Dancing with genres
Jaquandor, or whatever alias he chooses in the next lifetime, has taken up championing Dances With Wolves as a great film. He makes a lot of salient points, and I agree that it is a great film, but in no way is it a masterpiece like Goodfellas. Unfortunately for Jaquandor, he knows that he's unable to be objective about it:

When you get a discussion of the Oscars going with people who see a lot of movies, one of the most common examples of a year in which the wrong film was purportedly given Best Picture is 1991. That was the year that first-time director Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves took the big prize over Martin Scorcese's GoodFellas, in an eerie repeat of ten years earlier when first-time director Robert Redford's Ordinary People beat out Martin Scorcese's Raging Bull. (Now there is an example of the Academy getting it staggeringly wrong. Does anybody watch, or read, Ordinary People any more?) I can sort-of see the complaint: I remember GoodFellas being a very good film. Although I haven't seen it in at least ten years, I remember it being pretty absorbing, and I'm one who has very little interest in stories about the Mafia or organized crime. I have yet to see any of the Godfather movies all the way through, for example.

I'd pick on that more, but not having seen any of the Godfather films (or Lawrence of Arabia, for that matter, is embarrassing enough). Still, I'm sympathetic to his genre bias; I cannot stand musicals -- never could. At best, I will tolerate musical number in certain films (e.g., Willy Wonka), but only just. I just can't help but roll my eyes when a character in a film suddenly breaks out into song.

I guess the best way for me to describe my trouble with the genre is that people bursting into song and dance completely shatters my suspension of disbelief. While I'm able to get absorbed into most movies just fine, the effect of dancers and unexplainable props and such appearing out of nowhere is just so jarring. The only place that incongruous elements thrown into an otherwise realistic situation is acceptable is on the Simpsons or, say Airplane!, where you are meant to laugh at it. At least acceptable to me. So, in that light, my sympathy towards recent musicals Moulin Rouge or Chicago is akin to Jaquandor's ignorance of Godfather I & II. However, for those of you keeping score, I've seen every film in AFI's top 10, which Jaquandor is lacking in at least two. That means total victory against any possible defense scenario.