What, exactly, is going on this year?

When the Academy Award nominations were announced in January and Dreamgirls found itself shut out of the Best Picture race, the news was something of a surprise, as the film was widely considered a shoo-in. The bigger shock, though, came from realizing that the snubbed musical still received more nominations than any other film - eight in all - and the last time a film led in Oscar nominations without a corresponding Best Picture nod was ... well, never.

But the Oscar weirdness didn't end there.

Most people think that documentaries are dull. And when they're environmental documentaries? Forget it.

That perception changed a lot last summer, when An Inconvenient Truth showed that even a lecture delivered by Al Gore can be compelling and urgent.

The box-office and critical success of An Inconvenient Truth provided a lot of guidance to the organizers of the second Environmental Film Festival, which will run from 2 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, February 24, at Davenport's Unitarian Church (3707 Eastern Avenue). The free event is co-sponsored by the church and the Eagle View Group of the Sierra Club. Food will be available from Greatest Grains.

Most of my friends have all but given up on going to the movies, and considering the quality of most movies nowadays, it's pretty hard to blame them. But what's alarming is that the people I talk to don't seem to be boycotting the cineplex in protest of what they're showing; they're protesting the audiences. And in that case, it's really hard to blame them.

Ted Priester, the new president of Open Cities Cinema - formerly the Open Cities Film Society - knows he has a fight on his hands.

He admits that Open Cities, as it nears its 30th anniversary, is widely considered "rather a grandfatherly organization."

He's aware of the difficulty in marketing a weekly film series - one featuring titles readily available to home viewers - to a modern audience, saying, "Anymore, in our society, people work themselves into a frazzle. They want to go home at night and maybe watch a little TV and then lights out."

And he understands that when the organization opens its new season on September 22 - beginning with the Oscar-winning Danish film Babette's Feast - cinephiles may balk at the group's decision to screen DVDs as opposed to 16- or 35-millimeter prints, ceding that "there's a certain richness of sound that can't be replicated" with DVD.

Priester knows all of this.