As Chris Rock aptly observed in an interview last month, Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator—perhaps the closest Hollywood came to producing an epic in the past year—draws its dramatic power from the suspense of watching a wealthy white man choose where to invest his money. In the age of Enron and Halliburton, it’s surely a story for our time and the picture most likely to take home the top prize at this Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles.

The Aviator isn’t the best film in the field, so why does it enjoy favored status? A glance at its fellow nominees, two other inspirational biopics and two studied human dramas, suggests that Scorsese’s Spruce Goose offers the safest bet in a year of cultural division and political unrest.

The first of the biopics, Finding Neverland, revels in the warm fantasy world of childhood, an inviting escape for today’s world-weary audiences. The film is fiercely emotional—Johnny Depp’s J.M. Barrie must face fatal disease, domestic discord, and a devastating death—but the action is safely removed from us, both temporally and geographically. The travails of an aristocrat in fin-de-siècle Britain may make for stellar entertainment, but they cannot engage the pressing issues of our contemporary culture.

Box office numbers show that Ray more closely resonated with American audiences, grossing about $30 million more than Neverland. But Taylor Hackford’s film, despite Jamie Foxx’s soon-to-be-Oscar-winning performance, offers an easy way out. It mixes clichés of cultural nostalgia with the classic American tale of rags-to-riches. Comforting, perhaps, but somewhat trite in an age of wholesale corporate layoffs and a widening divide between bourgeois and blue-collar. If anything, the film offers a longing glimpse into a world we no longer possess: many have noted that in today’s record industry, Ray Charles would never have left the lounge-bar circuit.

This leaves Sideways and Million Dollar Baby, the year’s requisite realist duo. Both feature a raw, devastating naturalism; they are far and away the most mature offerings on the Oscar docket. But while Ray and Neverland stay too distant from the viewer, these pictures cut too close to the bone. Sideways is an apt parable of its time, a tale of failure, loss, and botched hedonism. That mix is a bit too real in the era of outsourcing and Dennis Kozlowski. And for Academy voters in Hollywood, the casual alcoholism and bungled love affairs could seem more painful fact than funny fiction.

Million Dollar Baby is the best of the bunch, a tight and powerful film that offers pathos, warm humor, and classical tragedy in surprisingly equal parts. The end is devastating, but the promise of redemption is not far from the film’s horizon. Throw in the charming friendship between director and star Clint Eastwood and narrator Morgan Freeman, and you have a complex portrait of a world both heartrending and hopeful.

Why won’t Baby win? Consider the cultural currency of The Aviator, which combines tabloid gossip with big business and social elites. If the story of an heir’s trials and tribulations isn’t contemporary, what is? Paparazzi, excess, glamour and decay: replace Howard Hughes with Paris Hilton and you would have an eerily similar film. The Hotelier?

And despite its Old Hollywood narcissism and jumpy narrative, The Aviator stands as one of the best cinematic achievements of 2004. Left high and dry by the stunted Alexander and kitschy Spider-Man 2, audiences were desperate for a reminder of why they go to movies in the first place. Scorsese delivered, creating lovingly detailed sets, momentous speeches, and an electric dynamic between star Leonardo DiCaprio and scene-stealer Cate Blanchett, who resurrects Katharine Hepburn onscreen.

As with Gangs of New York, Scorsese tacks on 30 minutes too much material, leaving a bloated finished product. But its mix of celebrity obsession, glamour-tinged nostalgia, and anti-government undertones is the perfect concoction for the Academy voter of 2005. Eastwood has already won an Oscar; so far, Scorsese’s been snubbed. This year it’s Marty’s turn to shine.

CUTTING ROOM FLOOR

Missing in this year’s best movie mix are the postmodern masterpieces the Academy still refuses to touch. Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was visceral, virtuoso filmmaking, a visual trip that delighted the senses while ruminating on the deepest human themes of love, loss and memory. Charlie Kaufman picked up his second original screenplay nomination for this gem, whose late spring release date crippled its chances of Oscar success. Tape the awards and pick this one up on DVD; as he did with the masterpiece Adaptation, Kaufman questioned our assumptions of what film can accomplish, technically and emotionally.

And lastly, where was Napoleon Dynamite? An original screenplay nod would have been killer. Frickin’ idiot...

—Staff writer Michael M. Grynbaum can be reached at grynbaum@fas.harvard.edu.