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I will always remember the pure exhilaration I felt watching Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” for the first time in a theater thirty years ago. The memory is so clear of first realizing that I was experiencing an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, deliriously entertaining but also completely fresh and unique. What made “Pulp” so exciting and distinctive?

Like me, Frances McDormand is not a big fan of the Academy Awards. As she put it in her characteristically wry, plainspoken way: “I don't like award shows. At our house we call this time of year 'the convention'. It's too bad we haven't figured out how to stop it. But I think…because of the Internet… it will naturally go away. We'll have other ways to gather; it's not going to be this stuff. The shoes hurt too much.”

To understand the power of “the cinema” in our past, and the comfort and escape it offered our forebears, we need only think back to the Great Depression, when many people would skip a meal to be able to afford going to the movies.

It’s astonishing how many Christmas movies are out there. Just do a Google search and your head will spin. Like movies in general, a few are fabulous, some just okay, while the rest is dreck.

Career advice can come from any quarter. Sometimes it’s the guy who sells you the newspaper. Other times it’s a chance encounter with a titan of industry. But there is no guidance likely to make a deeper impression than that given by our proxies on the screen.

Love it or hate it: our system of justice is a large part of what keeps anarchy at bay — and us safe. Deny that if you will. Still, there’s plenty to question and complain about. Like so many of our institutions, sometimes it works, too often it doesn’t. But no one yet has found a better model.

The 2014 Oscar nominations are just out, and once again, this year’s Best Picture nominees demonstrate the connections that great movies have to each other. To illustrate, here’s a list of the current nominees matched with previous winners that share some common themes.