Rarely has a slate of best picture Oscar contenders centered on characters so much at odds with society.

That is true of the driven oilman played by Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, who seems to veer further and further from society’s mores as he climbs higher up its ladder. And it is true of George Clooney’s conflicted law firm “fixer,” who finds himself increasingly alienated from the corporate world he is supposed to fix in Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton.

It is also true of the teenage girl played by Saoirse Ronan in Joe Wright’s Atonement, an outsider to the adult world she doesn’t understand, whose lies push the adults themselves out of their cocoon. And it is equally true of a more contemporary teenager, the eponymous lead in Jason Reitman’s Juno, played by Ellen Page, who discovers that the perfect insiders, the prospective parents for her baby, are hardly more comfortable in their world than she is.

The outsider stamp is branded on not one but all three leads in Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men.

The down-and-out welder (Josh Brolin) whose discovery of a briefcase full of drug money sets him on a journey of violence and terror; the veteran cop (Tommy Lee Jones) whose moral ruminations have little place in this amoral universe; and the implacable assassin (Javier Bardem) whose indefinable accent and indescribable haircut make him even more of an outsider than the blue-collar guy he’s pursuing.

“All these movies seem to have this individual who is an outsider,” notes Russell Smith, one of the producers of Juno,” which will compete for four awards at the Oscars on Sunday.

... contd.