With Oscar season in full swing, The Flipside is proud to present a summary of 2012’s most acclaimed films. While we aren’t making any award predictions just yet, we will be happy to take your money and place a bet for you.

Peruse our reviews of the other nominees:
*Argo and Django Unchained
*Silver Linings Playbook and Life of Pi
*Lincoln: Thoughts from a Northerner, a Southerner, and a Man Who Misheard the Title of the Film as LinkedIn
*Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Ceremony Highlights

ZERO DARK THIRTY – Kathryn Bigelow’s long-anticipated chronicle of the hunt for Bin Laden was delayed from its early-fall release date due to claims that it was propaganda for Obama’s re-election campaign. Early cuts of the film attempted to deflect criticism by casting Mitt Romney as a member of Seal Team 6 in an “alternate timeline” where Osama is killed during John McCain’s inauguration thanks to decisive thinking by John Boehner. Many have also expressed anger at the film’s distributors for tacking on a more “profitable” ending in which main character Maya is recruited for the Avengers initiative.

Jessica Chastain is nominated for her performance as a neurotic, possibly unstable CIA analyst who nevertheless is consistently proven correct about each of her wild allegations. Oh, wait, that was Claire Danes in Homeland.

LES MIS – No other nominee had the social-media-related clout to generate a volume of Facebook statuses on the same order of magnitude as Tom Hooper’s film-opera adaptation of the beloved Broadway musical Les Misérables. We can’t believe how hard we cried when Karen’s dad from Mean Girls died, or when all those cute French guys built that fort with extra furniture that got blown up also died.

Anne Hathaway is nominated for her heart-wrenching performance of Fantine, a hooker with a heart of gold with a real show-stopper of a ballad. (We were taking a bathroom break when she died, but we’re sure it was, like, super sad, and we’re sure we would have cried, so we posted about it on Facebook, Twitter, and in our Instagram of our pile of tissues anyways.)

Confession: We didn’t cry. And we bet you didn’t either. Mainly, we just wondered why Anne Hathaway actually agreed to let that toothless extra cut her hair off with a pocket knife, and thought about how much faster the plot would have moved if Hugh Jackman still had those metal claw things he could pop out on command when he was wolverine.