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 s*xuality in films.

I think it's undeniable that nude scenes can create a certain amount of goodwill among fans. Look at the backlash Elisha Cuthbert suffered after she refused to appear naked in The Girl Next Door. She was playing a p**n star, for chrissakes! I think nudity in that case would have helped both Cuthbert's career and the box-office performance of the movie, just like Halle Berry's topless scene in Swordfish helped that movie sail past the $100 million mark.

But that gets us into tricky territory, doesn't it? Successful women are always being unfairly accused of slutting their way to the top. I think s*x in the cinema can be evaluated differently than s*x in the workplace. Movies are different because they fall under the purview of art - unless we're talking about p**nography, which is emphatically not art.

Still, there are different kinds of art, and different kinds of nudity. Because of the role she was playing, I don't think Cuthbert appearing naked in The Girl Next Door would have been gratuitous. Berry's scene, on the other hand, was completely gratuitous, because there was nothing about the role that required it. The subtext was essentially, "OMG! Halle Berry's t**s!!!"

So how do the T&A scenes of this year's Oscar nominees stack up? Are they gratuitous or essential to the parts being played?

I for one am of the opinion that Kate Winslet has never appeared in a gratuitous s*x scene in her life. Even in Titanic, the nudity is about art and the characters falling in love with each other. (It's also chaste enough to have kept the film from receiving an R-rating.) Other clothes-shedding roles- in Holy Smoke (yowza!), Little Children and The Reader - are about revealing the inner lives of the characters, not about exhibitionism. This level of artistic integrity is why, at 33, Winslet has received a remarkable six Academy Award nominations.

The careers of Anne Hathaway and Angelina Jolie are more problematic. In 2005, Hathaway appeared in Havoc, which was basically a teen s*xploitation movie. And her nude scene in Brokeback Mountain only served to highlight the lack of graphic male s*xuality in that film (understandable, given the film's subject matter and its determination to achieve mainstream success).

Jolie leaves them all in the dust; her filmography is a virtual smorgasbord of glorious gratuity and exhibitionism. Hackers, Foxfire, Gia, Original Sin - they have all shown Jolie's willingness to flaunt it, to no apparent artistic end. But I have to go back to this idea of creating goodwill among the fan base. With such Athena-like beauty, there's something to be said for showing off what you got for the sake of humanity. It's like donating your body to science. I don't know if this goodwill helped these actresses get nominated this year, but, given the actresses in question, it couldn't have hurt.