The Departed is the last movie I saw on the big screen. On a Monday afternoon a couple of weeks ago at the dollar theater. It's not really a "dollar" theater anymore, but on Mondays before six, you can get in for fifty cents if you're going with family. Or if the ticket taker decides she doesn't want to charge you a buck twenty-five. I'd seen the movie last fall (in the regular theaters, where prices are much more than a dollar), and it's still my favorite of the five flicks up for Best Picture.

Of course, I haven't actually seen any of the other Best Picture nominees. I've heard good, warm fuzzy things about Little Miss Sunshine, and will probably check it out sometime. Babel looks like a "tough" movie, and maybe I'm supposed to learn something from it. The Queen...she's a cardboard cut-out, right? I mean, she's not really a really real person, is she? And I'm just not a huge fan of Clint Eastwood, no matter what side of the war his movie is about. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, that's a good Eastwood movie.

This isn't to say I don't like the Oscars. I've watched them, semi-regularly, since E.T. was up for one in the early 80s. And I didn't understand why a movie about some thin, peace-loving guy in the desert beat out the alien emotional tearjerker. I don't always understand why one movie wins over another one. Since no one asks me, I just offer my opinions or asides when I can.

The year Return of the King won for every Oscar it was up for (including that really stupid song--which was the point in the show when I knew it would win everything), I was on a business trip in California. I'd made the company fly me out earlier in the day than my boss so I'd be ensconced in my hotel room with everything I needed when the show started. I spent more than $100 on room service (fried calamari, salmon with garlic potatoes and asparagus, four beers and then breakfast for the next day) because, well, they were messing with my Oscar weekend.

Not that it's a big celebration or anything, but a day full of meaningless (it was, pretty much, a P.R. trip for us, as we wanted more business--didn't work, and my primary job was to run the computer while my boss talked) meetings at Intel isn't a good time, even if you're getting paid for it. I wouldn't get another out of town trip for a year and a half.

But movies are about more than awards. They might, for the most part, be about everything other than awards (except for this year's For Your Consideration, which I thought could have been funnier and nastier). I like seeing films on the big screen. I don't make it every week (there are, in fact, some months where nothing comes out that I want to see--which is very disappointing since so many movies come out every week) to the theater, but I do consider it. It's always on my list of possibilities.

And I have tons of movies at home. In the new millennium, I became a DVD junkie. I have a wide selection to choose from at my fingertips. And now they want us to buy a whole new collection with these new HD or Blu-Ray DVDs. Of course, they must understand, I watch movies on an almost decade old 20" TV set. So the HD doesn't do much for me. I'm sure upgrades will happen sometime in the next ten years, but it's not on the top of my list. I don't have an upgrade list.

So movies are neat.

And you know by now which movie the Hollywood people think is the neatest this year.

The Sunday morning talking heads said no one in Hollywood cares about the Oscars as much as they care about the burgeoning Hillary-Obama feud. But since the talking heads are full of hot air, we know this isn't true--this year. Next year they might be right. We'll have to see.

Until then, we've got the movies to make us forget, for a few hours, about the things in real life that piss us off on a frequent basis. There are some potentially great flights of fancy coming up in the next few months: 300 (a gruesome comic book telling of an ancient Greek battle), a new Tarantino/Rodriguez double feature, and Spiderman 3. It's not about the serious as much as the fantastical.

There's a glut of flicks I want to see at the dollar movies right now. All those movies that came out in the last months of 2006 are all cramming up the cheap seats, which means I probably won't make it to all of them.

But, if I'm lucky, I'll see a couple and slide into my seat after all the commercials have been shown.

Matt Worley has a moving picture jones.