

Fashion folks love her for her striking looks, that tiny clothes-hanger frame, and her willingness to take a risk. (She had her own private part pierced for the role of Lisbeth Salander, after all.) And when she arrived on the red carpet dressed in a Givenchy couture gown stitched from panels of cream-colored mixed lace, it was a fine fashion moment. The dress had exaggerated details at the bust line, giving the effect of tail fins shooting off her bosom. It was odd and fascinating, strangely enticing but not exactly pretty. It was the most interesting garment to make an appearance on the red carpet at the 84th annual Academy Awards.

The prettiest dress, however, most surely had to be the bright orange, strapless Louis Vuitton gown worn by Best Actress nominee Michelle Williams. It was feminine and delicate; it conjured the romance of old Hollywood without giving in to va-va-voom clichés. Williams paired it with a Bottega Veneta knot-top clutch in charming pink. Her look was an antidote to a red carpet dominated by white, ivory, and black.

Among all new films released Friday, Act of Valor counted as the runaway winner, with the public eagerly endorsing a breathlessly paced, passionately pro-military, hyperpatriotic action film about heroic Navy SEALs protecting the public from diabolical cooperation between Islamo-Nazis and drug cartels. The movie delivered its stunningly choreographed scenes of combat on a miniscule budget of $12 million, earning back more than twice that amount ($24.7 million, an impressive $8,128 per screen) in just its first three days in release. By comparison, the top new release from the big studios, Jennifer Aniston’s intermittently amusing hippie-commune comedy, Wanderlust, earned just $6.6 million and a $3,297 average per screen.

Like The Hurt Locker, the Oscar-winning Best Picture from 2008, Act of Valor attempted to give moviegoers an intimate, visceral sense of personal participation in danger and combat, but unlike The Hurt Locker, this new film connected with a mass audience—earning considerably more in its first three days than its much-acclaimed predecessor brought home in its entire run.

Despite reports saying otherwise, Sacha Baron Cohen was allowed to walk the red carpet dressed as the character from his upcoming movie The Dictator. And he totally behaved himself. Kidding! He stopped to talk to Ryan Seacrest, where he said he was wearing John Galliano (naturally) and then upended an entire urn of ashes—“Kim Jong-il!”—on the host.

The New Old Face of the Oscars

Of late, however, the Spirits and the Oscars have grown ever closer together as the films the Academy has nominated have gotten smaller and more niche—and the independent world has become a certified genre of Hollywood filmmaking. Like the Sundance Film Festival, the Spirits crowd has grown ever more entrenched in showbiz, with the presence of agents, corporate functionaries, financiers, and official sponsors overshadowing the clusters of grubby little artists around the tent. This year, as Oscar stands ready to award its most outsider film yet, The Artist, one question reigned: would the film’s triumphal march storm right over the Spirits, finally merging the two awards?

Only once before have the Spirits voters picked the same film as the Academy: Platoon in 1987. Instead it has more served to give a consolation prize to the smaller, critical-favorite also-rans that just fall short on Oscar night, films like Lost in Translation, Sideways, and The Wrestler. For the two awards to converge now, however, as the big studios more and more get out of the prestige adult-drama game, could signal that for all intents and purposes, the Oscar race has become a race of the best small or independent film.

This year, however, was to have been his. Clooney’s rich and nuanced performance in the critically-lauded film The Descendants earned him raves across the board. Not only that, at the race’s open, the Best Actor field was seen as the weakest of the major categories. Fellow It’s-Their-Turners were up for parts in movies that were perceived as either too light (Moneyball for Brad Pit) or outright disasters (J. Edgar for Leonardo DiCaprio). And so, by Christmas, a consensus had settled among the Oscar punditry that the prize was Clooney’s for the asking--game over, hand the Oscar to George.

A month and a half later, Clooney is the odds on favorite to lose. To a Frenchman whose name even now is unknown to most of Earth, who gave a mannered, non-vocal performance. As the Oscar ballots are being counted, Jean Dujardin is the heavy favorite to win the Best Actor prize. Clooney’s sensitive, complex performance seems like to join his growing list of also-rans in Oscar’s eyes.

Despite this fact—and the Los Angeles Times’ recent, not-so-surprising revelation that the “overwhelmingly white, male” body of Oscar voters doesn’t reflect Hollywood’s demographic makeup, let alone the movie-going public—we still gather in homes across the country to watch a show that, in the best case scenario, ultimately leaves us only partially satisfied.

So whether you’re someone who tries to dazzle your guests by cooking up the toughest recipes from Heston Blumenthal at Home, or more of the sort who chops up a bunch of Ho Hos and Sno Balls and passes them off as finger food, the surefire pleasure of your viewing party lies in themed potables.

Instead, director Michael R. Roskam’s first feature film eschews the familiar for gritty drama and sinewy character study set amid the strange-but-true world of Belgium's “hormone mafia”—criminals who traffic in drugs used to fatten up cattle for slaughter. The focus falls on Jacky Vanmarsenille, an inarticulate, antisocial thug hiding the physical and psychological scars of a traumatic childhood experience.

Roskam’s film and Matthias Schoenaerts’s brawny, transformative breakout performance in the lead role have already drawn comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s collaborations with Robert De Niro on Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s work with Tom Hardy on Bronson. Like those filmmakers, Roskam is interested in exploring the fine line between man and animal. Jacky’s feral nature—he communicates in grunts, withdraws from the world, and acts purely on instinct—gives him more in common with the cows on the farm than the people he struggles to connect with.

So when Sheila Nevins, HBO president of Documentary and Family Programming, saw the tiny wire story buried deep inside The New York Times in 1993, she sent documentary filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky to investigate.

“Sheila saw that story as the Satanic worshipers who killed the Cub Scouts,” recalled Berlinger, whose 1992 documentary Brother’s Keeper had impressed Nevins. “At the time the country was coming off a wave of Satanic hysteria … It was a real life River’s Edge.”

2. Gary Oldman: The Scarlet Letter
Oscar Nominee: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy