The 81st Annual Academy Awards are two days away. Going in, I'm fairly ambivalent about the outcome. Unlike last year, when There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men duked it out for the top prize, there are no masterpieces. I deeply admired Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, Andrew Stanton's WALL-E and Gus Van Sant's Milk. These would have been my nominees for Best Director and Best Picture, but many of them got gypped.

Still, I'll definitely be tuning in. I've watched every awards show since 1990, when I was 9 going on 10. All 9-year-olds who watch the Oscars naturally assume they'll be making it to the podium someday. I'm sure if I looked hard enough I'd find a few acceptance speeches, written in chicken-scratch and tucked away for safekeeping. I'm more cynical and realistic about all that now - instead of 30, now I'm giving myself until 40 to win an Oscar. Now and then I'm forced to look away to avoid being blinded by all the Great and Important People basking in their own sense of self-worth. But mostly the Oscars give me a giddy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

When you look at this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Actress, one thing that sticks out is the number of nude scenes the actresses have appeared in. Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), Angelina Jolie (Changeling), Kate Winslet (The Reader) - these are beautiful and mega-talented young women who have never shied away from on-camera nudity. Their nominations got me thinking about the nature of female sexuality in films.

When it comes time to hand out the best-of-the-year awards, movies released in December get all the love. This is partly due to the fact that studios have been saving some of their best products for the holiday season, but sometimes it seems like movie critics and members of the Academy Awards of Arts and Sciences suffer from memory loss. So I thought it might be fun to see what the first 11 months of the year had to offer and make a best-of-the-year list from that. Keep in mind that I still haven’t seen some of the most anticipated films of the season, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon and Milk. I’ll write about those movies in future blogs. For now, here’s my nowhere-near definitive look at the best movies of 2008, listed in order of preference: