"

Curiously, though, Fast Five was completely left out of all the technical awards — which feels like a serious snub, considering that Fast Five‘s car chases actually make a certain amount of coherent visual sense, unlike the car chases in the thrice-nominated Transformers: Dark of the Moonstruck, which made my ears, eyes, and nose bleed. The most striking omission, if you’re a buff of deep-cut Oscars, is the absence of Fast Five from the Visual Effects category.

—

Listen, Fast Five is a ridiculous movie — one of the earliest scenes involves Paul Walker and Vin Diesel driving off a cliff, jumping out of their falling car, and emerging from the water without a scratch on them. But really, almost every big movie Hollywood makes now is ridiculous. (The most critically acclaimed blockbuster of the last four years is a movie about the richest man in the world who wears an armored costume with big ears.) The Oscars tend to recognize movies that have some sort of social utility — movies that are about things. But as we all know, Oscar Wilde said, “All art is quite useless.” Clearly he was talking about Fast Five.

"