Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, "The Artist."

His wit is obviously still as sharp as the blades he wielded in the unlikely role of a scary mob boss in “Drive,” not dulled by this devastating disappointment.

But Brooks was not the only one unjustly snubbed in the 84th Oscar race. What of Tilda Swinton’s implosive portrait of a mother burdened with a profoundly bad boy in “We Need to Talk About Kevin”? Or Michael Shannon’s heart-shredding turn as a man imagining the approach of an apocalyptic storm that’s going to destroy everything he loves in the little-seen drama “Take Shelter”?

We might also question the exclusion of Shailene Woodley’s wise-beyond-her-years teen daughter in “The Descendants” and Michael Fassbender’s tortured sex addict in “Shame.”

We could go on, but there are some worthy contenders this year, so here’s how I’m calling the winners of Sunday night’s Hollywood showdown.

BEST PICTURE

George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, "The Descendants."

“Drive” should be parked at the top of this category, but Nicolas Winding Refn’s noirish crime-thriller-with-a-soul was apparently dismissed by Academy voters as just another ultraviolent, car-crashing guy movie. Most members were feeling sentimental this year, so the nominated nine include the maudlin “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” the epic family fare of “War Horse,” and two sweet love letters to the movies themselves, “The Artist” and “Hugo,” which were bound to get love in return (10 noms for the former, 11 for the latter).

There are deserving films of emotional and topical weight, such as “The Help,” about black housemaids and the white women who employed them in the early ’60s South, and “The Descendants,” a comedy-drama about a Hawaiian land owner coping with family crisis. But the heartstring-plucking “The Artist” has the added novelty of being silent and in black-and-white, which seems to be capturing the affections of the Oscar gods.

Should win: “The Descendants.”

Will win: “The Artist.”

BEST ACTOR

¿Quien es Mas Macho? George Clooney o Brad Pitt? It might not make much difference, because while the two “Ocean’s 11” buddies are duking it out for the Best Actor trophy, Jean Dujardin just might silently steal away with the prize for the ability he displayed in “The Artist” to speak volumes with his soulful eyes and eloquent gestures, without uttering a sound. Gary Oldman’s perfectly-pitched stillness as a cunning but desperately lonely spymaster was gold-worthy in “Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy,” and Pitt hit a homer in the sports drama “Moneyball.” But Clooney has never locked into the humanity of a character with more depth and sensitivity than he displayed as a Hawaiian landowner with serious family issues in “The Descendants.”

Should and will win: George Clooney.

BEST ACTRESS

Glenn Close just wasn’t believable as a man in “Albert Nobbs,” but Rooney Mara was supremely convincing as a female street tough in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Meryl Streep

Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, "The Help."

 delivered a dead-on feature-length impression of Margaret “The Iron Lady” Thatcher and Michelle Williams did much the same portraying Marilyn Monroe in “My Week with Marilyn.” But “The Help” glowed with the gravity and grace of Viola Davis’ African-American housemaid suffering the humiliations inflicted by white Mississippi housewives in the early 1960s. She won a lot of hearts, including those of many Academy voters, no doubt.

Should and will win: Viola Davis.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Even more amazing than funnyman Albert Brooks’ against-type turn as a murderous menace in “Drive” is the fact that he’s not among these nominees. That’s a criminal oversight. The five contenders who did make the cut certainly gave noteworthy performances, particularly Kenneth Branagh playing his personal idol Laurence Olivier in “My Week with Marilyn,” and Jonah Hill as the nerdy baseball recruiting consultant in “Moneyball.” Nick Nolte always looks good playing his rough-edged, weather-

Christopher Plummer, "Beginners."

beaten self and Max von Sydow was yet another silent wonder as a mute in “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” but with Brooks unjustly absent from the picture, Christopher Plummer is the outstanding competitor here, having already won several honors for his widower who comes out of the closet at age 75 in “Beginners.”

Should and will win: Christopher Plummer.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Academy voters gave a rare nod of respect to a comedic performance for Melissa McCarthy’s fat-joke-sensitive member of the wedding in “Bridesmaids,” Berenice Bejo managed to say it all with her bright eyes and dazzling smile in the silence of “The Artist” and Janet McTeer was the single saving grace of “Albert Nobbs.” Even more remarkable was seeing Jessica Chastain prove her versatility yet again in “The Help,” her fifth movie in a banner year that included memorable turns in “Take Shelter,” “The Debt,” “The Tree of Life” and “Coriolanus.” But Octavia Spencer has already proven to be an awards magnet for her angry African-American maid with a wicked sense of vengeance in “The Help,” and she’s about to add another trophy to her mantle.

Should win: Jessica Chastain.

Will win: Octavia Spencer.

BEST DIRECTOR

I’m going to go with the way things ought to be. The director of the year’s Best Picture should win for helming that picture. Of course it often doesn’t happen that way, which is one of

Michel Hazanavicius

the great mysteries about how the minds of Academy members work. But the new kid on the block, Michel Hazanavicius, has already taken top honors at the Directors Guild Awards, which bodes pretty well for a directing Oscar win for “The Artist,” his black-and-white valentine to America’s silent era, although “Hugo,” Martin Scorsese’s fanciful, family-oriented 3-D billet-doux to early French cinema, has the veteran craftsman running a very close second.

Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” was an imaginative but lightweight adult fairy tale, Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” was an artful meditation on existence and mortality that meandered between powerful and plodding. In “The Descendants,” Alexander Payne brought out the best in George Clooney while painting a painfully funny and moving portrait of a shattered family slowly beginning to pull itself together again. But Hazanavicius has it.

Should win: Alexander Payne.

Will win: Michel Hazanavicius.

Quick guesses in other categories:

Best original screenplay

Woody Allen, “Midnight in Paris.”

Best adapted screenplay

Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, Jim Payne, “The Descendants.”

Best animated feature

“Rango”

Best documentary feature

“Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory.”

BY DENNIS KING

Like lemmings, we movie critics line up every late December to release our lists of the year’s 10 best movies.

It’s a necessary chore, but try as we might to be independent minded there’s a numbing sameness to most critics’ lists. Dictating the year’s “best” films is so often a rote ritual, driven by urgencies of the upcoming awards season and marked by a certain inevitability as studios march out their prestige pictures and promotional blitzes to generate maximum holiday fanfare. Thus, most top 10 lists are necessarily top-heavy with these inescapable Oscar contenders.

The fated suspects show up on every list – “The Artist,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Descendents” and so on. And rightfully so. These are indeed among the year’s indisputable best. (* Below, see the 10 best voted by members of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. A worthy roster indeed.)

In a mild act of contrariness, we hereby issue our highly subjective list – not of “bests” but of spiffy double features comprised of some of the year’s coolest flicks. Not all of these movies will show up on others’ lists and they might not all figure into the manufactured hype of the pre-Oscar run-up. But they’re popcorn pairings we found to be neat and natural fits.

So, here are our top five double features for 2011:

“The Artist”/”Hugo” – A film buff’s dream double: French director Michel Hazanavicius’ silent valentine to silent cinema and Hollywood’s rocky transition to the era of “talkies,” and American master Martin Scorsese’s 3D epic of a mechanically gifted Parisian boy and his encounter with visionary French film pioneer Georges Melies. (Add in “My Week With Marilyn” and the knockout performance of Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe and you have a cinephile’s eureka trifecta.)

“The Tree of Life”/”Melancholia”- Two brainy, abstract movies that address philosophically wonky, cosmic questions: Oklahoman Terrence Malick’s visual poem couches in its dead-on evocation of a 1950s boyhood in America’s heartland multiple big questions about creation, the afterlife and God; Danish trickster Lars von Trier’s dreamy duel examination of clinical depression and the end of the world is both beautiful and terrible to behold.

“War Horse”/”Buck” – Equine magnificence in all its earthy glory: Steven Spielberg’s painterly adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s classic young adult tale and the Tony-winning stage play is a gloriously old-fashioned horse opera; documentarian Cindy Meehl’s aw-shucks film portrait of original “horse whisperer” Buck Brannaman is a life lesson in the intricate relationships between horses and people, one that brings out the best in both.

“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”/”Project Nim” – Monkey business, low and high: The chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans that populate director Rupert Wyatt’s surprisingly smart and emotionally resonant reboot of the fallow franchise based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 sci-fi novel are indeed a gnarly, frighteningly feral and hyper-realistic bunch; Oscar-winning documentary director James Marsh takes an unflinching and unsentimental look at Nim, the chimpanzee who was the focus of a landmark experiment aimed at showing that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. A sad, funny and unsettling biography of an animal we tried to make human.

“Moneyball”/”Seven Days in Utopia” – The Zen of baseball and golf: Director Bennett Miller’s portrait of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) shows that nerds, with the obsession over stats and box scores, can indeed win baseball games; director Matt Russell marshals the gnarled, wizened countenance of Robert Duvall to tell the spiritual tale of a troubled young pro golfer (Lucas Black) who recaptures his mojo by hanging out in the rustic, sagebrush environs of Utopia, Texas.

* Here’s the OFCC Top 10 films of 2011

1. “The Artist”
2. “Drive”
3. “The Descendants”
4. “Hugo”
5. “Shame”
6. “Moneyball”
7. “Midnight in Paris”
8. “Melancholia”
9. “The Tree of Life”
10.“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

This week, the most interesting DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Badlands”

With native Oklahoma filmmaker Terrence Malick possibly set to shoot a new movie in Bartlesville, it’s a good time to revisit his first feature in a newly repackaged DVD of “Badlands,” due out Tuesday.

The 1973 film, which many critics rank among Malick’s best, is a deeply evocative dramatization of the Charles Starkweather-Caril Ann Fugate killing spree of the 1950’s, in which a teenage girl and her twenty-something boyfriend slaughtered her entire family and several others in the Dakota badlands.

In Malick’s stylized, fictionalized version, shiftless garbage collector Kit Carruthers strikes up a relationship with baton-twirling teen Holly Sargis (Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in brilliant performances that were prelude to distinguished careers). When her father objects to their romance, Kit guns down the old man and the rest of Holly’s family and the two sociopathic young lovers go on the run.

As Kit and Holly live in the woods in idyllic flight and trek across the badlands in an effort to reach Canada, the body count rises. But Malick makes this more than a murder-spree tale as he manages to get inside the heads of this bizarre pair and produce one of the most stunningly stylish and psychologically compelling crime sagas in film history.

Casting calls for an unspecified new film project were conducted earlier this fall in Bartlesville, and unconfirmed reports had it that former city resident Terrence Malick, who is notoriously press shy, would be directing a “romantic drama” in the area starring Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. But officials of the Oklahoma Film Office have declined to comment specifically.

- Dennis King

BY GENE TRIPLETT

TORONTO — Ben Affleck wanted to pull a job in his hometown of Boston. To get away with it, he imported a string of pros who he knew could fake convincing Beantown accents and

Ben Affleck

provide solid backup when the shooting started.

His accomplices were Jon Hamm (“Mad Men”), hailing from St. Louis; Jeremy Renner (“The Hurt Locker”), out of Modesto, Calif.; London native Rebecca Hall (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”); Blake Lively (upcoming “Green Lantern”), from out L.A. way; Pete Postlethwaite (“Inception”), another limey from Warrington, Cheshire, England; and Chris Cooper (“Adaptation”), of Kansas City, Mo.

Affleck’s plan was to knock over box offices nationwide with “The Town,” a heist thriller he co-wrote and directed, based on the Chuck Hogan novel “Prince of Thieves.” It opens today in theaters.

Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner

“I think the accents are a big issue because if you don’t do them well … they can really upend your movie,” Affleck said during a news conference last week at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“You have to hire really good actors to do it. I didn’t even have to know they can do it. So, when Blake came in and read the scenes, I asked her which part of Boston she was from. So, that was handled. And then with Renner — who I knew was a good actor, a great actor — I wasn’t worried about his ability to do it, I was just worried would he do it. … And so I sent him a lot of recordings.

“But more than the recordings, I found out that it’s about the people you stand next to. So, I put the right people around Jeremy without saying anything, and Jeremy’s so smart, and you could immediately see him sort of like radiating towards the people. … It was really fun to watch. And he’d show up at the set, and he had it dead to rights.”

“The Town” is about people who grew up in a one-square-mile neighborhood of Boston called Charlestown, which has produced more bank and armored car robbers than anywhere in

Jon Hamm

 the U.S., according to the authors of the film and the book.

Affleck directs himself for the first time as Doug MacRay, leader of a crew of ruthless bank robbers that always gets out clean. The only family Doug has is his partners in crime, especially Jem (Renner), a dangerous dude with a hair-trigger temper: the loose cannon of the bunch.

“I had the hardest time, I think (with the accent),” Renner said. “It’s difficult. I’m not from the region, and I thought it was one of the most important things I had to overcome. It doesn’t matter how good Ben is or how good any actor is. (If the accent sounds phony) it’s going to pop out, and it’s gonna pull people out of the movie, I think.

“So, Ben didn’t help me at all, initially. I kept calling and saying, ‘When do I get that accent coach?’ He says, ‘We’re not doing those.’ I’m like, ‘OK, great.’ ‘But I got this little tape for ya. It’s, like, some criminals talking.’ I’m like, ‘OK.’ So, yeah, he gave me a lot of actual resources. Actually, when I got to Boston, there were resources out the wazoo. So, it became easier. But the ultimate challenge is to improv on the dialect.”

Hamm, who plays the FBI agent in pursuit of Doug’s gang, said, “I had a pretty easy time with my accent on the film. It was nonexistent. No, but what Jeremy was saying is totally true. Walking around Boston is a pretty good accent coach. There are various and sundry versions of the Boston patois that you can pick out and find, and I think Renner and I had a blast exploring those particular vocal coaches.”

Affleck said Hamm didn’t really need to learn Bostonian speech patterns, since his federal agent character wasn’t really supposed to seem like a homeboy.

“We talked about it,” Affleck said, “and he and I both had the same instinct, that being from whatever it is — Illinois, Missouri, Rochester or something — being an outsider kind of said more for him than somebody who had an accent.”

Hamm did, however, take some pointers from Boston area law enforcement officers at the local, state and federal levels.

“It’s a collaborative effort between all three levels of law enforcement, and they do amazing work,” Hamm said. “There are a lot of robberies in Boston, and a lot of them get solved because of these guys’ hard work. So, it was nice to see from the inside how clear their objective is. Their job is to stop bad people from doing bad things. They’re very clear on that, so that was very helpful to me.”

But assistance from the local law was limited and unofficial. After all, the film is about a smart gang of thieves who keep giving the cops the slip.

“There were various levels of cooperation, as you astutely point out,” Affleck said in response to a question from The Oklahoman. “We were not officially embraced by the FBI, for example. We don’t use their actual logos; we’re not sanctioned by the Department of Justice. For one thing, that’s a long process, and for another thing, you end up in an editorial situation when you have to really subject your film to creative concerns that you might not want governing what you want to do.”

However, local authorities were not only cooperative but generously tolerant of the film crew when it came to shooting several spectacularly destructive car chases through Boston’s North End.

“It was difficult for us,” Affleck said of the constricted area. “We had to be very judicious about how we worked in the North End, where we parked or put the things, how much we smashed, how much we burned the cars. It just got very, very hard for us to do. And to make matters worse, it rained, so we kept postponing and postponing. We’d close all the streets, and then we wouldn’t be shooting. … The North End is now a great tourist destination, so they’re makin’ a lot of money, so we’re taking money out of people’s wallets.

“The movie is nothing if not one long apology to the people of the North End. So, I hope they like it. I wish there was a way you could bring your phone bill and get in free. But anyway, I’m sorry.”

Although “The Town” is the fourth movie Affleck has made in his hometown (the first was “Good Will Hunting” in 1997, for which he and Matt Damon won writing Oscars, and the second was his directorial debut “Gone Baby Gone” in 2007; the third was the upcoming “The Company Men”), he insists he’s not making a career out of filming movies about Boston.

“I just happened to find … stories set in Boston, and probably being from there helped me a little bit,” he said.

In fact, Affleck’s next project is far from Boston. He’ll be shooting a film with director Terrence Malick (“Days of Heaven”) in Oklahoma, in and around Bartlesville where Malick grew up, with production to begin at the end of September, according to the Oklahoma Film and Music Office. As yet, no official announcement about that film has been made.

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Ben Affleck

Open casting calls for actors and extras will be held Saturday and Sunday at Bartlesville High School for a movie being developed for filming in Bartlesville, according to a press release issued this week by Norman-based Freihofer Casting.

“With the support of the Oklahoma Film and Music Office, Freihofer Casting is conducting additional open casting calls for actors and extras to be considered for speaking and non-speaking roles in an upcoming family-oriented Hollywood romantic drama to be filmed in Oklahoma,” casting director Chris Freihofer said in the release.

Film office director Jill Simpson would not confirm recent reports that a movie directed by former Bartlesville resident Terrence Malick and starring Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams would be filmed in Bartlesville. Local officials also have declined to comment on the

Terrence Malick

reports.

“Well, we’re scouting a number of films right now and there is a major film slotted for September in the Bartlesville area, and one for October in the Oklahoma City metro, and these are high-quality productions and there’s casting going on and they are coming in, but that’s about all I can say,” Simpson told The Oklahoman on Wednesday.

Rumors about the Bartlesville film project began to spread quickly after Affleck and his wife, actress Jennifer Garner, were spotted Aug. 10 in Broken Arrow’s Bass Pro Shop, buying fishing supplies. The couple signed autographs and posed for photographs for store employees and customers.

Malick, who grew up in Bartlesville, has directed such films as “Badlands,” “Days of Heaven” and the 1998 remake of “The Thin Red Line.”

The current project held its initial casting call last weekend in Tulsa. The Bartlesville casting call will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, and from 1-5 p.m. on Sunday at the high school, located at 1700 Hillcrest Drive in Bartlesville.

The call is open to people of all ethnicities, ages 5 and up, regardless of prior acting experience. For more information, call Freihofer Casting at 310-4391.

The Wrap and Ain’t It Cool News are reporting that Ben Affleck and Rachel Weisz have joined the cast of a Terrence Malick film, set to begin filming in in Bartlesville, OK  in October.  Affleck was recently spotted at the Broken Arrow Bass Pro shop, where an employee reported Affleck said he was filming a movie, and researching a role as a fisherman.

According to the Wrap, the project, a “romantic drama,” was announced at the Berlin Film Festival.   The Wrap speculates Affleck may be replacing Christian Bale in the film.  Bale was spotted in Bartlesville in 2008, and told The Oklahoman’s George Lang he was scouting a possible film.

Oklahoma Film and Music Office Director Jill Simpson said she has not spoken with Affleck about making a film in Oklahoma.

Ben Affleck