We’re less than a week away from the Academy Awards, a fact you may or may not care about. Now that the writer’s strike is over, the Academy is free to celebrate in its usual way: lots of pats on the back and stilted speeches. On the plus side, Jon Stewart is hosting so you can expect some hilarious moments at the expense of some of the world’s most over-paid people.

Gareth Higgins, the Belfast author and blogger, has some insight into this year’s awards show.

The interesting thing this year is that the films speak for themselves as ethical statements. Each of the five Best Picture nominees represents a high quality attempt at exploring a question of morality, and each takes its purpose seriously enough to propose a response that could stand alongside the kind of ethical positions people who seek to embody progressive spirituality might take.

Gareth briefly examines the “ethical statements” in each of this year’s nominees for best picture. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Kester Brewin, another blogger across the pond, has a thoughtful post on one of my favorite films of the past few months, There Will Be Blood.

Oil, Crude and Spiritual, are the two things two men are drilling for. Boring down into dangerous fissures within themselves and their communities, risking explosion and hurt to those around them. Daniel Day Lewis’ extraordinary performance as Daniel Plainview, and Paul Dano’s equally good one as revivalist revelation cult leader Eli Sunday are full of guttural, primordial sounds, helped along by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood’s score.

No matter how deep they dig, and what riches they bring themselves – crude or spiritual – it’s real blood that they both know are absent. Plainview’s ‘son’ is simply an orphan he took on, the brother that finds him a fraud, and the blood of Jesus that Sunday screams for never materializes into grace. There may be oil and wealth, but there is no blood, no family blood to root one of them, none of God’s blood to save either. And so they fight and drill deeper into darker places.

You can read the rest of Kester’s short post on his blog.