Marion Cotillard in La Vie En Rose Photo by Bruno Calvo/Picturehouse

While it's possible to catch an Oscar wave with modest reviews — in the 70% Rotten Tomatoes range, for instance, as Paul Haggis's Crash did — anything under that faces a rough haul. Haggis's In the Valley of Elah and the quirky Ryan Gosling comedy Lars and the Real Girl earned averages in the 60s. The actors could come through for Gosling; and Lars screenwriter Mary Oliver still has a shot to earn a slot in the original screenplay category.

Originally intending to open Marc Forster and David Benioff's adaptation of the Khaled Hosseini bestseller The Kite Runner on Nov. 2, Paramount Vantage pushed the film back to Dec. 14 to protect three young actors from Kabul who might have been in danger after the film was shown in Afghanistan. The studio moved them to safer quarters at the end of their school year. But The Kite Runner lost valuable screening time and played better for audiences than it did for critics. And there was some fallout from the filmmakers placing vulnerable Muslim children in harm's way.

This year, any movie that was branded as an "Iraq film" faced tough going, from star-driven vehicles such as The Kingdom, A Mighty Heart, Rendition, and Lions for Lambs to smaller-scaled fare such as Elah and the poignant John Cusack–starrer Grace is Gone. Audiences and Oscar voters just didn't want to spend time with these stories. Clooney, whose Oscar-worthy political films Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana helped to inspire the current spate of Iraq flicks, has pointed out that "people prefer ambiguity. They don't want to be told what they should think."

In the end, it helps to have a sense of humor. Even the dark-themed No Country for Old Men and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are sometimes starkly funny. Writer-director Tamara Jenkins's black comedy The Savages boasts hilarious performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as warring siblings. While Hoffman is also grabbing praise for his role in vet director Sidney Lumet's wicked film noir Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, he is most likely to land a nomination for his often uproarious supporting role in the most entertaining of this year's crop of Middle East films, Charlie Wilson's War.

Like last year — when popular director Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth landed six nominations, five more than the standard-issue foreign-language film nom it might have had to suffice with in another year — this year's Oscar race is truly global. Forster filmed Kite Runner in Dari and English; Picturehouse is pushing Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in the French hit La Vie en Rose; Taiwanese director Ang Lee shot his sexy epic Lust, Caution in Shanghai; and New Yorker Schnabel shot Diving Bell with Polish cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and a French cast (save for Swedish-born Max von Sydow, now a Paris resident), speaking French.

The Oscars have their own natural rhythm. It pays not to mess with it.