I haven't picked up an issue of Premiere Magazine in quite some time, but a friend of mine recently recommended I visit the publication's newly refurbished website. So I did. Pretty solid content across the board, I'm happy to opine -- but one particular article caught my eye, tickled my fancy, and squatted in my brain long enough to recommend it here.

Basically, a bunch of the Premiere writers were asked to come up with their picks for Most Overrated Film of All Time -- and while most of the sacred cows slaughtered here are pretty darn obvious ones, the opinions and explanations as to why each film was chosen, well, I thought they were fairly compelling. Frankly, I'm thrilled to see someone call Field of Dreams "just too on the nose," because it absolutely is.

Fully prepared for the onslaught of How Dare YE!! hate mail, the Premiere posse has wisely decided to add an equally pithy rebuttal in defense of each movie. So when someone has the audacity to impugn The Wizard of Oz, we sane people have a defender who'll say Dude, Please. I've placed the 20 titles under the jump, just to help spark discussion, but do not let that stop you from reading through the whole article. It might make you think a little differently about some of those Unquestioned Classics that everyone's afraid to admit they don't really dig. (Yep, 2001: A Space Odyssey is overrated; I said it and I'm proud.)

I decided to see Crazy Again at SXSW because I was intrigued by the idea of Zalman King making a documentary about Dale Watson. King has directed movies such as the 1990 "erotic thriller" Wild Orchid and an adaptation of Anais Nin's Delta of Venus; co-wrote 9 1/2 Weeks; and created the Red Shoe Diaries TV series. I didn't quite understand what inspired him to shoot a film about an Austin country-and-western musician.

As King explains in the movie, he had been in Austin researching potential musician-actors to star in his film Austin Angel, met Watson, and decided he was an ideal casting choice. To learn more about Watson, King joined one of his band's tours through the South, and brought along a digital video camera.

Driving from town to town, Watson and his road manager Donnie tell King the story about Watson's girlfriend Terry, who died in a car accident. Shortly after hearing the news, Watson "went crazy" for a weekend. Afterwards, he mourned Terry by writing songs about her. Everyone assumed he was dealing with her death normally.

Along with Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, King Vidor, and Clarence Brown, Robert Altman holds the dubious record for most best director Oscar nominations without a win: all five men have been "just happy to be here" five times. Now, though, Altman, whose nominations have been for MASH, The Player, Nashville, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park, is going to get his well-deserved statuette, even if it is just honorary.

It's hard to overstate what Altman has meant to American movies. Always unconventional, his improvisational techniques, innovative use of sound, long takes, and broad, rambling stories have, over the years, given Hollywood entirely new ways too look at filmmaking. Though they can never like the man enough to just vote for him already, Academy members decided Altman deserves a lifetime award because of his "innovation, his redefinition of genres, his invention of new ways of using the film medium and his reinvigoration of old ones." Amen.

I think it's safe to assume that Altman will not be spending the next two months carefully revising his acceptance speech. Whatever he says, we'll get to hear it on March 5, during the thirteen hour Oscar ceremony.