The war between art and commerce rages on at the movies

As 2011 winds to a close and the Academy Awards season begins revving up, it's time to look back on the highs and lows in cinema over the course of the year. In critical circles, there was a long burning firestorm sparked by an admittedly lame brained article calling art films "cultural vegetables," with the implication that anyone who enjoys art films is simply faking it to gain cultural capital. Besides the fact that this perpetuates a sub-teenage mentality that people become poseurs to join an "in" crowd, it also promotes the dangerous mentality that film can never be art, and that any pretensions otherwise are false since it's supposedly a populist institution. And when the larger public begins to equate the bloated, largely silly Oscar-bait pictures with art films, supporting only the crassest of commercial trash (we're looking at you, Michael Bay) that creates serious problems for any vaguely non-commercial film wishing to get some kind of distribution. This year's "Margaret" was actually shot and completed way back in 2006, and five years worth of studio entanglement caused it to get a meager release long after the time period that gave the film context (America in the second term of the Bush administration) had come and gone. In spite of the debacle, "Margaret" garnered its share of critical accolades but the fact that it's barely playing anywhere outside of New York and Los Angeles doesn't bode well for its financial future.

The age-old struggle of art vs. commerce rages on, and occasionally the two manage to bleed into each other, but not as often as they should. And yet 2011 turned out to be one of the richest years for art and world cinema in recent memory. Many established masters operated at the height of their powers like Abbas Kiarostami, Werner Herzog, Terence Malick, Lars von Trier and Errol Morris turning out films worthy of entry to the top of their oeuvre, while the new stars of art cinema like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Steve McQueen, Jeff Nichols, Nicolas Winding Refn and Kelly Reichardt cemented themselves as the top tier of the new wave of great filmmakers.  The story of the year though was young filmmaker Sean Durkin's stunning debut film, "Martha Marcy May Marlene" which swept Sundance and Cannes, dropping jaws among critics and audience members alike.  While the lion's share of Oscar hype is going to a fairly typical crop – "The Iron Lady" starring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, the French silent film pastiche "The Artist," Spielberg's "War Horse," etc. – dark horses like the aforementioned "Martha Marcy May Marlene" as well as surefire Best Picture nominee "The Tree of Life," which might lend a little class and artistic credit to the proceedings. Though they probably won't take home the big awards, it's always nice to see some legitimately great films get recognized in a sea of industry back patting.

This year wasn't without its odious, shameful movies though. Possible Oscar contender "The Help" continued in the grand Hollywood tradition of telling the story of the civil rights movement from the perspective of white people instead of the African American activists and families who are no longer allowed to be the heroes in their own story.  It's not surprising that the film captured the public imagination; many morally repugnant films have somehow managed to steal the hearts of the American public, from "Mississippi Burning" to "Life is Beautiful" to "Crash." Hollywood's penchant for pedaling out simplistic, feel-good-about-bad-things tripe is alive and well. Zack Snyder's "Sucker Punch" or "Things Zack Snyder Doodled in His Notebook When He Was 14 and Thought Was Totally Rad" flopped critically and commercially mostly because people were able to sniff out that the film's pseudo-female empowerment message was unfortunately misogyny in disguise. But the worst one-two punch of cinematic awfulness went to Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Company, releasing the absolute worst movies of the year, "Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star" and "Jack and Jill." Even in a season with such incredible lows, serious, wondrous art still exists. No matter what Dan Kois says.