As my wife said, it's just not the Oscars if there's nothing to complain about. However, I was impressed that two of the year's toughest films, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (389 screens) and Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men took the most nominations. Typically, the Academy is attracted to much less challenging and easy-to-categorize films (like Atonement). Both films are fairly bleak in their vision, but I suspect There Will Be Blood will sneak out ahead for two reasons: it's an epic, and epics almost always win. And, to quote a character from Sunset Boulevard, it "says a little something" about the current sociopolitical climate.

One of the biggest controversies cropped up over the foreign film category, which came up with five nominations that no one has ever heard of. (The Counterfeiters opens sometime next month and Mongol opens in June.) Not to mention that they ignored top contenders like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (opening this week) and Persepolis (30 screens). Thankfully the outrage has begun discussions on changing the stupid, ancient rules for the category. Currently these rules require each country to submit one film, and multi-national films, such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (107 screens), to be disqualified. A small group of "specialists," rather than the Academy as a whole, votes on the small list of films. The documentary category was less obscure, and although I saw 19 documentaries in 2007, I only managed to see two of the five nominees, No End in Sight and Sicko. I have an Academy screener for Operation Homecoming that I hope to catch soon, and Taxi to the Dark Side (1 screen) is screening for Bay Area press next week.

Pop quiz: what was one of the most critically lauded films of the year, yet barely got seen in the US? Syndromes and a Century received many admiring reviews off its play at various film festivals and finished #4 in the indieWIRE Critics' Poll; DVD might be a natural home for director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest meditative drama. The Strand Releasing DVD is bare-bones, with only a few trailers included, but kudos to them for making this more easily available.

The Ten features an all-star cast in a comic dissection of the Biblical Ten Commandments. In his review, Scott Weinberg acknowledged the "fairly sketchy" framework but said he "discovered a solid handful of worthwhile chuckles in the flick." James Rocchi summarized: "The Ten's a wacky, hit-and-miss, shotgun blast of a comedy that stands apart from the corporate commodity comedy's become in major-studio Hollywood." The DVD from ThinkFilm includes an audio commentary, more than 55 minutes of alternate takes and deleted scenes, an interview, a "making of" feature, ringtones (!) and wallpaper.

PBS is broadcasting Robert Stone's JFK doc Oswald's Ghost starting this week, but it's also available on DVD with extra features, including an interview with Stone, "The Zapruder film and beyond," and a visit fo Dealey Plaza. In my review, I called it "the rare film whose power increases with distance," though I wish that more of Stone's opinions had been expressed. Maybe the DVD's extra features will add the "degree of balance of perspective that is otherwise missing from a very well-made documentary."

Kim Voynar felt Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, a documentary about a project that brought together distinguished writers, soldiers and their families, at times seems "uncertain of just what kind of film it wants to be," lacking any new insights into the Iraq War. She thought it would lend itself more to the intimacy of television "much more than the big screen." The DVD includes a discussion guide.

If nothing else, 2007 will go down as the Year of the Iraq War Films. Back in September, when I reviewed Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq, I ran down the litany of the recent Iraq-war films, from Fahrenheit 9/11 to Body of War. Anyone who's been to film fests this year has probably had about all the war they can stomach for a while; it just gets depressing after a while. War is probably as old as mankind, and the evolution of modern weaponry hasn't made it any prettier when average people die in battles in which they are pieces in a chess game being played out by people who will likely never face death in the way the troops they send to fight their battles do.

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience is one of the efforts this year to capture the experience of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts started "Operation Homecoming," a project that brought some of America's most distinguished writers to the troops and their families, to create a compilation of stories and poems about the war, to be printed in an anthology. Pulling from this collection of thousands of writings-- ranging from poems to letters to parody of life in the desert -- the doc captures some of those stories, read by folks like Robert Duvall, Josh Lucas, and Aaron Eckhart. The writings -- some polished, some less so -- are wrenching reminders of the real cost of war, brought your way by the folks who are over there sweating in the desert and risking their lives on a daily basis.