The Best Picture category isn't the only thing that bulked up.

What is it about the Academy Awards? Intellectually, it's hard to muster up that much enthusiasm about who "wore it best" (Ang Lee) or how modest Katniss will be in her acceptance speech, hopefully avoiding a First Wives' Club reference that sounded like she was hating on Meryl Streep this time. And yet ... we still feel compelled to watch. Maybe it's because secretly, deep down, we still find it fascinating that the guy who does the voice of Stewie looks like the host of a reality game show about finding true love by having a dance-off on a stripper pole.

Or maybe it's because we're just suckers, who deep down believe that Beasts of the Southern Wild might still possibly have a chance against Argo or Lincoln.

Come join us, will you, on this the most magical of evenings for producers, people who are married to movie stars, and dress designers? We'll be hosting a live chat below. Just click the big countdown button and you're all set. Got it?

Great.

This year we're making our predictions in order of the film and/or celebrity, not the award. That's because this time ... it's personal. No, seriously: between Kathryn Bigelow and Ben Affleck being iced out of Best Director, the Weinstein Bros. not having a snowball's chance in hell of scoring a big win and the fact that we're practically giving an award to Anne Hathaway just to make her stop sing-crying, there's going to be a lot of sore losers tonight. But don't worry; we're using a time-tested formula for predicting the bitter ceremonies, including taking all of the guesses on Twitter and averaging them against Nate Silver's predictions. Then we throw those out the window and  get ourselves angry over Lincoln’s inevitable windfall of awards that should be going to that movie that had all those great New Yorker articles written about it and stars a 9-year-old who wasn't even an actress when she started the film, which is about 50 percent more method than Daniel Day-Lewis's decision to become an Italian cobbler every time he's taking a hiatus from Hollywood.

So enjoy, and don't forget to tune into our live chat on the Oscars, starting at 7 p.m.!

Quvenzhané Wallis gives her director Behn Zeitlin a big hug.

The red carpet was aglow with the incandescent twinkle of Hollywood’s stars on Monday night at the 22nd annual Independent Film Project Gotham Awards. With Oscar winners Matt Damon and Marion Cotillard amongst the evening’s honorees and the likes of Jack Black, Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski and so many more blazing a trail through the double doors of Wall St.’s Cipriani’s, it was no wonder that the less glamorous side of the velvet rope was a veritable press feeding frenzy. Lucky for us, then, that we had sharpened our claws.

As the guests took their seats for the ceremony, The Observer was whisked upstairs to a private viewing room, lest we cavort too rambunctiously with the delicate A-List crowd. There we watched over the evening’s events like demi-gods looking down from the heavens upon the cherubs pecking away at their meals, with eight year old nominee Quvenzhané Williams and 13 year old Jared Gilman leading the underage coterie.

The awards soon got underway, much to the delight of the recipients. Honoring their intentions as champions of independent cinema, the jury not only rewarded the biggest Hollywood names but the industry’s up-and-comers for their contribution to film. Beasts of the Southern Wild writer and director Benh Zeitlin was undoubtedly the big winner of the night, scooping statuettes – well, glass cuboids - for Breakthrough Director alongside the Bingham Ray Award, dedicated to the late film executive.

Mr. Zeitlin was so swept up with his first victory, however, that he scarcely noticed he had procured a second, pausing in his role as the obliging interviewee only to dash back downstairs to claim his newest prize.

“The fact that the film has gotten out into the world has been overwhelming,” he told The Observer, “And I never imagined this many people would not only see it but champion it, and make it their business to help the film get out there. It has completely changed my life.” A spate of critical successes at Cannes, Sundance, the LA Film Festival and the International Film Festival has seen Louisiana-based Mr. Zeitlin’s awards cabinet go from empty to engorged in a matter of months.

Another director honored for his work during the event was David O. Russell, whose work on the likes of The Fighter and new release Silver Linings Playbook secured his status as a deserving IFP Gotham Award recipient. "With an independent film you are with your little family and you work together all day every day, and that’s the real difference," he explained. "You’re all there for the passion, and I prefer that because projects have to come from the heart. You have to dig deep."

Academy Award-winners and Gotham honorees Mr. Damon and Ms. Cotillard are certainly no strangers to widespread acclaim, but both seemed similarly touched by their newest prestigious accolade. Ms. Cotillard was every inch the elegant belle of the ball, dazzling in an array of Chopard jewelry and a stunning Christian Dior couture gown.

Clearly her nationality influences not only her wardrobe but her passion for various projects, telling The Observer: “I really cherish the fact that I’m able to share my French movies worldwide, because we have amazing creativity in France.” The softly spoken actress, who stars in the recently released Rust and Bone, seemed quite overcome with emotion, before continuing: “With this film I had one of the greatest journeys ever, and to share this very unconventional love story outside of my country is something that I enjoy more than anything. I never choose a movie because of whether it’s independent or not, it’s just a story that’s got to take me. But independent movies have the freedom of telling stories that nobody except a special director would tell.”

Mr. Damon echoed the Parisian sweetheart’s sentiments, divulging, “I’ve never set goals for my career. Each movie is just story-telling, and I never wanted to not do a bunch of good movies because I was waiting to make a great one.”

The evening was particularly poignant for the actor, who recalled his first attendance at the Gotham Awards some 15 years earlier in the year Good Will Hunting was released. The best-buddy-Ben-Affleck spot was filled not by his usual partner in crime, but by Mr. Krasinski, who became fast friends with the honoree after meeting on the set of The Adjustment Bureau, in which Mr. Damon and Mr. Krasinski’s wife Ms. Blunt, starred. The Observer did contemplate asking whether Mr. Damon’s onscreen dalliance with his friend’s spouse ever induced some awkward glances around the dinner table, but we opted to forgo stirring the salacious pot on this occasion.

Back to the matter at hand, Mr. Damon said he enjoyed the ubiquitous montage of his roles over the years, but revealed, “It’s always a little cringe inducing – if you have a bad or mediocre day at work, it’s alive forever, so that part [of working in film] is always a little weird.”

But Mr. Damon, who plays the lead in upcoming indie flick Promised Land, needn’t worry about bad days at the office, given that his most recent prize was for Lifetime Achievement – at the grand old age of 42. “I hope this is like a buoy marker – a half time thing,” he laughed. “I want to do this for another 50 years!”

And with that, our time with Mr. Damon was up, and he was briskly shepherded to the after party with the rest of his showbiz pals. Alas, we did not get the opportunity to put on our dancing shoes and join in the film festivities, but the evening was quite the show itself.

Lawrence, left, and Cooper, right, in Silver Linings Playbook.

A lot of critics have lost their proverbial cool over Silver Linings Playbook, a rom-com about mental illness, ballroom dancing and the Philadelphia Eagles. I wish I knew why. It’s a slow, repetitive, meandering, mostly overacted little picture—perfectly agreeable but nothing special, and directed with a steamroller by David O. Russell. Go figure.
I have never been able to tolerate the pointless, meat-headed, masturbatory cinema of self-indulgent writer-director Mr. Russell, especially the moronic Spanking the Monkey (1994), the criminally boring Three Kings (1999) and the profoundly pretentious I Heart Huckabees, which poisoned the ozone in 2004. Six years passed, and I was shaken to my shoelaces by The Fighter (2010), the most powerful study of a down-and-out boxer since Rod Serling’s classic Requiem for a Heavyweight. The ridiculously titled Silver Linings Playbook, not in the same league as The Fighter, doesn’t do for Bradley Cooper what that movie did for Mark Wahlberg, but it does suggest that the eccentric Mr. Russell has learned a few things about where to place a camera and how to stage small scenes that add up to a satisfying whole.
For starters there’s Bradley Cooper, who’s built a solid following by devoting his entire career to trashy comedies, proving again that you can’t go broke reducing the IQs of the most undemanding segment of the public. So we got assorted loathsome Hangover Xeroxes, and Mr. Cooper got a People magazine cover. But unless you were one of the lucky theatergoers who caught his resplendent performance last summer in the sold-out production of The Elephant Man at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, then you have no idea what a prodigious talent he is. He will probably continue full-throttle turning out junk, giving his fans what they want, but I suspect that deep down inside, where his pride is, he wants to prove he can act. The movie is a mess, but there is some evidence that Mr. Russell kicked and nudged and tweaked his star into doing something besides resting on his George Clooney charm and Pepsodent smile. He actually does some acting.
He plays Pat, a bipolar substitute high-school history teacher and former athlete who returns home to Philadelphia after an eight-month meltdown in a mental hospital. Subject to irrational mood swings and violent rages, he went ballistic when his wife cheated with another faculty member. Pat beat up the guy and lost his job, his marriage, his house and his freedom, and he was sent away on a plea bargain. Now he’s back in town, in the custody of his dysfunctional parents, and determined to get back in shape, rebuild his life and win his wife back. His father (Robert De Niro), who is as crazy as he is, just wants Pat to return to what matters most in life—the religion of worshipping the Philadelphia Eagles. Meanwhile, Pat runs, works out, wears garbage bags to sweat, dispenses fun facts about American history while breaking his wife’s restraining order, and wakes his parents in the middle of the night ranting about Ernest Hemingway. Between tirades, he meets an emotionally disturbed widow named Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) who has been fired from her job after having sex with 11 people in her office. Tiffany can compare prescription antidepressants with Pat faster than you can win Bingo at a Friday night rehab social.
Pat is on his way back down the mouse-hole, and who can blame him? His best friend from the hospital (Chris Tucker) is a perennial escapee who is forever inventing legal technicalities that never quite hold up when men in white shoes ring the doorbell carrying straitjackets. Tiffany, who turned goth slut after her policeman husband was killed playing Good Samaritan on his way home from buying lingerie at Victoria’s Secret, offers to reunite Pat with his wife if he will partner with her in a dance competition. During long rehearsals in the garage to songs by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, a mutual attraction blossoms, thwarted by awkward idiosyncrasies that keep the movie moving from one absurdity to another.
The football part of the movie—about how Pat’s crazy father, family members and friends bet their life savings and future on an Eagles game in a parlay that depends on at least a 5-point score in the dance competition—is so confusing I never did figure it out, and couldn’t care less. (Seems the father, who has been banned from the Eagles stadium for repeatedly starting riots, has invested everything in his beloved team in the hope of financing a cheesesteak business.) None of this makes sense, which is about par for a David O. Russell movie. It all ends in what would ordinarily seem anticlimactic, except for one thing: how can anything be anticlimactic if there isn’t much of a movie to precede it? Mr. De Niro hasn’t bothered to give a real performance for at least the past 10 years and he shows no signs of breaking precedent here. There’s nothing wrong with the overrated Jennifer Lawrence that some serious acting lessons couldn’t improve. The rest of the actors are pretty much on their own. Nothing mature or thoughtful here, which leaves Mr. Cooper to carry the show alone. He’s played it comfortable and he’s played it safe. Showing it’s fun to be bipolar, he could have played it like Jerry Lewis. Instead, he’s starting to realize the rewards of taking acting to a deeper level.
rreed@observer.com

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
Running Time 120 minutes
Written by David O. Russell
and Matthew Quick (novel)
Directed by David O. Russell
Starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro

Matt Damon (Getty Images)

This year's Gotham Independent Film Awards, a November fete that is part of the late-year slurry that's ultimately processed into Oscar nominations, are to feature special tributes to actor Matt Damon, director David O. Russell, and Participant Media's Jeff Skoll. The Gotham Awards organizers aren't just big fans of the Bourne movies and I Heart Huckabees--both men are Oscar contenders this year, with Mr. Damon starring in and serving as co-writer for Promised Land (a Participant Media production--hi, Mr. Skoll!), and Mr. Russell directing the much-anticipated Silver Linings Playbook.

The Gotham Independent Film Awards are among the minor-tier stops--along with the Hamptons Film Festival, Santa Barbara Film Festival, and Hollywood Film Awards--that can give the impression that an actor or director is "due" for an Oscar with lifetime achievement awards coming right before the Oscars and along with the release of their new film. Viva independent film!

Need a movie to keep you company until you literally can't keep your eyes open? Join us tonight when we pass out to Three Kings [starting @ 1:30 a.m. on AMC]

Why we’ll try to stay up and watch it: 1999 might have been the best single year for movies in the last ten. Seriously! In fact, there is a chance it ranks as one of the greatest ever. While it might be a tough slog to find 10 worthy Best Picture candidates this year (Star Trek, come on down?), 1999 could have filled up a new-fangled Oscar ballot with ease. There was an embarrassment of riches: Fight Club, American Beauty, Election, Being John Malkovich, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, Magnolia, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Eyes Wide Shut and The Insider. And that list leaves off movies like Boys Don’t Cry, Go, Run Lola Run, The Limey, Toy Story 2, Office Space, The Blair Witch Project and, of course, Three Kings.

David O. Russell’s Desert Storm serio-comedy doesn’t hold up as well as you might remember—in part because of a third act that gets treacley and message-y—but for large swatches of time, Three Kings is as good as any of the big boys from 1999. Mr. Russell keeps the pace moving at a ridiculously quick clip, perfectly balancing the absurdist M*A*S*H-like humor with the Bruckheimer-ian action set pieces; this isn’t Courage Under Fire we’re talking about here. That he gets great performances from the disparate cast of George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and director Spike Jonze is just gravy. Under no circumstances would anyone ever imagine these four people having chemistry together, but in Three Kings they blend like the perfect team.

After Spanking the Monkey (Jeremy Davies for life!) and Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings seemed like the film that would help launch Mr. Russell onto the A-list; his “Hal Ashby–on–an–energy-drink” style was perfectly suited to the new-wave Hollywood ascetic. Ten years gone, however, and the director is best known for his lack of output—when The Fighter with Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale comes out in 2011, it’ll be Mr. Russell’s first film in seven years—and his C-word–enhanced rant against Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees. We’re still waiting for his one great film. Here’s hoping that comes around eventually.

When we’ll probably fall asleep: Like we said, the third act of Three Kings gets a little stale. So we’ll clock out a bit beforehand, at 2:45 a.m., 75 minutes into the film, after a fantastic little interrogation scene between Mr. Wahlberg’s Sgt. First Class Troy Barlow and an Iraqi solider played by Said Taghmaoui. At once reasonable and terrifying, Mr. Taghmaoui—who you know from this past season of Lost and countless other roles where he’s asked to be the “Middle Easterner with a secret”—rails against what America forced the late Michael Jackson to do to his face, with the disconnected monotone of Sir Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man (with “Is it safe?” replaced by “What is the problem with Michael Jackson?”). When it comes to “that guy” character actors, Mr. Taghmaoui will always be our “main man.”

We have to hand it to Christian Bale. For as long as we could remember, he was always a conundrum: a brilliant actor that seemed to actively sabotage his stardom by appearing in mostly limited-appeal dreck. Then, something fascinating happened: Caught up in the wave of counterintuitive superhero casting choices—you can thank Tobey Maguire for this—Mr. Bale wound up starring as Batman and vaulting onto the A-list. Only he wasn’t just front and center in Batman Begins; the film surrounded him with a load of talented, big-name actors (Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine). And while we have no proof of this—though if Mr. Bale wants to send us a message on Facebook, he’s more than welcome to—it seems that the experience on Batman Begins gave the cantankerous star a new blueprint for how to manage his career: never star alone.

We thought of this after seeing the news that Mr. Bale has signed on to star opposite Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter, from director David O. Russell. If this project sounds familiar, it’s because for the last few years it was in the hands of Darren Aronofsky, with Brad Pitt attached to star alongside Mr. Wahlberg. Matt Damon was involved, too. But they all dropped by the wayside, leaving the role to Mr. Bale. It’s the second film in the last few weeks that he has agreed to do with Mr. Wahlberg: The two will be seen together in Bryan Singer’s The Prisoners. Of course, both of these films will come on the heels of Mr. Bale’s dual appearances this summer in Terminator Salvation, with a load of giant killer robots, and Public Enemies, with Johnny Depp. Are you seeing a pattern yet?

Sure, he’s the biggest name in Terminator Salvation, but that movie is being sold on the franchise and not Mr. Bale’s star wattage. Hell, the name “John Connor” carries more weight for the fans of Terminator than “Christian Bale” does anyway. Meanwhile, in the trailer for Public Enemies, he is barely shown, taking a backseat to Mr. Depp (that Mr. Depp has become the biggest movie star in the world is a story for another day). Even in his post–Batman Begins roles, Mr. Bale used this strategy: He co-starred with Hugh Jackman in The Prestige and with Russell Crowe in 3:10 to Yuma.

In the end, the plan is quite genius. If the movie fails, he’s mentioned but never forced to take full brunt of the damage; if it succeeds, he gets credit for being sturdy and reliable. For an actor who once seemed adrift on his way toward movie stardom, Mr. Bale has found a comfortable resting place. Now if he can only get through a shoot with David O. Russell without the two of them murdering a craft services employee, everything will be fine.

Tuesday: Gavin & Stacey
American television sorely lacks genuinely funny—and non-stereotyping—relationship sitcoms (How I Met Your Mother stands out to us as the sole exception). So we find ourselves ridiculously excited each week for BBC America's Gavin & Stacey, which is dirty, hilarious and totally charming. Stacey is a Welsh girl with a number of failed engagements under her belt; Gavin is her London-dwelling beau who proposes on their first date. (They met through work, talking on the phone.) Of course, and unfortunately, there's already discussion of an American adaptation of this show. See the original before we get the inevitably tame, fruit loop version. [BBC America, 8:40 p.m.]

Wednesday: Sons of Anarchy
No, seriously, we're nuts about this Hamlet-inspired show about a biker gang in California! Charlie Hunnam (the blond cutie of the underwatched Apatow sitcom Undeclared) stars as Jackson "Jax" Teller, the son of a gangleader who's ambivalent about the direction his dad's legacy is taking. (Guns instead of drugs, basically.) Married with Children's Katy Sagal—who gets more beautiful and better with each role—is Jax's mom, who took up with second-in-line gang boss Clay (Ron Perlman) after her husband's death (which she may or may not have orchestrated? Too early to tell!). There's also a drug baby, a hot doctor from Jax's past, and a bunch of good-hearted biker dudes, just trying to pay their bills and stay out of jail. Don't be put off by the faux-gritty title sequence. Sons of Anarchy is plenty smart enough for you. [FX, 10 p.m.]

Thursday: I Heart Huckabees
We love David O. Russell (even Spanking the Monkey), but this may be our favorite if only for the performance of Mark Wahlberg as Tommy Corn, a firefighter who is also a crazy anti-petroleum environmental activist. He should have had an Oscar nod. That's all we'll tell you. [IFC, 6 a.m.]

Friday: Maxed Out
We haven't seen James Scurlock's documentary about predatory lending and credit card debt, but we read his book of the same name and were blown away. (We even served on a book prize that gave him $10,000 for truthtelling!) Maxed Out travels the country, exposing both just how evil banks are and how naive Americans are when it comes to spending and using credit. If you have debt yourself, you'll take cold comfort in seeing that a lot of folks are worse off than you. If you don't, you'll be even more glad than you already are. [Showtime, 3 p.m.]

Tuesday: It wouldn't be hard to fill your DVR queue with dozens of films from Turner Classic Movies (we've been known to do just that, actually). But here's just one pick for this week: Kiss Me, Stupid, Billy Wilder's 1964 comedy starring Dean Martin and Kim Novak. Martin plays an exaggerated, bizarro version of himself, Kim Novak plays a prostitute; the film pissed off the Vatican for all the sex and adultery. Need we say more? (TCM, 12 noon)

Wednesday: Bones has been in reruns all summer, and has been practically the only thing to alleviate The Observer's complete primetime boredom these last two months. David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel play a crime-solving duo, sort of a muscle/brain team that also has great chemistry and appeal. Tonight, the two, together with their group of hot nerds at the Jeffersonian institute, work on id'ing a victim (via his bones, of course) who'd been burned beyond recognition. (FOX, 8 p.m.)

Thursday: David O. Russell's feature debut, Spanking the Monkey, isn't for everyone: it's a comedy about incest after all. But, with Jeremy Davies back on the rise (his character on the last season of Lost was as freaky as the black smoke monster), it's time to remember where he started. Alberta Watson plays the mother and Apatow darling Carla Gallow (Undeclared, Superbad) the teen nymphet who competes for Mr. Davies' affection. (IFC, 10:30 p.m.)

Friday: If you've somehow neglected to see The Last Waltz up to now, here's your shot. Martin Scorcese's documentary of The Band's last concert is filled with great music and cameos -- a startlingly young Emmy Lou Harris, a frenetic Van Morrison -- as well as interviews with band members. Robbie Robertson is especially compelling, as he comes off like a giant prick. Rick Danko looks and sings great throughout. Perfect for your Sunday afternoon hangover. (VH1 Classic, 11 p.m.)

“If Dennis Hopper’s freewheeling 1969 road movie Easy Rider was the key in the ignition for 1970s Hollywood,” writes James Mottram, laying out the premise of The Sundance Kids, “there’s no doubt twenty years on that sex, lies and videotape was the same to the decade it was to precede.”

The next several years would find Quentin Tarantino, Bryan Singer, David O. Russell, Richard Linklater, to name a few, following in Mr. Soderbergh’s large footsteps. This celebrated coterie of Sundance alums provides the jumping-off point for Mr. Mottram’s book, which then becomes a dissection—unparalleled in its breadth and scope—of American cinema in the 1990’s.

This isn’t the first time that Mr. Mottram, a British film critic, has traversed this terrain: He’s published three previous books about film, including one about the Coen Brothers and another about the making of Memento. His writing is confident and incisive. Consider the reason he gives in his new book for ignoring Kevin Smith, a Sundance alum whose film Clerks made him the festival’s poster boy in 1994: “[Smith’s] body of work has yet to make an impact on the medium of cinema in the way films by Soderbergh, [Alexander] Payne, [David] Fincher, or Tarantino have.” Touché.

Mr. Mottram pushes hard with his 70’s/90’s, New Hollywood/Sundance Kids parallel. It doesn’t hurt that most of our current directors and film writers have, quite rightly, lionized Mr. Coppola, Mr. Scorsese, Hal Ashby, et al. Who wouldn’t want to inherit their bully pulpit? “Part of my whole career plan,” said Mr. Soderbergh, “was to pretend it’s 1974 and that you can make movies for adults and they’ll show up.”

Mr. Mottram is certainly not the first person to make the connection. If there’s one thing that film writers have in common with the industry they cover, it’s that ideas for articles and books are recycled, reinvented and dusted off for new generations, like so many movie remakes and sequels. But Mr. Mottram is the first to make a sustained argument based on the content of the films. He mostly leaves out the morass of industry deals, behind-the-scenes tussles and box-office grosses, the insider dope expertly peddled by Peter Biskind in Down and Dirty Pictures (2004)—and again by Sharon Waxman in Rebels on the Backlot (2005).

At first glance, there seems little difference between Mr. Mottram’s book and Ms. Waxman’s, whose subtitle (“Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System”) bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Mottram’s. Whether the “mavericks” conquered Hollywood or simply took it back seems too small a difference to warrant two separate tomes in just two years. But where Ms. Waxman sees a disparate crew of independent directors, Mr. Mottram sees an interconnected posse of filmmakers dedicated to inheriting the mantle of New Hollywood. And he relegates biographical material to a supporting role.

Sundance Kids reminds me most of Geoff Andrew’s Stranger Than Paradise: Maverick Film-Makers in Recent American Cinema (2004). Mr. Andrew covers some of the same ground, focusing on Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Tarantino but adding the Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, John Sayles, David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch—all directors whose careers flourished in the 80’s. Unlike Mr. Mottram, Mr. Andrew situates his collection of directors in a broad context: “The history of the American cinema is littered with free spirits who, rather than merely conform to the escapist ideals fostered by mainstream Hollywood, strove to bring a personal vision to the screen and, in so doing, created lasting works of art that transcend the narrow definition of film as entertainment, pure and simple.”

This points to a disconnect in Mr. Mottram’s book: Though he focuses on the films, the real throughline (as with all things relating to Hollywood) is money. The 70’s were the last time that artistic and financial success intertwined in a splendid symbiosis. This was before the onslaught of the blockbuster and the utter bomb of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. Though Mr. Mottram’s “mavericks” want to make good movies, they also want to make good money. They’re different from David Lynch or Spike Lee, auteurs destined (until recently) to stay on the fringe. Mr. Singer, whose The Usual Suspects was both a commercial and critical success, says his agenda was “to bridge the gap between mainstream and independent, by doing an interesting film on a large canvas, the way it was back in the 1970s.” With X-Men, Mr. Singer single-handedly revived the comic-book movie while drawing critical praise.

It’s perhaps ironic that a book about the substance of movies ultimately depends on the money they make. But I guess that’s the point: Good directors know how to blend the two, how to make both goals harmonize. And it’s this aim, I think, that separates the two decades, at least in spirit. Sundance commodified independent filmmaking for the studios; it branded it in a way that’s different from the films made in the 70’s. Moreover, the 70’s were a time of radical political and social change. And don’t get me started on the drugs ….

“I just think you can’t repeat the political films of the ’70s today because the political climate is different,” said Mike De Luca, the New Line executive who greenlighted both Boogie Nights and Magnolia. “People want entertainment. They’re into having a good time. If you’re going to be satirical or angry today, I think you’re Magnolia or you’re [Alexander Payne’s] Election. It’s a different time … the ’70s were about the time those artists were coming of age in, and you can’t duplicate that. We are living in a very ironic, weird kind of age where nothing is shocking anymore.”

Mr. Mottram may have passed up an opportunity here to draw a stronger conclusion from the movies being produced by the Sundance Kids. He clearly and energetically makes a case for their success, but he doesn’t make any larger statement about what, if anything, links them thematically.

After seeing I ♥ Huckabees, the critic Philip French lambasted David O. Russell’s film as “a lesser product of ‘the new whimsy,’ that school of surreal, absurdist comedy to which Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson belong.” To which Mr. Mottram replied: “As derogatory as French’s comment is, it does indicate that Russell and Co. are being seen as an unofficial group or ‘school.’” (A Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one.)

As it happens, Mr. French’s remarks are echoed by one of the Sundance Kids, Sofia Coppola: “[The directors of the 70’s] really did seem like they were putting their necks on the line and now it seems safer—nobody’s marching into the jungle to make a movie.” Perhaps Mr. French and Ms. Coppola are on to something; perhaps the films that we celebrate now will ultimately appear frivolous to future generations. But these questions are not addressed by Mr. Mottram; he’s too busy, for better or worse, with the past.

Jake Brooks is an associate editor of The Observer.