New York Times reporter David Carr's alter-ego the Carpetbagger has come out to offer movie analysis in the long, loooong runup to Oscar season, which seems to last for approximately four months. Now, it isn't that these year's movies are bad; they're "solid efforts. And all the other things you would say to a shiny class of first graders who are all very special in their own ways." However, they're all the same, he argues.

One of the Bagger’s favorite movies this year is a very serious film aimed at adults involving people coming to terms with their sexuality and identities against a backdrop of profound cultural and political change.

That description would cover “Doubt,” “Revolutionary Road,” “The Reader” and “Milk.”

That description would also cover every New Yorker short story ever published! And it keeps going:

A remarkable debate between people skilled in the ways of rhetoric? “Frost/ Nixon” and “Doubt.” Guerrilla leader who slashes through big odds? “Che” and “Defiance.”

But why should we be so surprised? Oscar movies are often a bore because middle-aged people are obsessed with sex and their own neuroses. (That's why no one but the middle-aged reads the New Yorker's fiction.)

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