In a striking kickoff to the two actresses’ back-and-forth awards-season competition, Davis paid a warm tribute to the woman she described as an idol, a mentor and a friend. She spoke openly about the loneliness of being an ambitious African-American actress with very few role models to follow, who had seen talented forerunners like Cicely Tyson and Dorothy Dandridge essentially kicked to the curb by Hollywood. She hadn’t been looking for a Caucasian role model, she said, but the craft and range of Streep’s work on stage and screen had always impressed her, and when they worked together on the 2008 film “Doubt” (for which both were Oscar-nominated) they became good friends. Streep’s example had demonstrated a fearlessness and generosity, Davis told us, that had opened new pathways in her personal and professional life.

Streep then took the stage to deliver a dry comic monologue in which she claimed — incorrectly, I believe — that only a minority of the critics in the room had voted for her. (I’m a member of the group, and I don’t understand its voting procedures, but Critics Circle chair John Anderson has said that Streep won a first-ballot majority.) But before she moved on to that, Streep thanked Davis for her introduction: “How remarkable, and how generous, for you to do that. This is your year.”

That was a heck of a lot of high-class dames in less than five minutes, and we were all appropriately dazzled. But looking back on that event, and Davis’ remarkable speech, I think that Meryl Streep saw what was coming more clearly than the rest of us did. (Furthermore, I think she’s 100 percent fine with it.) At that moment, she looked like the prohibitive favorite to win the best actress Oscar, both because she had given a dominating performance as a major historical figure in a big holiday-season movie, and also because she has been nominated an unbelievable 13 times since her last win (for “Sophie’s Choice,” in 1983) and at age 62 is probably close to the end of her leading-lady career. She went on from the New York critics’ award to win several other prominent critics’ groups, along with the BAFTA Award and the Golden Globe. A shoo-in, right?

Not exactly. Of course I could be proven wrong, but along with virtually everybody else who pays attention to this circus, I’m betting that Viola Davis ends up clutching one of those little gold statues on Sunday night — as much because everybody watching wants to hear her acceptance speech as because of anything she did on-screen in “The Help.” People talk about all the backstage hoodoo that goes into an Oscar campaign, and Harvey Weinstein’s admittedly amazing powers to bend the minds of Academy voters to his will. But I’m not sure we’ve ever seen an actor go out and claim an Oscar during the campaign in quite the forthright and dramatic way that Davis has.

Davis evidently decided that this was her opportunity, after a long career of stage roles and oddball supporting parts and runs on “United States of Tara” and “Law & Order: SVU,” to come out with guns blazing and let the world know who she was and what she thought. It may have been a calculated decision on some level, but she’s a ferocious, intelligent and independent-minded woman as well as an outstanding actor, and there’s nothing strategic about that. She has spoken directly about all the racial and social discomfort caused by “The Help,” and about the yearning for positive role models that sometimes limits the choices of African-American artists.

Most notably, when PBS talk-show host Tavis Smiley told Davis and costar Octavia Spencer (who is also likely to win, for best supporting actress) that he felt ambivalent about the prospect of them winning Academy Awards for playing servants, six decades after Hattie McDaniel, Davis delivered a dressing-down that violated the happy-friendly norms of chat TV. “That very mind-set that you have and that a lot of African-Americans have is absolutely destroying the black artist,” she told Smiley. “The black artist cannot live in a place — in a revisionist place. A black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy, people are messy.” Smiley was clearly startled — but he was standing on the track in front of the Viola Davis Oscar Express. One can only pity the fool.

Davis has talked openly, but without a hint of self-pity, about the difficulties of being a black actress in an industry that still relies heavily on caricature and stereotype, and even about being a dark-skinned black actress at a time when, as she recently put it, “Halle Berry is having a hard time.” After she brought this up, during a Newsweek panel discussion featuring various Oscar candidates, Charlize Theron jumped in to assure Davis she was “hot as shit,” which was a nice thing to say and all but (as many commentators have observed) massively misses the point. Win or lose at this year’s Oscars, Davis won’t get offered Theron’s wide-ranging dramatic roles, from serial killer to narcissistic sexpot, and won’t get the Vogue covers or Dior endorsement deals either. If it’s any consolation — and it probably is — Theron’s “Young Adult” was a dud, and she was not nominated this year.

As far-fetched as this seems now, when Davis delivered that Manhattan introduction for Streep, she was a long way from being a for-sure nominee herself. She had appeared in a pulpy, controversial hit that had opened well before Oscar season and was aimed 100 percent at female audiences (two doses of poison for the guy-centric Academy), a movie that made a lot of money and ignited a sharply polarized debate on the history of race in America. That’s at least three strikes, maybe four — and then there was the question of whether Aibileen Clark, Davis’ character in “The Help,” even qualified as a leading role. Emma Stone’s crusading white journalist, Skeeter Phelan, is clearly the protagonist, and Aibileen is pretty much the stoical, even-tempered Robin to Skeeter’s hotheaded Batman. On the other hand, while Stone and Spencer and Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard and all the other women in the movie chew up the scenery (and often enjoyably so), Davis delivers a performance of tremendous dignity and quiet, almost stillness. Amid all the histrionics and violence and poop-eating, Aibileen is like a Zen monk contemplating the essential emptiness of everything. She knows a great deal more than she says, and Davis communicates that nonverbally, through her carriage, her measured movements, the long pauses before she speaks.

Everything the Academy ever does can, and probably should, be viewed through a cynical lens. Nominating Davis for best actress — along with the supporting nods for Chastain and Spencer — was a way of honoring “The Help” as one of the year’s cultural touchstones while navigating around the racial controversy sparked by the film’s release. The Oscar-season script, a few weeks ago, looked something like this: African-American viewers got a rooting interest in the best actress campaign (while still being permitted, like Tavis Smiley, to deplore “The Help” on various levels), Davis got a major notch in her career belt, and Streep would go on to collect a career-spanning Oscar after a tour de force performance and many years as a bridesmaid.

Instead, Viola Davis has seized the opportunity. Not just the opportunity to stage an unlikely upset and win an Oscar, although she’s probably done that. More important, she has seized the chance to remind us that she is an immensely underutilized and underappreciated actress and one of the most outspoken free thinkers in the closed-mouthed, cliché-spouting world of Hollywood stardom. Should she be playing bigger and better parts than Aibileen Clark? Of course. Was that really the best screen acting performance of the year? Almost certainly not. But the Oscar is always about much more than that, like it or not, and someone with Meryl Streep’s social conscience and sense of drama understands that well. We’ll likely never know what Streep may have told her friend in private, but what she said in public was enough: “This is your year.” She was right.

Now, it’s also true that my reaction to all this diligent legwork by a team of at least seven Times reporters can be summarized with a colloquial phrase that begins with “No” and ends with “Sherlock.” No one who has paid attention to the Oscars or the Academy — or the American film industry at large — harbors any illusions about who’s running the show, or believes that Oscar voters have much in common with Americans or moviegoers at large. Indeed, the borderline-cruel caricature of a typical Oscar voter, often bandied about in private by journalists and publicists, is of a 70-something retired actor, certainly white and probably Jewish, who wears sky-blue slacks and white patent leather shoes and lives in Brentwood or Beverly Hills. That seems to be almost exactly what the Times investigation has revealed. If anything, I found the median age of Academy members to be surprisingly young, at 62, and the male membership surprisingly low, even at 77 percent. It’s only half facetious to say that those numbers reflect years of outreach and affirmative action.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that the Times pointedly did not inquire into the religious or ethnic affiliations of the Academy’s white members. I can’t deny being curious about the question of how Jewish the Academy is these days, and you might be able to construct a non-offensive argument for why that’s relevant information. But it’s information that ugly people would use for ugly reasons, and you can’t blame the reporters and editors involved for not jabbing a stick into that particular hornets’ nest. (Internet comment threads on this topic are likely to be bad enough without raising the subject directly.) For the record, I suspect anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists might be a little disappointed. Of course it’s true that Hollywood retains some of its traditional identity as an industry founded by Jewish immigrants at a time when other business ventures were closed to them. But I’m guessing that Jewish membership in the Academy has declined a fair bit, in relative terms.

As the Times report goes on to explain, you can’t accuse the Academy of failing to represent its own industry, which overwhelmingly remains a white boys’ club in almost every area (except public relations, long a realm of female power in Hollywood). Many areas of the mainstream film business, including cinematography, special effects work and the executive suites, still have very few women and almost no people of color. Crunching the numbers provided by San Diego State professor Martha Lauzen and the movie industry’s guilds, the Times concluded that the Academy represents women with rough accuracy among producers, directors and screenwriters, the key creative positions behind the camera. Of course this provides no answer to the larger question: Two years after Kathryn Bigelow’s big Oscar triumph with “The Hurt Locker,” why were only 5 percent of the top 250 box-office films in 2011 made by women? (Reportedly, 17 percent of screenwriters for Hollywood pictures were women, and about 25 percent of producers.)

As Steve Pond, the level-headed Oscar reporter at The Wrap, puts it, “In other words, the Academy, which is supposed to represent the best of the movie industry, is an accurate reflection of that industry in many ways.” That’s entirely true, but Pond is essentially shrugging off a larger social and cultural issue that speaks to the long-term relevance of the Oscars, or rather the lack thereof. I think we all owe a debt to the L.A. Times, however obvious the results of their work may appear, for thrusting this question front and center: How much do the creaky, crusty demographics of the Academy have to do with the fact that people don’t really care about the Oscars anymore?

I realize that I’m begging the question here on a number of levels (and for once I’m using that phrase correctly). We have nearly reached the end of an awards season more tedious, more predictable and more drawn-out than any in recent memory, and in that context it’s tough to evaluate the history or the overall viability of the whole enterprise. Millions will tune in on Sunday night to see the fabulous gowns, tearful speeches and unfortunate production decisions, of course. But hardly anyone who isn’t directly involved this year feels a passionate rooting interest. (I mean, do you?) We can predict the winners in almost every major category, with the possible exception of best actress (although I think Viola Davis has pulled into the lead.) The nominated pictures are almost all tepid and noncontroversial, neither huge popular hits nor memorable cinematic breakthroughs. (The one exception to this might be Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” which won’t win anything significant.)

In the middle of last week, about 10 days out from Oscar night, I clicked over to a major entertainment-news site to see what scurrilous and delightful tidbits they might have to offer. Among 35 or so stories on their front page, exactly two had anything to do with the Oscars: One was about an after-party that Jimmy Kimmel and Oprah Winfrey would reportedly attend (well, OK then!) and the other was about Kodak pulling its name off the Hollywood Boulevard theater where the ceremony is held. A couple of TV talk-show hosts, and the slow death of the historic American company that once made all the film movies were shot on (in the long-ago days when movies were shot on film). I think that about sums it up.

As I’ve suggested in a couple of earlier articles, I think the Academy has gradually painted itself into a cultural corner, with the Oscars increasingly devoted to middlebrow, mid-budget “Oscar-y” films that are neither mass-market hits nor indie-flavored critic’s darlings. As one reader commented in response to my recent piece on the apparent Oscar failure of “The Descendants,” what the Academy means by “best picture” is unclear. “Is it one we should admire? Is it one whose actors and directors we should applaud? Is it one people can’t stop talking about and actually want to see again?”

What the Los Angeles Times has given us is a quantifiable, demographic answer to those questions. The Academy Awards emanate from a closed universe of movie industry insiders, who are overwhelmingly rich white guys over age 50 (in the real world, one of the demographic groups least likely to go see movies in the theater). Inescapably, the awards reflect the tastes, inclinations and worldview of that audience, which goes a long way toward explaining all the portrayals of depressed middle-aged men among this year’s nominees (and the otherwise inexplicable best-picture nomination of “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”).

As recently as the turn of the century, when best-picture winners included major pop spectacles like “Titanic” and “Gladiator,” the Academy’s voters could serve as a plausible stand-in for a pretty big slice of the adult moviegoing audience. But as the entertainment universe has grown ever more niche-oriented and “narrowcasted,” and Hollywood’s global harvest of billions has increasingly come to rely on franchise movies aimed at teenagers, Oscar-friendly pictures have become their own middle-aged genre. As Steve Pond notes, the results aren’t always as disappointing as they are this year: “No Country for Old Men,” “The Hurt Locker” and “The Departed” are (at least arguably) exemplary new-school Oscar pictures. But there’s also no denying that they appeal most strongly to white men of a certain age.

One response is to say “so what,” as some people do in the Times piece. The Academy is a private membership organization, which is devoted to burnishing the image of the film industry and has never claimed to represent the public at large. It can give out awards however it wants, and people aren’t required to watch. Another might be to institute radical reforms, as suggested by 2001 best-actor winner and longtime member Denzel Washington: “If the country is 12 percent black, make the Academy 12 percent black. If the nation is 15 percent Hispanic, make the Academy 15 percent Hispanic.” It’s safe to say that Academy president Tom Sherak and CEO Dawn Hudson are going to steer well clear of both those positions, like Odysseus navigating between Scylla and Charybdis. They’ll make mumbled noises about diversity, do little or nothing in terms of concrete change, and hope to God that next year’s Oscar race has more sizzle.

Sure, the moment affected me — but there was both something Pavlovian and something willed about the way I was affected. Part of me was right there with Matt and the severely ill wife he’s learned a lot of unsettling things about, the daughters he’s just getting to know and the big decision about selling unspoiled land on Kauai to developers that still lies ahead of him. (As if anybody in the viewing audience believes for a second that George Clooney is going to do that!) And part of me was thinking, “Boy, George is really acting his ass off right here, isn’t he? I’m supposed to cry, right?”

Hardly ever in recent memory has the Academy Awards best-picture race been so bereft of drama or gossip or horse-race speculation with a week to go. I think everyone understands that in our sped-up media society the Oscar campaign just goes on too damn long, and the innate ridiculousness of all this focus on an election in which 6,000 people get to vote starts to show through. (I’d expect the ceremony to be moved to early or mid-February next year.) Even so, in most years there’s some late-breaking scuttlebutt among the industry reporters who follow this stuff and quiz Academy members off the record. We often get word that some dark-horse candidate is starting to pick up steam (à la “Crash” in 2006), or breathless reports of a tightening two-way contest (between “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network,” or “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Milk,” or “The Departed” and “The Queen”).

This year, though, zilch. Nobody even gets to complain about Harvey Weinstein’s strong-arm tactics, because he doesn’t need them. Mitt Romney can only dream of having the aura of inevitability that has clung to Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist” throughout awards season. Oh, “Midnight in Paris” and “The Help” have had their Rick Santorum moments, I guess, but those faded out even more rapidly than Sen. Frothy Mixture has. So here we are, a week out from the big night in the No-Longer-Kodak Theatre, with Oscar’s big prize all but awarded to a silent black-and-white film made by French people. If we can pull that fact free of the massive ennui we’re all feeling about Oscar season this year, it remains objectively amazing. I mean, don’t get me wrong: “The Artist” is agreeable lightweight entertainment, and I can see exactly why it appeals to the wounded, nostalgic and crisis-ridden industry insiders of the Academy. Jean Dujardin is an irresistible performer, and I bet he’s been hitting the “apprenez l’anglais” CDs hard in preparation for his likely Hollywood career.

Still, the likely Oscar triumph of “The Artist,” like the movie itself, is a novelty hit, a one-off parlor trick that demonstrates the weakened cultural position of the Academy Awards and the lack of confidence endemic to mainstream American filmmaking. As a spoof and tribute to the glories of Hollywood’s silent age, “The Artist” is not especially subtle, but a lot of love and talent and pure high spirits went into making the movie, and that shows up on-screen. It’s not a great film and may not even be an especially good one, but it’s going to win the prize because it resounds with good cheer and confidence and willingness to entertain. Those are precisely the qualities usually associated with American cinema, good or bad, and precisely the qualities lacking in this year’s other nominees.

When I made a mock-proposal for an alternate-universe Oscars in which mass-market hits like the “Harry Potter” or “Twilight” movies might compete against art-house films like “Melancholia” and “Take Shelter,” I was trying to approach this same question from a different angle. Some readers assumed I was adopting some kind of bass-ackward, pseudo-contrarian Philistinism, and at least that’s a change from the usual charge that I only like lesbian war films told backward and made in Hungarian. Please note that I didn’t nominate “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” or “Thor,” for my imaginary Oscars — but I definitely prefer it when the Academy honors movies that don’t apologize for their own existence, and that don’t embrace a middle ground of mediocrity calculated to offend no one.

It’s patently unfair to cook this crisis of confidence down to a single donkey tail and pin it on one movie. And I liked “The Descendants.” Kind of, in parts, and up to a point. It’s got quite a few modest, nice moments of emotional honesty, one of Clooney’s best and subtlest performances (mainly when he’s not saying anything) and a pleasant, half-dissolute Hawaiian vibe. But it’s always going to be the American movie made by a name director that has George Clooney playing a bereaved husband and father, a spunky, sexy teenage daughter, slack-key guitar stylings and gorgeous tropical locations — and that lost the best-picture award to that silent movie made by French people.

Believe me, I can hear your complaints, thanks to the one-way Panopticon that allows me to observe all of you out there in Internet-land. Criticizing “The Descendants” for not being some completely different kind of movie than it actually is is even more unfair than everything else I’ve said. Sure, sure. But the fact remains that on paper “The Descendants” sounds like an absolute, surefire Oscar winner — a blend of laughter and tears; Hollywood’s most beloved male star served in a pineapple, with a little umbrella — and in practice it’s a bit of a melancholy slog, a movie with a lot of dragged-out emotional scenes and not that many laughs, a movie people like well enough without feeling passionate about.

Furthermore, it’s pointless to say that since Alexander Payne is a pretty-much-independent director who made the film he wanted to make, he’s not to blame for the fact that it’s almost but not quite an Oscar-winning movie. Let’s face it, the movie Payne wanted to make is kind of a mess, starting with that mind-bendingly awful opening narration, in which Clooney-as-Matt pretty much tells us the whole story, including exactly how he feels about it and how we should too. In fact, whenever we draw near a dangerous scene where we’re not quite sure what Matt’s thinking or how he will react, Payne halts the forward progress of the narrative (which is already leisurely in the extreme) in order to have him talk to us in that literary voice that’s not quite conversational and not quite internal. I have a hard time listening, though, over the Pounding Hammer of Obviousness.

Yes, this must be intentional. Payne is an experienced filmmaker who thinks, I guess, that he’s being mildly unconventional here, dosing his tropical Mai Tai with a little Brechtian potato vodka or something. But mostly it comes off as forced and indulgent and a little bit off — an attempt to create an Oscar moment — which is exactly what I was talking about in the big scene where George Clooney made me cry.

I cried, in a pro-forma way, maybe because I’d sat through a long movie that was supposed to deliver an emotional catharsis. But the final shot, when Matt and his daughters snuggle wordlessly on the sofa, watching TV with a tub of ice cream, moved me on a much more profound and mysterious level. That scene represented “The Descendants” at its best, when Payne isn’t trying so hard to deliver big emotions for which he’s ill-suited, and is instead finding small, silent truths. If he had made that movie all the way through, instead of laboring so conspicuously to build an Oscar vehicle — well, he might not be in the Academy Awards race at all. But at least he wouldn’t be remembered forever for failing to beat out a French film where nobody talks.

For anyone eager to understand Russia’s depressing 20-year slide from one version of cynical totalitarianism into another, with a brief stop-off in between for giddy, wide-open, largely dysfunctional democracy, “Putin’s Kiss” is required viewing. Of course Pedersen can’t explain all the conundrums of contemporary Russia in 85 minutes, but in profiling two singularly important young Russians — pro-Putin youth activist Masha Drokova and leading opposition journalist Oleg Kashin — she captures some essential drama in the nation’s recent political life. (If you read Russian, Kashin’s site is here.)

Born at the tail end of the Soviet era, Drokova was a fresh-faced teenage girl from suburban Moscow when she suddenly became famous in the mid-2000s after giving Putin a worshipful smooch on national TV. She assured interviewers that she could tell he was a strong, charismatic and kind man, and that whomever she spent her life with would have to follow his example. Poised and pleasant, pretty without being drop-dead Natasha gorgeous, Drokova rapidly became a major public face of Nashi, the “anti-fascist and democratic” youth organization founded by prominent Putin supporters to channel adolescent energy and quell dissent.

As opposition leader Ilya Yashin tells Pedersen, Putin’s regime grew increasingly restless and paranoid after the 2005 “Orange Revolution” threw the post-Soviet autocrats out of power in neighboring Ukraine. (Arguably, the Orange Revolution has itself been largely undone by current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, but that’s another story.) Nashi was initially led by shadowy Putin lieutenant Vasily Yakemenko, perhaps operating at the behest of Vladislav Surkov, a guy who seems like a boring, puffy-faced Kremlin apparatchik but is widely described as the “gray cardinal” or ideological puppet-master behind Putin’s regime. (At the risk of derailing this whole review, the more you read about Surkov the weirder he gets. He may have written or co-written a satirical novel making fun of the system he helped create, and reportedly has portraits of Che Guevara and Tupac Shakur, alongside Putin, in his Kremlin office.)

As we see from Pedersen’s often chilling footage inside Nashi rallies and summer camps, Surkov and Yakemenko created a two-faced organization on a familiar and unfortunate 20th-century model, one part calisthenics and canoeing classes and ritualized teen romance, one part ultra-nationalist ideology. Older Russians of course liken it to the Soviet-era Komsomol, by all accounts one of the communist state’s more successful endeavors. Other people have simply started calling it the “Putinjugend” (a reference to the German name of the Hitler Youth). At any rate, saying that the group is pro-democratic and anti-fascist doesn’t make it so; Nashi has frequently been used to humiliate and harass opposition politicians, journalists and human-rights activists, and is at least circumstantially connected to racist violence against Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris and other minority groups.

Nobody knows for sure — or nobody who’s talking — whether it was Nashi activists who beat Oleg Kashin into a coma in the fall of 2010, breaking both his legs and both his jaws, after he wrote a series of investigative pieces critical of Putin’s business dealings. And nobody knows exactly who the two guys were who took a crap on top of Ilya Yashin’s car, right on a Moscow street. (We see both incidents, via grainy surveillance footage. Russia is just that kind of place.) The ingenuity of the political system engineered by Surkov lies precisely in the fact that orders to quash the opposition often don’t have to come from the top, and the people in power can pay lip service to freedom and democracy and wring their hands over violent incidents. Unlike in Soviet times, dissent is not illegal, and it’s tolerated as long as it stays limited to marginal political parties and elite Moscow publications. But it isn’t good for your health or your public reputation.

Nobody suggests that Masha Drokova had anything to do with the dirty side of Nashi. She was the organization’s happy face, giving speeches against official corruption, hosting a pro-Putin talk show and leading demonstrations against supermarkets that sold expired meat. But as her mentor-protégé relationship with Nashi founder Yakemenko becomes more troubled and she gets to know Kashin and other liberal journalists, this naive but likable young woman visibly begins to struggle with the cognitive dissonance of contemporary Russian political life. No one could accuse “Putin’s Kiss” of painting an encouraging portrait of Russia, but there are some signs that the opposition has been revitalized, and Drokova’s story of apostasy is one small part of that. Ilya Yashin laments the way that Nashi has turned an entire generation toward conformity and cynicism, but it was idealism that made Masha kiss Putin in the first place, and that same idealism made her walk away from him.

“Putin’s Kiss” opens this week at Cinema Village in New York, with more cities and home-video release to follow.

In fact, there are reportedly 157 members in the Academy’s documentary branch, which is about 2.5 percent of the total membership. Until recently that tiny group was seen as a bunch of hidebound conservatives, notoriously resistant to new aesthetic and narrative approaches to documentary film. There’s really no way to exaggerate the strangeness of this category over the years, or the number of important films that have been completely overlooked. The most famous non-nominees include “The Thin Blue Line,” “Roger & Me,” “28 Up,” “Hoop Dreams” and “Grizzly Man,” and it’s absolutely not coincidental that I’ve just cited films by Moore, Werner Herzog, Steve James and Errol Morris, all of them controversial figures whose work flies in the face of long-standing cinéma-vérité convention.

On the other side of the ledger, the list of winning and nominated features over the decades of the award’s history have an irresistibly random quality; as filmmaker and blogger AJ Schnack recently told me, the winners have included Jacques Cousteau, Walt Disney (twice apiece) and the Department of the Navy. Trying to pick the single most bizarre Oscar-winning documentary, one faces an embarrassment of riches. Is it “The Hellstrom Chronicle” (1971), which combines bogus science and genuine stop-motion photography to suggest that we’ll all be eaten by bugs? Is it Peter Watkins’ terrifying “The War Game” (1966), which depicts the effects of a hypothetical Soviet nuclear attack on Britain and can only be considered a documentary by stretching the term beyond all recognition? I’m going with “Design for Death,” an anti-Japanese agitprop film from 1947 that reportedly featured faked archival footage and was mostly written by Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss).

You can definitely discern streams or currents in the documentary category; most famously, between 1995 and 2000, five of the six Oscar-winning films were about Jewish and/or Holocaust-related topics. (Spike Lee got in trouble for observing that his 1997 film “4 Little Girls” had no chance up against “The Long Way Home,” a film about Jewish emigration to Israel. He was right.) In 1994, the year the Academy spurned “Hoop Dreams,” it awarded the Oscar to “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision,” a little-seen film made by Freida Lee Mock, who happened to be governor of the Academy’s documentary branch at the time.

In recent years, the documentary branch has veered from righteous political anger to a desire to reward films that reach out to broad, general audiences. So we get Oscars for Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side” (2007) and Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s “Murder on a Sunday Morning” (2001) — terrific films, both with very little box-office appeal — and also for “March of the Penguins,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Man on Wire.” One-time renegades Moore and Morris have come in from the cold, although arguably neither guy won for his best movie: Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” and Morris’ “The Fog of War.” One can definitely continue to kvetch about the omissions. I don’t know whose dog Steve James ran over, but it’s absolutely disgraceful that “The Interrupters,” his moving and dramatic film about ex-gang members trying to stop Chicago street violence, was left out this year. As for Asif Kapadia’s “Senna,” I guess it wasn’t groundbreaking in any way, but it’s still an exciting film that put a lot of ordinary people’s butts in the seats.

However, if the Academy’s documentary branch wants to reach across the partisan divide into red-state America, it has the perfect candidate this year in Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s “Undefeated,” a “Hoop Dreams”-style story about sports and society that inspired me and made me mad in about equal portions. (I’ll discuss the other nominees on another occasion, but here they are: Danfung Dennis’ war-veteran saga “Hell and Back Again,” Marshall Curry’s “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front,” Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” and Wim Wenders’ 3-D dance documentary, “Pina.”)

“Undefeated” is a tale of the 99 percent for sure, except that the young men who play for coach Bill Courtney’s Manassas High School Tigers, on the north side of Memphis, are a lot closer to the bottom 1 percent than the top. They live in a physically derelict and economically devastated neighborhood, where few households have two parents and few of those parents have full-time jobs. Before Courtney, a local businessman who lives in a luxurious suburban home, volunteered to coach the Manassas football team for no pay, they were a bedraggled program who’d gone almost 14 years without winning a single game. As he explains it, the school kept the team going by essentially renting it out as a sacrificial goat to suburban schools on a pay-for-play basis. The Manassas players would be bused out to some white neighborhood, take a whipping from some better-coached and better-organized team, and go home with a pizza and a check for a few thousand dollars. Courtney’s mission at Manassas is evangelical, in several senses of the word. He wants to create a winning football team, he wants to teach these boys self-respect and encourage them to pull themselves out of their dismal circumstances, and he wants to serve as surrogate father and mentor to young men with very few constructive role models.

If Courtney doesn’t officially want to serve as a spiritual guide, or spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, it’s probably fair to say that in the context of Southern high school football, that stuff just comes with the territory. This is an old-school, you-are-there documentary, completely free of judgment or extraneous commentary, and the pervasive quality of religious faith in the lives of Courtney and his team — along with the sense that team sports, and especially football, is itself a sort of spiritual quest — is just a given. Courtney stops just short of praying to God for victory before a big game, but when Manassas goes on an unlikely winning streak during the 2009 season, he doesn’t discourage the view that their comeback victories over bigger, richer and whiter schools might just be the will of the Big Guy.

I’ve already mentioned race more in this article than anyone does in the film, maybe because the racial dynamics of Manassas, and of Memphis and Tennessee and the United States, are so obvious to everyone involved. When Courtney tries to get his troubled defensive star, Chavis Daniels, to get in his car for a chat, he jokes, “You don’t like to ride with white people, Chavis? Is that it?” That might be the only time in “Undefeated” that anyone officially notices that Courtney has a different skin color than all the players on his team, and from virtually everyone on the Manassas campus.

To be honest, the whole idea that high school football is this almost mythological test of masculine character is profoundly alien to me. Still, there’s no disputing that Bill Courtney has touched and transformed his players’ lives, at absolutely no tangible benefit to himself. His brand of hyper-Christian caring and tough love — after one practice, he tells the team he must go home and pray for forgiveness for cursing so much — is hungrily embraced by these young men who’ve hardly ever had anyone treat them with dignity, let alone a wealthy white man who didn’t have to. Manassas’ unlikely 2009 run makes for great drama, as do the heartbreaking tales of the team’s three stars: Daniels, academic standout and undersized lineman Montrail “Money” Brown and O.C. Brown, a massive offensive lineman and genuine NCAA prospect.

But if O.C. and Money are getting out of north Memphis, partly through their own skill sets and partly because Courtney gave them a leg up at the right moment, what the hell is going to happen to the rest of the kids at Manassas? Should you have to be a football star — and one with a rich, white, well-connected coach — to have any shot of escaping from crime and poverty and a dismal, half-abandoned neighborhood? “Undefeated” is a genuine crowd-pleaser, a rousing and inspirational flowers-in-the-junkyard fable of hope and possibility in grim circumstances. But I can’t help thinking that if you step back from the immensely likable Bill Courtney and his football team, the bigger picture is of a screwed-up society that can offer no hope to millions, and is throwing away entire generations of young people.

“Undefeated” opens this week in Los Angeles and New York, with wider release to follow.

Oldman is a reflective, soft-spoken fellow who considers questions carefully before answering them, but he doesn’t have to think about this one. “It was greatly liberating, powerfully liberating, to play George Smiley,” he says. If he plays a character who’s called upon to cry, Oldman explains, “Those are Gary’s tears. They have to be real. I’ve had to feel that grief or that anger, and then the performance is contaminated by that emotion.” With Smiley, he goes on, he didn’t have to display that emotion on the outside; the character is a profoundly melancholy, even tragic figure, but all that emotion is bottled up inside, in the classic English style.

Oldman recently made a brief visit to New York, to talk about the first Oscar nomination of a circuitous acting career that has taken him from the British indie fringe of the mid-’80s to major Hollywood roles and video games. (He is most famous among the schoolmates of his teenage sons, he says, for supplying the voice of Sgt. Reznov in the “Call of Duty” series.) I got to spend some time with him in two different settings: First as the moderator of a question-and-answer session at Manhattan’s Sunshine Cinema, following a screening of “Tinker Tailor,” and then the next morning over coffee at Oldman’s Upper East Side hotel.

A performer of tremendous, almost chameleonic flexibility, and something of a cult figure for many younger actors and film fans, Oldman has never been in exactly the right spot for an Oscar to land on top of him. As the star of “Sid and Nancy” and “Prick Up Your Ears,” he was too edgy and too English. As a memorable character actor in Hollywood movies like “JFK” and “True Romance,” he perhaps seemed too damaged and disturbing. (Oldman explains that he settled on a key detail of the “True Romance” character after interviewing a Brooklyn teenager, who told him to replace the word “titties” with “breasteses.”) His ’90s roles as a leading man (“Immortal Beloved,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Lost in Space”) never clicked in quite the right way, although we should make an exception for Francis Ford Coppola’s flawed but gorgeous 1992 “Dracula.”

Now, at age 53, Oldman finds himself — as he ruefully puts it — almost an “elder statesman” of the film business. On “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” he says, he got to work with both John Hurt, an actor he has long idolized, and Tom Hardy, a younger actor who idolizes him. “I might like to think of Tom as a peer and a contemporary, but I’ve got almost 20 years on him,” Oldman says. “He’ll say to me, ‘Gary, I watched all your films when I was a kid.’”

As Oldman told the Sunshine audience, getting to play John le Carré’s legendary spymaster was an amazing opportunity, but one he approached with trepidation and nearly refused. He was “absolutely petrified” about taking a role so strongly identified with Alec Guinness, who played Smiley in the legendary BBC miniseries of the early ’80s. “You’ve got a knight of the realm, one of the most famous and most beloved British actors in our history. And if you asked almost anyone in the U.K., or at least anyone over a certain age, ‘Who is George Smiley?’ they’d say, ‘Oh, right, that’s Alec Guinness.’”

But just as director Tomas Alfredson’s chilly, modernist take on le Carré’s novel feels entirely different from the boxy claustrophobia of the TV series, Oldman’s Smiley is quite a different creation from Guinness’. “No doubt there are parts of the character where I wind up in the same place as Alec Guinness,” Oldman says, “but I’d like to think there are things in Smiley he didn’t find. Ultimately, I think his Smiley might be a bit more huggable. I think there’s a coldness, even a sadism to the character as I play him.”

Across these two conversations, I found Oldman to be an exceptionally thoughtful and gentlemanly person, much closer in manner to the quiet but deadly Smiley than to the unstable, violent or passionate characters he was known for in his youth. Oldman’s working-class London accent has been softened by nearly two decades in Los Angeles; he actually worked with an accent coach to make sure his performance as Smiley carried the correct upper-class Oxonian overtones. (“I was casting about a little bit to find his voice. And then I got to meet John le Carré, and said, ‘Thank you very much. I’ll take that.’”)

If anything, Oldman comes across as an intensely private person who isn’t terribly comfortable with the glare of celebrity, which may partly account for the fact that his leading-man career never quite took off and he’s never previously been nominated by the Academy. He talks about film, theater and literature with obvious passion and knowledge, and never seems to give rehearsed answers. For instance, he says he’s enjoyed playing Sirius Black in the “Harry Potter” series and Commissioner Gordon in the “Dark Knight” films, but also makes clear that those roles have been personally and financially beneficial. In the 2000s, he found himself raising two sons after a divorce, and didn’t want to be an absentee dad. “I didn’t want to be away from home all the time, and then I also didn’t want to be the kind of father who dragged them all over the world. Doing those kinds of roles in those kinds of movies, you’re making the most amount of money for the least amount of time.”

Oldman is a genuine movie lover, a connoisseur of cinematography, costuming and music — which makes him a particularly gratifying interview subject. While we were standing backstage waiting for the closing credits of “Tinker Tailor” to wind up, he talked about the piano theme, spreading his fingers on an imaginary keyboard: “Listen to that, so lovely. Then it goes all Russian!” When I meet him for coffee the next morning, we begin talking about the American movies of the 1970s that he likes best, starting with Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.”

You were talking last night about your relationship with Los Angeles, and it struck me that you don’t view the city as an outsider or a visitor, at least not anymore. It sounds like you love the place, and have complicated feelings toward it.

It’s a shame about California, and particularly about L.A., where they’ve demolished so many landmarks. It’s a bit of a disease there, where if anything is over 30 years old, they sort of knock it down and replace it. It’s a strange town, it’s this sprawling suburb, and then there’s a city, the old town. It’s as if someone wanted to build a New York or a Chicago, they got only so far and they gave up. They just abandoned it. I’ve lived there for 17 years, and I’ve grown rather fond of the place.

I’m guessing you must like “Chinatown,” both because it’s your kind of movie and also because it captures so much of that urge to destroy and rebuild.

Oh, yeah, “Chinatown.” Sometimes it takes an outsider. If you look at Schlesinger’s “Midnight Cowboy,” it’s such a microcosm of New York life at that time. He captured something about New York that was extraordinary. Polanski did much the same. Or a native can do it, a real native — Scorsese or Woody Allen with New York, P.T. Anderson with L.A. and the Valley.

Here’s another thing: These films, like “Chinatown” — these movies were mainstream! You try to say to a younger generation, who are watching these movies on DVD, and getting their sense of history through that: “The Conversation,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network,” “Chinatown,” “All the President’s Men,” “Marathon Man,” “Taxi Driver.” They were the movies you went to see at the cinema! They weren’t particularly art-house movies. They played everywhere.

Sure. I went to see “Taxi Driver” with my dad at the mall, in suburban California. It’s a little bit hard to imagine that particular movie playing there now.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s “Puss in Boots.”

I feel like the early part of your career, from the late ’80s to the early ’90s, almost belongs to that era of movie history. I can’t imagine Coppola’s “Dracula” being made now, or not the way you did it.

Well, I certainly think that — “Dracula,” for instance, it’s such a romantic movie. If you made it now, it would be a whole different animal. First of all, you’re competing against the market that has movies like “Paranormal Activity.” You’d have to deal with the scare factor. It was such a romantic take on the genre, and the book. This sort of tragic love story. I don’t know if people would want that now.

They could turn it into a “Twilight” movie. You guys were a couple of decades ahead of the curve on that one!

Right. I mean the people that write checks might not want it. I’m not talking about an audience. And then there was that slump in my career. People say to me, “Oh, there was a while where you disappeared.” There were many factors. I took a bit of a back seat, I had kids and I wanted to focus on them. There’s that period in the late ’90s, the early 2000s, where I didn’t do a great deal. People say, “Oh, you had a slump in your career.” And I say, “Really? Name me a movie. Name me a great movie from those years that I’d have wanted to be in.” That was a real strange seismic shift in the industry. That was when it all really started to change.

A great deal of it was being exported, suddenly, and the kind of movies that they were making was very different. I was lucky — I caught the very tail end of the indie thing, coming out of the late ’70s and going into the ’80s. With “Sid and Nancy” and “Prick Up Your Ears,” those were the last of that. Then there was the Merchant-Ivory phenomenon, that happened for a while. And then Tarantino, with that voice, that great marriage of action and dialogue, the like of which we’d never seen before.

But if you go back to those ’70s movies, you can’t imagine those being made today. I watched “Network” recently, funnily enough — I was on an Air New Zealand flight. Do you know there’s not a note of music in that film? Not a note. And it holds up. It just works. Those stunning performances from people, especially Robert Duvall, who is marvelous in it. You think of Finch, of course, and Faye Dunaway. But for me it was Robert Duvall and, of course, Ned Beatty. You remember him? When he gets him into the office, and they do that scene down that long table, gives him that speech?

I’m sure we could talk about ’70s films for a couple of hours, but why don’t you tell me about the moment when you found out you’d been nominated for the Oscar.

I was in Berlin, rather fittingly. I was in the middle of what I thought would be my last interview for “Tinker Tailor.” We were opening the movie there, and it was around 2:30 in the afternoon. My manager was watching the announcements in the hotel bar, and he came in looking flustered and a little teary-eyed, and said, “You’re an Academy Award nominee.”

We were already having anticipatory disappointment and anger. “Let’s just get angry early” — you know what I mean? Before we heard, I asked him, “Are you all right?” And he said, oh, he was just getting pissed off in advance. Tomas Alfredson, the director, went out for a walk. He couldn’t take it. So he was out walking around at the Brandenburg Gate. If one had taken the temperature for the last month, with the SAG Awards and the Globes, we weren’t part of it. So I wasn’t expecting anything. It was quite a shock.

I think I said this last night: You can let it overwhelm you and stress you out, give you anxiety. You can be cynical about it, or you can be, I think, overly modest — “I am not worthy,” that kind of thing. Or you can enjoy it. And I’m just having a great, great time, riding in the front cabin. It’s nice up there!

People in my position spend a lot of time fretting about whether the Oscars still mean anything to the culture at large, whether they mean what they used to, and so on. I wonder how that question looks to you. Do you feel like you’ve finally been accepted as a son and brother in Hollywood, after all these years?

I mean, I’ve never felt excluded, exactly. I am a participating member of the Academy and all that. But I think the answer is yes. You become an elder statesman, don’t you? A veteran. I’ve put the years in, I’ve got quite a body of work. And it’s particularly nice for me that it happened with this film and this character. I know some people who’ve been in this situation who have not had a good time. They get nominated, and they didn’t have a particularly good time on the movie, or they might not like the director. That’s got to be bittersweet, because you’re excited for yourself that you’ve been acknowledged, and yet you have a taste in your mouth from the experience.

This was a Rolls-Royce from the beginning, with Tim Bevan and Working Title, Robyn Slovo, the producer, Tomas Alfredson, the director — and this cast of actors! You know? So I’m very happy that it happened with this one. And we’ll see, who knows. It’s an achievement to make the top five.

And then, what you mentioned about the Oscar — where it is culturally, does it still mean the same thing, all of that. It certainly feels like it does from the inside, that’s for sure. It’s a big deal from where I’m sitting. What it means to the public — it’s a question I’ve never really asked anyone, you know? It’s never really come up. As an insider, you can take it or leave it, you can be cynical, you can dismiss it. It’s easy to be on the outside and criticize it. To me, the Golden Globes — that one is a puzzlement. There’s not one journalist I’ve spoken to who hasn’t had a comment or made a remark. Or rolled their eyes, as you are doing now. [Laughter.]

As you say, you’ve got quite a body of work, but this role feels quite distinct. Smiley is so quiet and calm, and you have a reputation for playing exaggerated, emotional characters. So much of the film is you being impassive, or at least seemingly impassive, underreacting rather than overreacting.

I’m excited and happy about the nomination precisely because of that. It’s not so showy, so extroverted. There’s a lot going on, but it’s like a simmer, isn’t it? It’s a small flame. It’s ironic, I suppose. There have been a few in the repertoire that have been more bombastic and showy, but I have to say this feels right. I don’t know — does that make sense? It’s a more mature piece of work.

I agree. I get such a powerful sense of depression or melancholy from Smiley. From the whole movie, actually, but especially from this tremendously still and quiet performance you give at the center of the movie. It’s like all the anxiety and sadness of post-war England compressed into one guy.

Well, he’s a romantic. A disenchanted romantic, one of the last. And he’s having to deal with these people, these new people in this new war, where it’s God versus Marx. There are suddenly all these questions, all these philosophies to deal with. I thought when I was working on it, “What would a psychiatrist, a therapist, say to Smiley in this day and age?” Look at that relationship [with his constantly unfaithful wife], it’s very dysfunctional, it’s very inappropriate. Someone might say to him, “Why don’t you feel that you deserve more than Ann? Why are you happy with scraps from the table, and not a full meal?” Those are the questions I asked myself; that’s what I was playing. That sadness that he carries around. I think, also, that he knows that the mole is Bill Hadon [played by Colin Firth] before I let you know it’s Hadon. So there’s this double betrayal.

When he talks about meeting Karla [the legendary KGB spymaster], and I have that monologue …

Yeah, about meeting Karla and figuring out his weakness. Which is such a great scene.

Smiley feels a little bit responsible for creating Karla, because he was the one person Smiley couldn’t crack, and he got away. And subsequently Karla became Karla — you see, I’m not being cuckolded by Bill Hadon, I’m being cuckolded by a man who’s thousands of miles away, this is how clever he is. But Smiley invites Peter Gwillam [Benedict Cumberbatch] up and they have whiskey, and then Smiley says to him, indirectly, don’t have a relationship. You want to be successful in this business? Don’t be involved. It’s his way of saying, I let him go, you see? Maybe you should tidy up your own affairs. [Long pause.] It’s fucking brutal, it gets me every time. The casualties of it.

I also found it chilling when Smiley says he has found Karla’s weakness, and that’s the fact that he’s a zealot, a true believer. Which raises the question of what Smiley believes in, or if he believes in anything. It’s the great mystery of the character.

Well, he’s become cynical, and the cynicism is there in the writing. I think it’s there in great writing. I think Arthur Miller has it, Tennessee Williams has it. I don’t even think great writers are even conscious of it, but there is that thing: Are we any better than you, when we think about it? Aren’t we really the same? What’s it all about?

Now we’re lucky. We look back at that period and we wonder: Should we have been as paranoid as we were? Perhaps not. What was all that about? But at the time, you know, it all felt very different. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing, a terrific creation. I’m very fortunate to have gotten to play it.