Okay. It's time to get down to brass tacks. I'm going to get up on my soapbox and hope that the right Academy members read the column this week, because it's time to re-do the rules of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category. Do you know how long it has been since a great film, a truly great film, won in this category? I'm talking about a film made by a genuinely great artist of the cinema, a film for the ages, and not just a perfectly good film, or a film about one of the great world wars. Here's your answer: twenty-five years ago. Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1983) was the last great one. That leaves 25 years of pretty good, just OK, forgettable, or flat-out awful winners (mostly forgettable). This year's winner, The Counterfeiters (41 screens) had to be one of the worst movies I saw all year; at it's center is a perfectly good (true) WWII concentration camp story, but it's warped by an entirely inept director, responsible for one of the worst movies I've ever seen, All the Queen's Men (2001). How did it win? How did it get past all the truly great films of 2007?

I like Christmas movies as much as the next guy, but when they're bad, they're really bad, as in Christmas with the Kranks or Deck the Halls. Most times I prefer a different kind of experience. Sometimes a movie simply set during the holiday season can weave Christmas into its storyline without making an overt holiday statement, and these can evoke a warmth and nostalgia -- or sometimes the opposite -- of their own.

1. The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Ernst Lubitsch)
Lubitsch rarely balanced comedy and pathos so beautifully as in this movie about a busy Hungarian department store during the month before Christmas. Hardly anyone mentions the holiday until the final scenes, but the hope and despair that the season can bring hovers everywhere. Jimmy Stewart plays a clerk having an anonymous pen-pal love affair with a girl (Margaret Sullavan) -- who happens to be working right next to him in the shop, unbeknownst to either of them. The entire cast is remarkable, from Frank Morgan as the shop's owner to William Tracy as the delivery boy. Unhappily, Nora Ephron remade this in 1998 as You've Got Mail.