We don't need any more of that. We need a 21st-century version of Nothing But a Man (1964), the quiet, eloquent film starring Mr. Dixon as a working man who marries a preacher's daughter (Abbey Lincoln) and insists on being treated respectfully by everyone he meets. That's it. But for a long time after I first saw it in the 1970s, it was my favorite film (and, I gather, Malcolm X's).

Nothing But a Man is available on DVD, and from the first black-and-white frame (I am referring to the film stock), you will see that it is of a different era. But if you stay with it, you will also see that some treatments of race do not grow tiresome, because they are simply, straightforwardly human. That's why I remember Ivan Dixon.

What McCandless did do was abandon family, friends, future prospects, and affluent lifestyle, to embark on a quest without definition that, to judge by the film (I have not read the book), acquired definition as it went along. After two years of living as a voluntary hobo (he renamed himself "Alexander Supertramp"), hippie (he bonded with a counter-cultural tribe living in RVs), and latter-day alms-seeking monk, he trekked alone into the Alaskan wilderness, where after 112 days of foraging for food and living in an abandoned bus, he died of starvation.

In the wrong hands, this story could be unbearable, especially in today's acrimonious social and cultural atmosphere. And ... let me put it this way: I am not enlightened by Sean Penn's politics, and I don't much like him. But he is one of the major talents in Hollywood, if not THE major talent. This film is a masterpiece. I'm not even talking about its visual beauty, which is all the more stunning for not having been generated by a computer. Nor, really, am I talking about Emile Hirsch, whose only flaw in the lead role is that he is more lovable than the real McCandless seems to have been.

No, I'm talking about that rarest of qualities in Hollywood films these days, the story-telling. No one but Penn could have handled this as deftly, even to the point of using McCandless's favorite books in a way that skips the usual self-consciousness ("aren't we smart to be quoting a real book in a movie?") and cuts to the heart of Jack London, Henry Thoreau, and Tolstoy.

I seriously doubted whether this film would make room for Tolstoy, despite putting his books in McCandless's backpack. But if you stay with it, all the way to the end, you will see that it does capture him. Not the big shot author of War and Peace, but the restless soul of Confession, who rejects everything in his society, only to find God in a dream fraught with existential angst.

You can interpret the ending of Into the Wild any way you like, but for me, it completes the trajectory of this strange young man's life in a way very similar to Tolstoy's in Confession: doubt; disillusionment; cynicism; flight; heartache; yearning for human re-connection coupled with the realization (on the bank of a swollen river) that it's too late, there is no going back; terror in the face of death; and finally, transcendence that may or may not last beyond this life.

Quite a lot for one movie. And they gave the Oscar to No Country for Old Men, a plotless mess gagging on its own blood. It's enough to make a real movie lover drop out.

I don't mean the commercials, which would have served as a great plague on Pharoah, if only the Lord had thought of it. No, I mean the ads congratulating the Academy for being so wonderful and putting on all those wonderful awards shows of the past. I know there's been a writers' strike, but did they have to show all those replays of funny, touching, uplifting bits, when everyone knows that this year's nominees are sorely lacking in all three qualities?

The coverage focused on the "dark" mood of Hollywood, which according to some reporters is out of date now that a Democrat might get elected. But the darkness in American films has been building up for a long time now, especially in those precincts of the movie colony where people are just as cynical about politics as they are about everything else. To my knowledge, the only candidate who has said anything about the sick violence now pervading mainstream films is Barack Obama. So go figure.

This stylish, apolitical darkness dominates all the nominated films, with the exception of Juno - as host Jon Stewart put it, "Thank God for teenage pregnancy." Even the kerzillion-dollar blockbusters that keep Hollywood going feel obliged to get progressively "darker" with each sequel or lose their franchise.

So get ready for the sequel, Ratatouille Twouille , which will feature a demon rat voiced by Johnny Depp, who tears American tourists apart with his long yellow fangs, then drops the pieces into a savory boeuf bourguignon, which his pal Rémy will then feed to other American tourists. Maybe then the Academy will take notice ...

Never again will I trust the Internet Movie Data Base, at least when it comes to television distribution.

But I do have a tip for voracious fans of British TV who have already gone through the better known classics. The House of Eliott, a series about two sisters who start a fashion business in the years after World War One, was never shown in the US. It was also knocked for being the last production shot on videotape in the BBC Television Centre, and (more serious) for concentrating on two touchy British themes: social class, and the relation between art and commerce.

There are some awkward moments in the series, on both fronts. The ancient tradition of treating the working class in a comic-ignoble way and the upper class in a tragic-noble way, persists to a degree. But this is not a series about the working class and the upper class, it's pre-eminently and definitively a series about the middle class. What's more, it's about three flawed but admirably brave and resourceful entrepreneurs: the Elliot sisters Beatrice (Stella Gonet) and Evangeline (Louise Lombard), and their good friend (and eventually husband to Bea) Jack Maddox (Aden Gillett).

Fashion, even the haute couture undertaken by the House of Eliott, is not considered serious art. On the contrary, it is regarded as a parasitical growth, feeding off genuine creativity not contributing to it. Its elitist clientele only add to the problem. It is extremely hard to deal with these topics in a TV series, not least because TV itself suffers from some of the same disdain. But we are in a golden age of longform TV these days, and programs like The House of Elliot made that possible by exploring their characters and themes at novelistic length. It helps that this show was "devised" (as the Brits put it) by Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins, who also created (the hell with "devised") the unforgettable 1970s series, Upstairs, Downstairs.

Unfortunately, the Beeb canceled The House of Elliot after the final episode of the third season was completed, so many loose ends were never tied up. But if you are willing to tolerate that (and some unattractive opening credits), you will be richly rewarded.

The eye-moistening episode was not her finest moment. She did not cry, and it was a long way from a tantrum, but it smacked of one. She was saying, in effect, "I care more than they do, I'm better than they are, and I deserve to win. And if I don't, I'll cry." By itself, it would keep me from voting for her (if I did not already have other reasons).

The debate moment, on the other hand, won me over (for a fleeting second). To a patronizing question, one that I doubt would be asked of a male candidate, Clinton came back with a sly, kittenish, screw-you expression on her face: "Well, that hurts my feelings. But I will try to bear up." I wasn't in the room when this occurred, but I could hear the laughter, and my husband called out, "Hillary just did something brilliant." He was right: it was a brilliant stroke, intended to mock both the question and the questioner.

This was acknowledged by the talking heads right after the debate, but a day or two later, Chris Matthews boneheadedly ignored the ironic nature of Clinton's retort and equated it with the tears of New Hampshire. Then all the other boneheads piled on, and this dumb factoid is now bouncing around the media echo chamber.

Unfair. If the pundits can't detect irony any better than that, then they deserve to be exiled to the same howling, no-Blackberry-service desert as the pollsters who tried to persuade my fellow New Englanders how to vote. So there!

A Western journalist is talking with several Russians in a cafe, and he naively asks them what they think of Comrade Stalin. They stare at him in silence. But then, when the reporter leaves, one man follows and offers to share his true opinion of the Great Leader -- provided the reporter is willing to meet at midnight on the banks of the Moskva River. The reporter agrees, and that night they meet. The man insists on getting into a boat and rowing out into the middle of the river, where amid bitter winds and bobbing ice floes, he leans forward and whispers into the reporter's ear: "I like him!"

If you enjoyed this joke, then don't miss this news bulletin from the Onion.