Much to my surprise, I find myself very excited by this year’s Oscar nominees.

I was pretty skeptical of the decision to expand the Best Picture category from five films to a whopping ten, since it seemed such an naked studio cash grab rather than a legit reconsideration of how this process works. But I didn’t realize that it would open the category up to films and genres outside the beaten path of your usual Oscar fare. A hardcore science-fiction movie like District 9, for Best Picture? That’s very exciting to me. (Avatar doesn’t count, because it made so much money it was BOUND to get nominated. Nothing succeeds like success!) It doesn’t really matter, even, that District 9 is a flawed work–as time has gone by, that fun but not terribly interesting action climax has overshadowed all the meatier stuff earlier on for me–because, c’mon, look at what normally gets nominated. If you’re going to have a contest between great works, flawed works, and sometimes out-and-out bad works, you might as well expand the pool from which you’re drawing.

All in all three of my four favorite films of the year were nominated: A Serious Man, Inglourious Basterds, and The Hurt Locker. I also liked District 9 and Up in the Air. I’m pretty happy with the choices. (For the record, Best Films of 2009 as of this very moment: 1) A Serious Man 2) Inglourious Basterds 3) The Lovely Bones 4) The Hurt Locker 5) Crank 2: High Voltage–1 & 2 especially are subject to change)

I’m thrilled that Jeremy Renner got a Best Actor nod. Loved him since Dahmer, in which he was really something special. Shit, I’d have nominated him for 28 Weeks Later. (Man, that was a finely acted horror film.)

Also thrilled about Stanley Tucci and Christoph Waltz getting nominated for Best Supporting Actor for the villains they played. Tucci was maybe the best serial killer since Renner in Dahmer? And Waltz, I mean, duh.

I’m a bit perplexed that A Serious Man earned a Best Picture nomination AND a Best Original Screenplay nomination for the Coen Brothers, but they didn’t get nominated for Best Director. Was that due to rules against co-directors, or was it felt that they should have done a better job?

Also a bit perplexed that BOTH Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick were nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Up in the Air. They were good, and as far as I’m concerned Kendrick should be nominated for nearly singlehandedly making the Twilight movies entertaining (her and Michael Welch), but I thought Farmiga didn’t have much to do but be sexy. Nudity tends to be rewarded, so I’m wondering, was the Academy unaware she used a body double?

I tend to care about the Oscars only to the extent that I have a dog in the race. When The Return of the King swept I was over the moon; most years since then I haven’t even watched. That seems to me like a healthy level of engagement with this thing and with award programs generally. So it looks like I’ll be watching this year. I don’t do picks or predictions, but I will say that The Hurt Locker‘s chances seem very strong and I’m glad of that. There were a few films I preferred, but that’s a totally worthy movie, and obviously it would be a huge, long-overdue deal for a woman director and/or her film to win. It’s not a terrible idea to reward an entertaining, non-didactic, but still powerful Iraq War movie, either.

How the FUCK have I never heard THIS before?

* Recently at Robot 6: Frank Miller drew new Sin City covers, Bendis and John Romita Jr. on Avengers, Picasso-style superheroes, and the Shamus/Wizard cons spread to Cincinnati.

* Child-porn conviction in Australia for dirty drawings of The Simpsons, The Powerpuff Girls, and The Incredibles. That’s a bad bad precedent. A real, serious crime involving imaginary depictions of imaginary people.

* Craig Thompson answers questions in a short interview someone’s doing for a school project. Aww!

* Kevin Melrose has a pretty fascinating interview up with Rafael Grampa of Mesmo Delivery. Check out the influences he rattles off–this guy’s the real deal. Interesting stuff in there about the move from AdHouse to Dark Horse, design as storytelling, and more.

* Red Lantern Gary Groth better thank his lucky stars there’s no Black Lantern Carol Kalish.

* TWIN PEAKS SPOILER ALERT IF YOU CLICK THIS LINK: Believe it or not it took me more than a day to mentally picture Star Sapphire Audrey Horne. I will take credit, however, for pointing out that Twin Peaks already had a power ring.

* Sam Gaskin sings the praises of Aapo Rapi, one of the highlights of Kramers Ergot 7.

* This is going on two years old now, but Phoebe Gloeckner took a photo of Ann Perry, the British mystery author whom fans of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures might better know for other reasons.

I really really really liked The Lovely Bones, a movie about murder and grief funneled into a big huge emotional slow-motion close-up panoramic fantasia swirling-camera special-effects Brian Eno CGI tear-streaked period-piece whirligig. It made me cry. The serial killer material was unusually well-handled and realistic, in that greasy nauseating biting-on-tinfoil way that those men are. It used a bunch of actors I personally have an affinity for, like Mark Wahlberg and Michael Imperioli, as buttresses for a CGI-as-metaphor spectacle, something you’d seen hints of here and there in King Kong and The Lord of the Rings, but here Peter Jackson goes full-on Heavenly Creatures with it. It had a fine Brian Eno score, including a couple of cues from his weird-pop days (I heard “Baby’s On Fire” coming about three minutes before it really started). There were A-class suspense sequences and a musical montage set to the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress.” If you wanted to read it as a horror movie that just spends an unusual amount of time with people who aren’t threatened by the monster anymore, you could do that, and I actually suggest that you do. Right down to the tricky climax, it made meaning from the stuff of moviemaking. If it were nine years ago or so, I could see myself getting stuck in a k-hole with this movie, staying up past everyone else in my house and watching it and living with it night after night. I found it strange and very sad.

The Winter Men

Brett Lewis, writer

John Paul Leon, artist

DC/WildStorm, 2009

176 pages

$19.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

Whoa ho ho, this is something special, huh?

I was only ever vaguely aware of The Winter Men during what struck me as a very long run for a six-issue miniseries, though I’m pretty sure I was confusing it with Peter Milligan and C.P. Smith’s The Programme for much of that time. I got the sense, just by seeing who was reviewing it, that it was a genuine critics’ darling, and I feel like I also heard that the production process was an unhappy one, with long delays or editorial troubles or something. I knew it was about Russian supersoldiers, drawn by JP Leon, so I mentally located it on a continuum with Sleeper and Gotham Central and Daredevil and other books that filtered superheroes through crime and espionage and drew them in a scratchy, black-heavy naturalist-noir style. That’s a subgenre people will associate with the ’00s like grunge and the ’90s, I think; I’ve still got a soft spot for its past examples even though I don’t know how much more of it I really need, so I figured hey, a limited series of it would be a pleasant way to spend a couple of train rides.

What I didn’t anticipate was Brett Lewis. Jiminy Christmas, this guy. I can’t remember the last time I read a genre comic this in love with language, this thorough and astute at developing and deploying its own. And here’s why it works: The Winter Men is about the bleed between the warriors and enforcers of the fallen Soviet Union and those of the New Russia’s criminal empires, a fluid and yet impenetrable world characterized by byzantine alliances, shades-of-gray legality, and the lack of any kind of centralized authority on either side of the law. The main spider we follow around this web is Kris Kalenov, an ex-spetznaz who was part of, essentially, the USSR’s Iron Man program, and who now works as a crooked cop for Moscow’s mayor, who runs the city like an independent state. He gets caught up in a kidnapping case with roots in an entire alphabet soup of international espionage agencies, military unites, and Russian mafiya outfits–the kidnapping’s the main throughline, finding out whodunit and all that, but it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters. Kalenov and his three comrades from the war–now a soldier, a gangster, and a bodyguard–get drawn through the web to and fro, and we follow him on such diverse enterprises as working undercover for the CIA infiltrating a Russian mob in Brooklyn, grabbing a criminal for a witness ID on behalf of some judge, conducting a hit, organizing a commando raid on a remote super-science outpost, drinking with his friends, fighting back against a new organized crime outfit as it muscles in on his gangster friend’s turf, taking down a couple of major crime kingpins, stealing a table from a McDonald’s, and on and on. In other words, The Winter Men is like The Wire: Moscow. Everything’s connected, but how is almost impossible to determine, and how to get it all to work for you instead of against you is even more remote. You work the angles you can and hope you did something right.

So, as a feat of storytelling, it’s impressive. But the language in which the story is told is directly analogous to the story itself–that’s the real knockout. Lewis develops a rhythm of speech that suggests a work of translation even when all the characters are talking to one another in fluent Russian. It’s not a pidgin English, it’s not a full-fledged Nadsat-style dialect. It’s just a question of where the narration and dialogue leans into you or away from you–unfamiliar slang or jargon whose meaning is nonetheless unmistakable, unexpected formality, disarming directness, repetition, a choice of which words to use, which to emphasize, which to elide. It’s a verbal map of the territory–shifting, shady, inscrutable, yet practical, impactful, something you can use to get what you want. A world with familiar elements, but arranged in a dizzyingly distant fashion, leaving you racing to keep up. In its way it’s as elegant as David Milch’s gutter Shakespeare or David Chase’s corner koans, and as inseparable from the world being depicted, the people populating it, and the message being delivered.

Weak spots? Sure. The super-stuff is superfluous–it brings nothing to the table you haven’t seen before, has no real narrative weight, and as best I can tell the only real purpose it served was “getting this book published through WildStorm.” I wished it wasn’t there, wished this was a straight-up crime book. The way it becomes so much more prominent in the final chapter after entire segments where it wasn’t a factor at all–including a pair of mini-masterpieces in which Kalenov and his gangster pal Nikki transport a suspect and fend off a challenge, the latter utilizing Dave Stewart’s where’s-waldo spot color for the book’s visual highlight–feels rushed and lopsided. I also wanted to see more out of Nina, the bodyguard, who never had much to do other than be beautiful and quietly pissed at Kalenov.

Mostly, though? I just wished it were longer. A nice long run of Winter Men trades could have been one of contemporary comics’ consummate pleasures. But this thing feels so meaty as is, so novelistic in its ins and outs and ups and downs, that I didn’t come away feeling robbed. Thrilled, more like.