I meant to do a quick movie catch-up before the Oscars, but didn't find time. Here's what we've seen lately:

Movie: Pride & Prejudice. AMG lists no less than eight versions, including a 1995 TV miniseries that I've seen before. One thing this demonstrates is that public utility is enhanced when pieces of literature enter the public domain. Jane Austen has come to rival William Shakespeare as one of Hollywood's prime storytellers. I've argued before that Austen's recent vogue has to do with return to favor of a class system in which fortune depends purely on the inheritance of property. The later Dickens seems to have entertained some doubts about what kind of world that gives us, but with Austen it's just cheerfully assumed. Her real interest was in bright, young, cheerful, witty girls determined to assert control over their love lives -- if successful, of course, they marry into fantastic riches. Back in my grade school days I developed a rather nasty prejudice against all the established literary standards taught there -- the sole exception was Shakespeare, no doubt because the plays were relatively short and I managed to read a couple of complete ones before being taught how great the bowdlerized versions were. I've never read Austen or Dickens or any of that lot, but lately various film and TV versions have never failed to delight me. This one is no exception. Necessarily more compact than the 1995 series, I'm sure it misses threads worth pursuing, but Matthew MacFayden makes a darker and more troubled D'Arcy than Colin Firth ever could, Keira Knightley's adolescent excitability works splendidly, and Donald Sutherland is always welcome. A-

Movie: Walk the Line. "Ray with white people" sums up what is uninteresting in it -- aside from the sheer glory of the music, but we all knew about that -- and misses much of what matters. For starters, black and blind Ray Charles brings more self-confidence to his game than white Johnny Cash, in large part because Charles' mother built him up while Cash's father tore him down. Both the music and the love (or whatever) stories flow out of this security differential -- and in Cash's case this lets June Carter's character emerge as his redemption. (Charles, on the other hand, hardly needed women, even though he was plenty fond of pussy.) On the other hand, the drugs and the tedium of kicking them just seem to be occupational hazzards. This ends with Folsom Prison in 1968 -- a long ways before the story ended in 2003, and there's plenty more in those 35 years that could have been worked up (unlike Charles' same 35 year gap). But that lets them frame this as a love story -- thankfully, they didn't overdo the Nashville royalty angle. One thing I found surprising was that the leads were cast with actors uglier than the people they were playing. Can't remember that ever happening in Hollywood, but Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon did superb acting -- the latter looking more like the young June Carter sounded than like she looked. And neither were as far off base as Shooter Jennings trying to play his dad. A-

Movie: The New World. Terrence Malick picked a tough subject for a movie. We all know about the late 19th-century plains Indians -- at least those of us old enough to have caught the heyday of the postwar western and its genre-busting post-Vietnam denouement. However, before the 1830s and especially before the 1770s the Eastern half of North America was still Indian country, and Europeans treaded lightly on that country, with skill and cunning, but without the overwhelming power that Andrew Jackson and his successors wielded. Malick pokes at a small part of that story: the Virginia expedition of 1607. I don't know whether he does this because he gets to play off the recognition of the Pocahontas-Captain John Smith story, or just because it represents the beginning of the end. But in doing so, he plugs into a framework we find strange -- we have little if any past visual references for comprehending the natives. Moreover, the English and Powhatan's tribe is a simple two-way exchange, not typical of the European conquest. That conquest happened mostly because the Europeans were able to exploit fault lines between the hundreds of Indian tribes in America. (E.g., Samuel Champlain got his toe-hold by allying with one tribe to wage war on another.) Also, by starting so early, Malick misses the profound impact of disease -- which was already prominent a few years later when the Mayflower landed. Whether Malick's vision of America is off or not is hard to tell. On the other hand, when he returns the story to England, he winds up exaggerating the wealth and sophistication, partly because the available period sets are so often castles. The cinematography is, of course, wonderful. The acting is secondary -- or in Colin Farrell's case, tertiary. B+

Movie: Transamerica. I wasn't looking forward to this one: figured it would just be stupid gender tricks. But it's mostly a road movie, done two-lane across some of my favorite parts of the country, where everyone they meet is slightly off center, and few are much the worse for it. Plus it turns out that Stanley/Bree's newly discovered teenaged son is kinkier than he/she is, and he/she's got enough sense not to push the difference between propriety and reality too far. The stopover in Dallas works due to its normality. The only mishap -- a stolen car -- significantly advances the plot. The "meet the parents" scene is much better than anything the Byrnes or the Fokkers could dream up. A

Movie: Match Point. Woody Allen's new Woody-less, New York-less, funny-less picture -- a throwback to Interiors, if you can still recall that dreary thing. It moves slowly, getting us acquainted with people we have no reason to like, then descends into an affair that smells like disaster from the start. Fortunately, by then nobody cares -- we're thankful for any plot we can get. In the end, it does pack a moral message. Not a happy ending, of course: the entire upper class getting garrotted just isn't in the cards. But at least a brief glimmer of conscience and consciousness. And it does lay bare the notion that it's better to be lucky than to be talented. Fact is, it's better to be born with the cards stacked in your favor -- or if you're not, to crawl into bed with someone who is. B+

Movie: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. This at least is a movie about justice, at least in the sense of punishing a wrongdoer just enough to strip him of his illusions and bring him to face his crime. Barry Pepper plays a trigger-happy Border Patrol who shoots a Mexican cowboy (Melquiades Estrada) in a cock-up bad enough that he could have appeared in a buddy movie with Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. The Mexican had been befriended by another cowhand, played by Tommy Lee Jones, leading to a promise to make sure Estrada, if he dies in the US, is buried back near his home in Mexico. When the Border Patrol and the Sheriff ignore the shooting and bury Estrada in an unmarked grave, Jones acts, taking Pepper to do the dirty work. A dusty town, lots of desert, several side stories which all pay out. Very satisfying movie. A-

Watched the Oscars Sunday night. I had no idea how inspired the opening introduction of the MC was until I saw the rest of the show, at which point the most vivid memory was Whoopi Goldberg yelling "Hell! No!" Cintra Wilson at Salon pretty much got it. Sure, she always says it sucks, but she's never been so right. And this isn't about which movies won or lost, although as best I recall everything but Crash beating Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture and Three 6 Mafia beating Dolly Parton for Best Song was pre-ordained. (It's hard to say whether Brokeback Mountain being busted back to two inescapably obvious Oscars was a sudden case of the chickenshits or whether the voters finally succumbed to the studio's classic love story advertising and figured who cares?)

By my count, Jon Stewart only got one relevant shot off: something about how all the socially relevant problems explored by the movies this year had bravely tackled decades-old problems. I've never seen him so dull or uptight before. And while George Clooney's acceptance speech -- the first of the night -- seemed like a modest point in the right direction, it lost whatever courage it suggested when it turned out to be the theme du jour, before they descended into a deep pile of doo about how the industry that gave us Birth of a Nation stood up to racism and how the industry that blacklisted Reds and faintly pink "fellow travelers" stood up to McCarthy. And that was just the content-oriented stuff. The whole thing was so streamlined and buttoned-down they left nothing to chance. The presenters lost half their front time and three-fourths of their jokes. Most of the nominee naming was canned. Many categories were down to three nominees, including the always dreadful songs. Even the normally silly dresses were prim and proper, and nobody had one of those dumb ribbons. The whole thing ran as smooth and fast as Mussolini's trains. You'd think nothing else was happening in the world. Certainly nothing to get alarmed about, with Hollywood steadfast on the job as the conscience of America.

Before the show the big controversy was about why none of the really popular movies released last year got nominations. Nobody talked much about how the nominations themselves are nothing more than niche marketing -- in other words, "good" movies are a mere niche, just like horror and action and teen romance and all those other niches that never get an Oscar marketing budget because they follow a different business model. But within the "good" movie niche, the nominees did pretty damn well, as usual -- eclipsing plenty of other good movies without "good" marketing budgets. The obvious question about the Oscars is why do so many people who never see "good" movies still watch the show. But a better question is how long will people still interested in "good" movies about decades-old problems will waste their time getting bombed out by commercials between which there's nothing but a bunch of stuck up farts congratulating themselves?