Had he just made those movies that came out between 1970 and 1975, Robert Altman would still rank as one of the world’s great directors. Maybe even greater because then he wouldn’t have turned out such clunkers as “Dr. T. and the Women.” (Okay, so we wouldn’t have had “Short Cuts” or “The Player” either). The recent retrospective at the Brattle Theatre, “Robert Altman’s 70s,” reminds me of the late director’s amazing creative outpouring during that period of eight masterpieces, from “M*A*S*H”(1970) to “Nashville” (1975,) and how, at the time, we took it for granted that it would just go on forever.

So my tally this year is 25 out of 30 correct, or 83%. Let’s say a B. An improvement over a year ago, with 6 wrong. Now if I had gone with my first choice and the received wisdom and picked “Little Miss Sunshine” for Best Picture over the long shot “Bobby” that would have brought the score up to 87% and a B+ but then if I got it right I would have looked like a genius…

So, back to the power of film.

The power of film? Has any movie ever changed anything in the real world?

Well, you might remember Erroll Morris’s “Thin Blue Line” getting an apparently innocent man off death row. More recently, Kirby Dick’s “This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated,” his puckish and devastating exposé of the absurdities and iniquities of the MPAA ratings system, seems to have had an effect.

As a rule I refrain from including in this blog aspects of my personal life that aren’t film related. But this was just too weird.

When I woke up this morning I heard my cat, the redoubtable Yodel, scratching around at something in the hall of my apartment. I went to check and he was staring intently at the kepi, a French officers cap, hanging on the wall (sometimes I like to pretend I’m Jack Lemmon in “Irma La Douce”).

1. Suspended animation:
A comment from John (“animation is my life”) Lassiter, whose gas-guzzling “Cars” beat out the eco-friendly “Happy Feet” as winner of the Globe’s new Best Animation category, convinced me that the genre has hit a dead end. “Life’s about the journey,” he revealed to us (his wife told him this), “not about the destination.

PK: I read that you had shown The Devil’s Backbone at the Toronto Film Festival on September 9^th 2001 and then on September 11^th of course that terrible thing happened and then you realized that you’d have to do another film that somehow reflected that occasion. Can you talk about that a little bit?

GDT: I started noticing that the world was becoming a harder place for dissension, for disobedience.

Guillermo el Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” was already building buzz even before its wide release starting this week. It’s gotten Best Foreign Language Film awards from the Florida, Washington DC, San Francisco and Southeastern Film Critics Societies, a Best Cinematography Award from the New York critics, Best Picture from the National critics, a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, not to mention Best Foreign Language and cinematography awards from Boston

Some notes on the National Society of Film Critics awards meeting, which I attended on Saturday.

1,. Sure am glad that it took an hour and a quarter less than last year.

2. There are 54 members in our society (I think). Some 45 voted. Of those About 24 were proxy votes of members who did not actually attend the meeting. After the first ballot the proxy votes are elimated, leaving some 21 or so less members (some had to leave before the meeting was over) deciding the winners.

For an industry traditionally unfair to females, Hollywood, some are saying, has turned out this year an unusually large number of meaty women’s roles. Meaning that the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress races will be heated. Meaning that a lot of big name actresses and ingenues have revved up scene-stealing performances of women who either embody the Western ideal of womanhood, a self-sacrificing mother and wife, or its opposite, the malignant, witch-like termagant who spurns her natural place in order to pursue her own perverse ideas of independence, career ambition, sexual fulfillment, or short haircuts.