The XX Factor: What women really think.

Amor Vincit Omnia, Academy Award-Style

Despite her courage, Jess, though Marisa Tomei performed her heart out as the pole dancer Mickey Rourke courts in The Wrestler, her (OK, let's call her "feminist") character didn't quite sell me—showing more compassion than passion in the film's fleeting love story. It may be a chick flick, but it ain't no romance. Speaking of, while everybody has a different reason why Millionaire will win the best picture statue tonight, for me, Slumdog's happily ever after fade out puts it solidly ahead. The Bollywood ending wins by a mile in a field where the only other love stories are the doomed courtship of Brad and Cate in Benjamin Button and The Reader's bordering-on-child-molestation sexual trysts between Kate and impossibly young actor David Kross. (Parenthetically, I wonder whether Harvey Weinstein—if Wall-E, the other love conquers all narrative in this year's top films, had been nominated in the BP category, as many fans and critics opined it should have—would have run a whisper campaign charging cartoon-robot exploitation?) Meantime, as we wait for confirmation of the Slumdog sweep, in honor of romance classic It Happened One Night's 1935 Academy Award shut-out of The Thin Man, I heartily recommend reading Slate's Nick and Nora of movie-criticism trash talk, the matchless Dana Stevens and Troy Patterson.