Best pictures nominees, and their shadows

Does the academy go for small underdog tales? Huge adventure epics? Thwarted romances? Violence and warfare? Conflicted heroes? Effects that enchant the eye and move the medium forward? Yes, yes they do, and so goes the latest list of best picture nominees. It may have double the nominations of the last 66 years, but it still hews to themes and stories long beloved of Oscar. So in an effort to sort out everyone’s chances, here’s a look -- below and on the following page -- at the latest titles bound for glory and the previous award winners that they hearken back to.

-- Lisa Rosen Oh, where to begin. The lineage of realistic antiwar movies and damaged soldiers goes all the way back to the 1930 masterpiece “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Oscar’s third best-picture winner. Embattled brethren can also be found in “The Deer Hunter” (1978), “Platoon” (1986) and “Full Metal Jacket” (1987).

While the visual leap would compare to James Cameron’s 1997 winner “Titanic,” with its similarly mind-boggling effects, the comparison that bears out thematically is 1990’s “Dances With Wolves.” Here, as there, we have noble savages, a female lead who starts out as reluctant mentor and ends up as soul mate and a military hero who finds healing with his new tribe as he rebels against his old one.

Let’s see, a sweet underdog story in which the love of a good woman and devotion to a bone-crunching sport take a broken man and make him whole. In 1976’s “Rocky,” it was a wife. This time it’s a mother, but the story has proved just as uplifting.

In the 1956 winner “Around the World in 80 Days,” an adventurer sets his own stubborn course. “Up” doesn’t start with a bet, and Carl’s faithful retainer may be a few years younger than Phileas Fogg’s, but our hero is just as hindered by obstacles, including a villain who all but twirls his mustache, and he does fly by balloon(s).

As in 1958’s “Gigi,” an innocent young girl is thrown into the arms of a suave older man, to different ends certainly, but one can almost hear Peter Sarsgaard’s character singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” every time he looks at Carey Mulligan’s Jenny.

As a man flummoxed by more powerful forces around him, Michael Stuhlbarg’s Larry Gopnik is reminiscent of another nice guy who lets others run roughshod all over him: Jack Lemmon in 1960’s “The Apartment.” Both films are ostensible comedies that harbor painfully dark stories, and both have endings that the viewer wouldn’t expect.

The fantasy sequences are in Precious’ head, not danced out on a train platform, but her reality is as grim as anything the street children in Mumbai face. And the somewhat happy ending is certainly as hard-won.

On the surface -- OK, many surfaces -- the frenetic sci-fi spectacle couldn’t be more different than the respectful epic biopic “Gandhi” (1982). But bear with us. As ordinary men suddenly forced to identify with a despised and oppressed minority in South Africa, the two heroes share the seeds of their respective revolutions. True, their paths diverge greatly over that whole passive resistance thing. And there’s no talk of a “Gandhi” sequel. “Schindler’s List” (1993) doesn’t share the “Basterds’ ” revenge fantasy, but there’s a similarly unbearable level of tension and violence and it’s in the same era, and it showcases another indelible Nazi character (played by Ralph Fiennes) that scooped up awards.

First, let’s go on the road with 1934’s “It Happened One Night,” in which a handsome, cavalier leading man and an otherwise engaged woman spend a very sexy night together in a hotel. Colbert showed her leg, Clooney showed his miles. (“One Night” wasn’t about layoffs, but it was during the Depression, so one could posit that many laid-off people were in the audience.) Then add a soupcon of “Man on Wire,” last year’s feature documentary winner about a Frenchman who gets by on charm and laser-like focus -- who disregards those around him, who couldn’t be more up in the air if he tried.

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