Two Oscar Vehicles

I need to get cracking on my review site, which I've been neglecting, but in the meantime here are brief impressions of a couple of 2006 releases vying for Oscar attention.

Half Nelson is a testament to the power of two great actors (Ryan Gosling as a crack-addict teacher and Shareeka Epps as his troubled student) to elevate material that's not sure of itself. Gosling deserves an Oscar; he gives the best male performance I've seen this year, although the competition is limited, and I still haven't managed to watch The Last King of Scotland. 3.5 goats.

In Babel, slice-and-dice structure-junkie Alejandro González Iñárritu tones down his weed-whacker enough that his actors' performances cohere into something you can recognize as a performance instead of simply a collection of disjointed scenes. However, the four interlocking storylines don't hold together as well as he wants them to, and I got the feeling that he thinks of actors as unfortunately necessary vehicles for his mediations on chance. 3 goats.