Diary of Awards Season: Zero Dark Thirty

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As a founding member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, I will vote for my 11th year in our annual awards. I'm now receiving all kinds of screeners in the mail, and I'm catching up with likely candidates that I missed during the year, or movies that haven't yet shown, or movies that I loved and would like to see again. I'd like for this to be a casual series of random thoughts, rather than actual reviews.
If this were the 1970s, Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty would be one of the year's best movies, but today, she's the only one tackling the kinds of ideas that filmmakers were regularly facing back then. If you're an industry person and you get a chance to see it at some point between now and Christmas, please notice how much fun you're having. Then notice how awful all the violence really is. Notice that Bigelow has managed to incorporate both these ideas into the same film: that violence is both appealing and repellent at the same time. Notice how Bigelow's final scene manages to sum up this concept in one penetrating, piercing image.
If you have to wait until Christmas, or January, or worse, Oscar season in February, to see the movie, you're going to be dealing with a lot of hype. Please try to ignore it and go with your gut. Look at the movie in-between its seams and try to feel it. Don't think of it as an important movie, and definitely don't think of it as a ripped-from-the-headlines movie that you have to see, and that's going to be good for you, like vegetables. Think of it as something more timeless, something that gets below the surface of current events and understands them for their essence.
Zero Dark Thirty is the best movie of 2012, but not for the reasons you may think. Its greatness has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, or America, or the CIA, or the people that persisted in hunting the bad guys. Its greatness has nothing to do with politics, or geography, or war. Its greatness has to do with emotions and ideas. If you can ignore the hype and submit yourself, body and soul, to the movie, you may have the pleasure of experiencing what we critics have experienced in early December.