“Was it all just a dream?” Michael Moore asks at the beginning of Fahrenheit 9/11, his custard-pie-in-the-face salute to the Bush Administration for using weapons of mass destruction as weapons of mass distraction. Moore was referring to the previous four years, from hanging chads to Swift boats, but he might as well have been referring to the first half of 2004, from The Passion of the Christ to Fahrenheit 9/11. After a century of purring like a kitty-cat, the American movie industry suddenly coughed up a pair of hairballs, and the result was mass hysteria—well, mass-media hysteria.

   Mel Gibson’s splatter film, which purports to tell the Gospel truth about Jesus’ trial and execution, either did or didn’t inspire the Pope to say “It is as it was.” Meanwhile, Moore’s campaign attack ad got a big fat thumb’s up from Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based insurgent group. And it’s tempting to pit the two movies against each other in some kind of international red-state/blue-state showdown—earnest religiosity versus sarcastic secularism, faith versus doubt. But what’s more interesting than who endorsed which one is the fact that people felt compelled to take sides. Not since Birth of a Nation has the country been so divided over cellulose fibers.

   That may explain why neither movie will play a prominent role in this year’s Oscar telecast (Sunday, February 27, 7pm on ABC). By definition, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences strives for consensus, smoothing over the rough spots, tossing out the hairballs. Gibson, who conquered the Academy with the strikingly similar Braveheart, has had to settle for a mere three nominations this time—cinematography (all that red blood), makeup (all that red blood) and original score (all those borrowings from The Last Temptation of Christ). And Moore, who staked everything on a Best Picture nod, isn’t even nominated for Best Feature Documentary.

   Did Academy members deliberately ignore these hot potatoes? Only their hairdressers know for sure. But there’s no denying that each movie offered something that Academy members tend to overlook: a distinctly personal vision. Despite Gibson’s desire to tell it like it was, The Passion of the Christ is very much The Gospel According to Mel, a right-wing ideologue’s Bible lesson, soaked in the blood of the lamb. And despite Moore’s carefully cultivated image as a working-class mascot, Fahrenheit 9/11 is very much The World According to Michael, a left-wing ideologue’s history lesson, the facts and opinions soaked in gasoline, then lighted, like a Molotov cocktail.

   Both movies benefited from the controversy that ignited around them, and neither director was above fanning the flames, but it takes more than controversy to fill a movie theater. You also have to be able to sense something in the air. Approaching it from different directions, Gibson and Moore both tapped into the zeitgeist, this feeling that the country, bitterly divided, is up for grabs. That’s why Moore could reasonably expect to swing an election, and it’s why Gibson, without having left ancient Judea, can be given at least some credit for having done so. It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s Deuteronomy. Like it or not, movies now have political clout.

   But we’re here to celebrate artistic achievement, not political clout, even if it’s harder and harder to tell the one from the other. Was Hotel Rwanda’s Don Cheadle nominated for Best Actor because of his stellar performance (I found it a little thin) or because the Academy wants to acknowledge a neglected genocide? Was Vera Drake’s Imelda Staunton nominated for Best Actress because of her stellar performance (I found it a little thin) or because the Academy is worried about Roe v. Wade? Politics aside, I’m sorry to report that, once again, the Academy has voted for movies that don’t even belong on the ballot. What follows is my attempt to redraw the electoral map.

I believe I can fly

They’re saying it’s Martin Scorsese’s year. At least they were saying that. Now they’re saying it’s Clint Eastwood’s year. Personally, I think 1976 (Taxi Driver) was Scorsese’s year. I also think 1978 (New York, New York), 1980 (Raging Bull), 1983 (The King of Comedy), 1988 (The Last Temptation of Christ) and 1990 (Goodfellas) were Scorsese’s years. But The Aviator, for all its cinematic razzle-dazzle—and there’s no movie of the last 12 months that I enjoyed watching more—doesn’t add up to all that much. Leonardo DiCaprio puts on quite a show as Howard Hughes, the business tycoon whose obsession with flying turned into an obsessive-compulsive nightmare. And Cate Blanchett is a veritable hoot as a Katharine Hepburn who perhaps existed only in her movies. But Scorsese and scriptwriter John Logan don’t offer us a very complicated portrait of Hughes, the living embodiment of American business in its skyscraping heyday. OCD isn’t a tragic flaw, it’s a personality disorder.

It’s about time

Made for a tiny fraction of the cost, Shane Carruth’s Primer gets more out of a two-car garage than The Aviator gets out of an entire continent. And it’s an enjoyable piece of do-it-yourself sci-fi to boot. First-time writer/director/editor/star Carruth drew on his experience as a software engineer in putting together this paranoid thriller about R & D gone bad. And the time-travel premise, which has a pair of inventors meeting themselves coming and going, leads to some great wisecracks—e.g., “I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon.” Still, it’s the atmosphere, Carruth’s feeling for low-rent scientific endeavor, that makes Primer such a provocative look at the way we do business today. Scorsese had more than $100 million to play with. Carruth had to make do with whatever was lying around. The result is a triumph of good ol’ American know-how.

They shoot horses, don’t they?

There’s so much to like about Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby that you find yourself not wanting to pick at its flaws. There’s the movie’s pace, for one thing—almost funereal, but with just enough spring in its step to go 15 rounds. And there’s the championship bout of comic understatement between Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, who appear to have studied each other’s moves for years. Finally, there’s Hilary Swank, who proves all over again that, given a role she can sink her teeth into, she’s going to clamp down like a rabid dog. Speaking of which, it isn’t hard to understand why disabled-rights organizations have protested a paralyzed boxer’s request to be put down, but you have to respect Eastwood for following the story wherever it led him. To my mind, there’s more religious feeling in Frankie’s decision to take Maggie’s life in his own hands than in all the torture scenes included in The Passion of the Christ. Let’s hear it for unhappy endings.

A soupçon of asparagus

And let’s hear it for unhappy beginnings. When Sideways opens, Paul Giamatti’s Miles is a bit of a slob and a bit of a snob. Still reeling from a divorce, he’s taken refuge in the rarefied realm of wine connoisseurship, and it’s hard to believe no movie’s explored this ripe territory before. Coming off About Schmidt, which I found drab and condescending, director Alexander Payne has deepened his emotional palette, added complexity. As Miles, Giamatti is remarkably unremarkable, which must have confused the Academy, cheating him out of a nomination. Thomas Haden Church, who is nominated, gets off some great lines. And Virginia Madsen does a lovely job of convincing us that there are women out there who might go for a guy like Miles. Movie of the year? Perhaps not, but Payne has made great strides in the comedy of disappointment. Rarely has failure been limned so successfully.

But seriously, folks

It was kind of a depressing year for comedy, and I mean that in a good way. For not only did Sideways drag Miles through the gutter before allowing him to step onto the curb, several other movies cultivated a bummer vibe while ostensibly going for laughs. Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou was so successful at this that it wound up dividing us critics down the middle. (I loved it.) So, in its willfully idiosyncratic way, did I Heart Huckabees. (I hated it.) And so did that cult fave Napoleon Dynamite. (I thought it was O.K.) Then there was Coffee and Cigarettes, Jim Jarmusch’s series of Beckettian blackout sketches, which didn’t attract much of an audience but deserved to. And 50 First Dates, which leaned too heavily on Groundhog Day but managed to generate real emotion while finally convincing me that Drew Barrymore is a goddess. And let’s not forget Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which features Jim Carrey at his darkest, meanest and most utterly hilarious.

Can we be adult about this

It was also a depressing year for love in the movies, and I mean that in a good way, too. For my money, Mike Nichols’ Closer, which stars Natalie Portman, Clive Owen, Julia Roberts and Jude Law as a pair of intersecting love triangles, goes places that Sideways isn’t even aware exist—the blackened heart of sexual jealousy, for one. Some found it shallow. I found it deeply shallow, and I mean that in a good way, too. While we’re on the subject of ailing, flailing relationships, allow me to mention We Don’t Live Here Anymore, which also features a pair of intersecting love triangles. (Laura Dern’s treacherous performance as a jilted wife should have been nominated.) And how about The Door in the Floor, where the perennially underrated Jeff Bridges, in that don’t-mind-me way of his, gives a wonderful performance as a beloved children’s writer who only wants what’s best for his wife. Finally, there’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a wonderfully disjointed movie about two people who are meant to be together and meant to fall apart, over and over again.

There’s gotta be more to life

I’ve come to dread the biopic, with all its inherent limitations. Real lives just can’t be squeezed into a smooth story arc, but that doesn’t stop directors from trying. Jamie Foxx does a beautiful job of impersonating Ray Charles in Ray, nailing the way the singer walked and talked and fingered a keyboard. If only the movie were prepared to dig as deep as he was. Instead, it tidies up Charles’ messy life, finds a childhood trauma to explain a man whose resentment and despair were lifted only when he broke into song. (That’s when Ray soars as well.) Likewise, Finding Neverland treats the creator of Peter Pan as if he’s Peter Pan, a man-boy who refuses to grow up. But isn’t that a cop-out? Didn’t James Barrie’s relationship with the real-life Lost Boys have to have been a little more complicated than that? Asked to play Barrie’s inner child, Johnny Depp himself seems lost. Toss The Aviator onto this pile and you’ve got three Best Picture nominees that, however interesting the lives they portray, have had the life sucked out of them.

Hurray for Hollywood

Sucking the life out of something is a Hollywood specialty, especially among the blockbustersaurs, but I was surprised at the number of cinematic T. rexes that managed to tread lightly this year, even do a little jig. Spider-Man 2 brought that mega-franchise to squirming life with masterful action sequences and soulful performances by Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. Harry Potter 3 blotted out all memories of Harry Potter 1 and Harry Potter 2, thank God. And I, Robot, though cobbled together from old sci-fi flicks, still felt like a shiny new product—slick, sleek and surprisingly dark for a popcorn movie. That leaves Hellboy, the most purely enjoyable comic-book movie since Darkman, and Van Helsing, which I appear to be the only movie critic in the world who actually enjoyed. As for Troy, where Brad Pitt bared his butt but not his soul, and Alexander, where Angelina Jolie chewed scenery from one end of the known world to the other, what can you say about them that hasn’t already been said? O.K., I’ll say it again: They sucked.

Doc or I’ll shoot

For a while there, I was writing about a different documentary every week, each one of them determined to add its 2 cents to a presidential election that cost hundreds of million of dollars. And although I’m all for this kind of participatory democracy, even when (especially when?) the boom mic is dangling at the top of the frame, I must confess that I was relieved when Metallica: Some Kind of Monster came to town. Finally, a documentary about something other than all the lies George Bush has been telling! But this behind-the-music look at the world’s most venerable heavy-metal band as it struggles through a midlife crisis is actually much more than that. Directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky don’t have to mention This Is Spinal Tap when the group hires a therapist at $40,000 a month; the connection is understood. But as the headbangers start to share their feelings, especially the commercially viable one called rage, you gradually realize that the movie’s about the very meaning of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a touchy-feely triumph.

Odds and ends

The Incredibles should have been nominated for Best Picture. Polar Express should have been nominated for Best Animated Feature. Shark Tale shouldn’t have. Oscar overlooked two excellent sports movies, Miracle and Friday Night Lights, the former featuring an admirably hard-nosed performance by Kurt Russell as the coach of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team. Oscar also overlooked Before Sunset, a wistful little film about a couple at the beginning of a beautiful relationship, and Open Water, a wistful little film about a couple about to be eaten by sharks. Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead will make a fantastic double-bill someday. So will The Passion of the Christ and Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Quentin Tarantino’s unjustly ignored revenge fantasy. But the movie this year that really got me thinking about the role of religion in our lives was the blissfully blasphemous Saved!, a teen comedy set in the wacky world of evangelical Christianity. JESUS LOVES YOU, reads the bumper sticker on one kid’s car, EVERYBODY ELSE THINKS YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE.

Between a Rock and a hard place

There’s been some grumbling out in La La Land ever since this year’s new host, Chris Rock, told Entertainment Weekly that handing out awards for art is “fucking idiotic.” Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen, it’s going to be a bumpy night. And I mean that in a good way.

It starts with the music , one of those brass-and-percussion fanfares that news anchors like to hum on their way to work. Then the announcer trumpets: “From Comedy Central’s World News Headquarters in New York, this is ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.’” And before you’ve had a chance to sort through the incongruity of Comedy Central having its own news division, let alone one with a global reach, the music has changed to a soft-rock vamp and the camera has zeroed in on Stewart, a former-frat-boy type with facial features that wouldn’t be out of place on Mount Rushmore. The hair’s a dignified blend of dark brown and gray. And what’s more important, there’s lots of it. For although we Americans are capable of devoting an entire television channel to comedy, there’s no room for a bald anchor.

Stewart isn’t a news anchor, of course. He just plays one on TV. But is it too hard to imagine that someday in the future, when Tom, Dan and Peter can no longer see the TelePrompTer, Stewart will be asked to serve as the National Entertainment State’s once-over-lightly Master of Ceremonies? He’s got the paper-shuffling, pen-twirling thing down. And he’s capable of shifting, in a nanosecond, from utter seriousness to utter fatuity. You laugh, but that may be what we’re looking for in the news anchors of tomorrow. In the past, we wanted them to be wise. (Walter Cronkite, everybody’s favorite uncle.) In the future, we may want them to be wiseasses. For the times, they are a changin’, ladies and gentlemen, and the news better change with them or it could find itself out of a job.

We’ve all seen the statistics. In 1962 (or ‘72 or ‘82 or ‘92) blah-blah percent of Americans read a daily newspaper or watched the nightly news. Today blah-blah percent do, the new blah-blah being significantly lower than the old blah-blah. And the percentages for young people—that Holy Grail of advertising known as Generation X—are even worse. As the 20-odd million gray hairs who tune in to the network news every night get grayer and grayer, nobody’s joining them in the living room. Instead, we’re tuning in to “The Daily Show.” Or we’re poring over the Onion, that weekly cartwheel of fake headlines. Billing itself as “America’s Finest News Source,” the Onion is the newspaper to end all newspapers, a wake-up call to an industry that appears to have taken an overdose of sleeping pills.

Does the proliferation of news outlets like “The Daily Show” and the Onion, that scribble a Mona Lisa mustache on the face of the Fourth Estate, signify the final triumph of infotainment? The giggle-ization of American society? The decline of Western civilization? The end of the world? Or do they, in that tongue-in-cheek, finger-in-the-ribs way of theirs, offer us a view of the world that traditional news outlets are largely blind to? Does Generation X, which supposedly can’t find Iraq on a map, know something the rest of us don’t know—that Baghdad is both a dateline and a punchline? When life turns into a media circus, isn’t a fun-house mirror the best way to see what’s going on? And aren’t news spoofs, therefore, a more accurate reflection of our time? Or are they just, you know, funny?

Stewart likes to open the show with a dollop of pure nonsense—memorably forgettable musings on, say, how risky it is to ignore that old warning about letting the bedbugs bite. (“They won’t stop,” he says with feigned resignation.) Then it’s on to Headlines, a series of riffs on the day’s top stories à la the Weekend Update segment of “Saturday Night Live.” For those who don’t remember “That Was the Week That Was,” a mid-‘60s TV series that made a mockery of current events, “Saturday Night Live” would seem to have invented the fake news broadcast. And its long line of anchors, from Chevy Chase to Dennis Miller to Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon, provides a shadow history of the news-reading game. Chevy Chase was Chevy Chase, and we weren’t—anchor as smug superstar. Miller was one of us, only with more flair and more hair, lots more hair.

And Fey/Fallon? Well, let’s just say they’re cute as heck and funny as hell—anchors as precocious eighth-graders. At least Fey seems precocious. Fallon sometimes seems preconscious, dozing off in the middle of a bit. They’re supposed to be a mismatch made in heaven. As producer Lorne Michaels said about the pairing, according to Fallon: “Tina’s going to be the brainy girl, and you’re going to be the kind of goofy guy who doesn’t do his homework and asks her for answers and stuff.” They certainly look the part, Fey with her smarty-pants glasses and Fallon with his randomly spiked hair. But they both have a tendency to crack up at their own jokes, as if they were broadcasting from somebody’s basement. Consequently, the political humor, coming from the mouths of babes, doesn’t seem all that political. Weekend Update used to take its lack of seriousness a lot more seriously.

Stewart, on the other hand, has that you’re-either-born-with-it-or-you’re-not quality called gravitas. When his face is at rest, he could actually be an anchor—he’s that boringly handsome. And his voice, although not quite up there with the dearly departed Phil Hartman’s, has just enough of that adman/madman plasticity to sell us the news as if it were a used car. He isn’t alone, of course. Like any big-time news anchor, he’s surrounded by a stable of thoroughbred correspondents, all of whom should have been put out to pasture long ago. Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Ed Helms, Mo Rocca, Nancy Walls—are these not the most hilarious people on TV right now, somehow managing to keep straight faces while their routines twist in and out of plausibility? Or do the show’s writers, led by former Onion scribe Ben Karlin, deserve a lot of the credit?

When the show’s clicking, the laughs come from everywhere, whether it’s Helms using red and blue M&Ms to show the recent shift in the Senate or Stewart ad-libbing a remark about George Bush’s “stimulus package” when a video clip of the spread-legged president conferring with someone at the White House reveals more presidential timber than many of us care to see. For all its massaging of our funny bones, “The Daily Show” can be surprisingly biting, as when an oil-industry representative (or at least an anchor playing one) says about the latest megaton tanker spill, “Fuel oil is good for fish. They like it. It’s like vitamins.” At such moments, you can’t help but wholeheartedly endorse the show’s ambitious tagline: “Now More Than Before.”

The Onion (also available on the web at www.theonion.com) may not be able to make that claim. Like so many newspapers, it often succumbs to deadline pressure these days, sending out “articles” that are printed to fit rather than fit to print. Articles have never been the paper’s strong suit. After repeating the headline (often verbatim) in the lead sentence, the writers tend to spin their wheels, as if developing a comic premise were a completely foreign idea. Ah, but those headlines! Like haiku, they’re still capable of condensing a world of insight into a few choice words. “Kevin Bacon Linked to Al-Qaeda”—how simple, how deceptively perceptive. Or how’s this for sheer pithiness: “Vote, Voter Wasted.” The dropping of “a,” “an” and “the”—or any other word that might slow down a one-liner—has been a source of constant amusement for the Onion’s writers and readers.

“The Daily Show” and the Onion could be owned by the same media conglomerate, so closely do their senses of humor mesh. And behind those senses of humor is a sense of the world as this man-bites-dog-eat-dog media fishbowl where everybody lies, cheats and steals, both to get ahead and just for the hell of it. Neither outlet is particularly partisan; they tend to be equal-opportunity offenders. But both offer a thorough critique of the way news is packaged these days, everything arranged into neat little boxes and wrapped up with shiny bows. In fact, that may be the major difference between “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and, say, “The Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.” Brokaw refuses to acknowledge the shiny bows. Stewart goes after them with the Christmas-morning glee of a 6-year-old child.

So, if you were an 18-to-34-year-old Nielsen ratings point, which show would you watch? A lot of ink has been spilled in the last 10 years trying to define Generation X, those hazy, lazy, crazy kids of the boom-and-bust ‘80s and ‘90s. And the general consensus seems to be that, when it comes to the news, they…well, they’re not terribly into the news. That’s what the pollsters tell us anyway. But maybe the pollsters are wrong. Maybe Gen Xers are interested in the news. Maybe they’re just not interested in having the news presented to them with a straight face. Maybe they prefer their news at a slant. These are kids who grew up in the media whirlwind, after all. They’re used to spin. And maybe what they want is for the news to acknowledge when spin is being spun—with a well-timed smirk, perhaps.

Jon Stewart is the Man of a Thousand Smirks, each one perfectly timed so as to squeeze every last ounce of laughter out of the studio audience. But if that was all Stewart was, a smirk machine, then “The Daily Show” wouldn’t be worth watching. He also happens to be a surprisingly well-informed guy and a fantastic interviewer. “I like to read the papers, keep up with the world,” he joked one night, but you get the impression he wasn’t joking, really. His interests range far and wide: He can trade deep thoughts with David Halberstam one night, compare favorite videogames with Ja Rule the next. And his guests are as likely to be Washington politicos as Hollywood stars. It’s an opportunity for the pols to let their hair—or, in John McCain’s case, their comb-overs—down. But even that can be instructive. (Don’t quit your day job, senator.)

Are we a nation of infotainment whores? Would the vast majority of us prefer to be well entertained rather than well informed, leaving the diehards to their C-SPAN marathons? Perhaps, but what such questions don’t take into account are the myriad ways we make sense of the world these days. We combine something we read in the newspaper with something we watched on the nightly news with something we heard on the radio with something Jay Leno said with something our neighbor said with something that was floating by in cyberspace, and tomorrow it may be a whole new mix of sources. We’re constantly bombarded with information, and the stuff that tends to stick is the shtick. Is it any wonder, then, that most presidential candidates manage to find their way onto a late-night TV talk show?

“The show is not a megaphone,” Stewart said when asked whether he prefers to go for the funny bone or the jugular. But he may be underestimating his ability to shape the hearts and minds of his audience—i.e., his role as both baby-boom and baby-bust mouthpiece. (Barely 40, he’s a tweener.) In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, it was David Letterman who led the late-night talk-show hosts back up Comedy Hill, pausing briefly to wipe Dan Rather’s eyes, then slowly turning the valve on the nitrous-oxide tank. But the most purely emotional return to the air may have been Stewart’s. Fighting back tears, he delivered a nine-minute valentine to the Big Apple that Howard Stern would rib him about for weeks afterward. “Our show has changed,” Stewart said, softly. “What it’s become, I don’t know.”

Has it changed? Not so you’d notice. The Onion, newly arrived in New York City, also stopped the presses for a few days. (Nothing puts comedy writers out of business faster than a national tragedy.) But after an appropriate period of mourning, it discovered that people wanted to laugh more than ever, not less. “U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We’re at War With,” the major headline in the September 27 issue announced, nailing to the wall the Bush administration’s determination to kick someone’s, anyone’s, ass. By the following week, things had pretty much returned to abnormal: “Greenland Thinks It Looks Fat in Mercator Projection.” But the headline that seemed to capture the mood of the country may also have represented a bit of wishful thinking on the Onion’s part: “A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again.”

The September 11 attacks threatened to end our decades-long pose of ironic detachment, which baby-busters share with baby-boomers. Suddenly, we were thunderstruck with the importance of being earnest. We didn’t want to mime quote marks with our fingers every time we said something. But it turns out that irony, which has been handed down from David Letterman to Conan O’Brien, from “Seinfeld” to “Friends,” from Euripides to Shakespeare to Swift to Twain to Mencken to Wolfe to Eggers, is bigger than Osama bin Laden, bigger than Al-Qaeda, bigger than war. Irony has often been considered a luxury item, something to indulge in during times of peace and prosperity. But maybe it’s closer to a necessity, something to reach for when the powers that be refuse to say what they mean, mean what they say.

And maybe “The Daily Show” and the Onion, like a pair of corrective lenses, allow us to see what we would otherwise miss, which is that the mainstream media are themselves distorting the truth, skewing the news. If present trends continue, there’ll come a day when none of us reads a daily newspaper or watches the nightly news. We’ll get everything off the web, or we’ll get a little bit here and a little bit there, as we’ve always done. And the news spoofs? Maybe they won’t be called the news spoofs anymore. Maybe they’ll be called the news. Maybe Jon Stewart, America’s Jokemaster General, will tell us everything we need to know about this wacky world we live in. Today, you have to keep up with the news to get all the jokes. Tomorrow, you may have to get all the jokes to keep up with the news.