The trailer for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, the current Oscar front-runner with 13 nominations, was one of the most strangely arresting film-going experiences I had last year. It quickly establishes the film’s nonsensical premise- Brad Pitt is born as an old-looking baby, but then ages in reverse, becomes younger over time, and somehow grows even more alien and distant – before submerging us in a flurry of warm/cold images, both creepy and touching. I saw this little dream of decay before at least four movies this year, and each time I was surprised that its one minute and forty-five seconds could be so chilling.

However, to my disappointment, the first reviews I read of “Benjamin Button” were ruthlessly dismissive. The film shares its screenwriter, Eric Roth, with “Forrest Gump,” a similarly sentimental high-concept epic; Karina Longworth of SpoutBlog writes, “For me, the “Gump’ comparison is a pejorative, a shorthand way to say, ‘This film will likely make a lot of money and win a lot of awards, and yet is so phony and cloying and gimmicky that its success will some day be seen by some as a tragedy.’” And that sums up why many astute critics and filmgoers may object to “Benjamin Button:” it’s Oscar Bait. In other words, it’s cleverly engineered to attract prestige without necessarily deserving it.

Does Oscar Bait rot our brains? A.O. Scott, New York Times critic, seems to think so. “’Doubt,’ ‘The Reader,’ ‘Frost/Nixon,’ ‘Revolutionary Road’…” he writes wearily in his 2008 wrap-up. “Each one is a hermetically sealed melodrama of received thinking. […] The suburbs are hell on earth. Richard Nixon was a monster. Literature is good for you. Religious authority is bad. The Nazis too. Kate Winslet is hot. Why argue?” These films are pretty blatant Oscar Bait, and the first three have done well at it; “The Reader” and “Frost/Nixon” are Best Picture nominees, while four performers in “Doubt” are up for acting awards.

I feel oddly compelled to stand up for these films, Oscar Bait or not. The only one I don’t particularly like is “Frost/Nixon,” and certainly not because it carries the reductive message that “Richard Nixon was a monster.” In fact, it’s too reductive for the opposite reason. Frank Langella’s Oscar-nominated (duh) performance as the ex-President is memorable in a way that the rest of the movie is not; thanks to the movie’s bland pseudo-documentary style and Langella’s refreshingly larger-than-life performance, Nixon, ostensibly the object of reproach, becomes an almost obscenely charming and dignified figure. Frost “won” the famous interview, and rightly so, but Nixon wins the movie by a long shot.

“Doubt” is much more effective in humanizing another figure Scott seems to assume is a “monster:” the strict principal of a Catholic elementary school in the Bronx. Like Langella, Meryl Streep has a lot of fun as Sister Aloysius, a die-hard disciplinarian who hisses at slovenly children and intones that “every easy choice today will have its consequence tomorrow.” Streep isn’t just scary, though– she’s funny, as witty as she is nasty and as observant as she is opinionated. Her crusade to bring down a less-than-traditional priest is certainly arrogant, but the secular values and patriarchal power structures Aloysius encounters are called into question just as often as her religious dogma is. The inevitably glossy Oscar Bait style sometimes cheapens the intimate story, but the human beings at the core are consistently compelling.

“The Reader’s” Oscar-licious style and subject matter make it an easy target for the kind of misreading Scott provides. Another NY Times critic, Manohla Dargis, bemoans the presence of “another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard.” Such a movie sounds unappealing indeed, but this is not a movie about the Holocaust. One character is revealed to have been a guard in the concentration camps; law students hold debates about the legal consequences of serving under the Nazis; a character makes a visit to the site of the camps. However, the film takes place between 1958 and 1995; there are no grainy flashbacks or cathartic confessions, and all the tears and death-camp visits are intentionally unmoving and empty. Most striking is the scene in which protagonist Michael (Ralph Fiennes), who had a youthful affair with a former Nazi guard, visits Illana (Lena Olin), a Jewish Holocaust survivor. It’s a bracingly cold, fragile scene, played perfectly by a vulnerable Fiennes and a steely-strong Olin. Dargis sneers that Illana “delivers a stern lecture to Michael about exploiting the Holocaust, an admonition that arrives too late for this fatuous film,” but the film is explicitly conscious of how untouchable those events are; that alienation from their own past infects the characters throughout the film. They learn that literature and lust are not enough to wish away thedarkness.

Thematically, “Revolutionary Road” is harder to defend against Scott’s glib dismissal. Just as “Benjamin Button” isn’t much more intellectually profound than its bland platitudes about Time and Fate, “Revolutionary Road”’s broad “message” can be reasonably summarized as “the suburbs are hell on earth.” Despite all the clichés about alienated, yearning suburbanites, there’s a human sensitivity beneath the posturing symbolism: a truer, universal yearning–yearning to love and be loved, and for it to last–is at the heart of the film, too. “Button” ultimately hits upon a similar sensitivity; when the final catharsis arrived, as overripe as it was, I cried, and discovered that a lot of other people in the theater had joined me. For all of its special-effects overkill and epic pretensions (it runs for 2 hours and 46 minutes), the movie is, at its core, faithful to its elegantly tiny trailer–a sad, love-struck look at the ravages and beauties of time. “Button” mostly ignores the brain, as is typical of Oscar Bait, but when it hits the heart, it reminds you why these kinds of movies get Oscars.