I am a huge fan of Ethan and Joel Coen, you must understand. I also enjoy myself a good Western. So when I heard that the Coen brothers were working on a Western, I flipped.

When I first saw the trailers for True Grit, I had a pretty good idea about what I thought the film would be. I pictured something right smack in between No Country for Old Men and O Brother Where Art Thou. Somewhere between a gritty, thriller-drama in the desert and a bumbling odyssey adventure with upright pianos and barn burnings. This, I thought, would be cinema perfection.

True Grit, however, ended up being anything but perfection and despite the Oscar nod—despite the laudable performance by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld—I found it to be a pretty disappointing film.

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Commercials and advertisements for this year’s Academy Awards are billing it as historic. Ten nominations for best picture, they say, because 2009 was such an incredible year for film. It’ll go down in the record books, they say. Monumental. I call shenanigans.

Like District Nine, the latest venture from the brothers Coen, A Serious Man, does not belong on the list of this year’s best films.

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If you’re familiar at all with the Coen brothers and haven’t seen Fargo, it falls, in tone and style, almost squarely between O Brother Where Art Thou and No Country for Old Men. That is to say, it’s unbelievably hilarious, but unnervingly dark. A dark comedy. A dark comedy of errors.

At its core, Fargo is a movie about very simple people making very simple choices and ending up in ever-more-incredible situations. It’s a comedy of crime and begins when one very poor choice, and spirals out of control from there.

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