Yes, Hollywood has given us many highly memorable villains, but none two better than our two favorites: Hans Gruber and Hans Landa.

Seriously, couldn’t you see a younger, thinner Alan Rickman doing Hans Landa in 2009? “That is excellent milk, Mister Cowboy.” Or the snide half-smirk of Christoph Waltz asking John McClane in 1989, “where are my detonators?”

Anyway, this post is really about some new info I’ve recently gleaned regarding a much asked about question:

“Why didn’t Inglourious Basterds win anything in 2009?”

Oscars we’re talking about. I mean, like Tarantino or not, most people consider I.B. an instant classic. A moving canvas of masterpiece art. The moment Shosanna Dreyfus’ Nazi funeral pyre passed through our retinas, anybody that’s ever taken a half semester of film knew that Tarantino’s coup de grâce would one day be taught in all future film schools right alongside D.W. Griffith and Fritz Lang (if it’s not already). Heck, Tarantino knows it, and voices that exact sentiment during the closing sequence of the movie when Aldo says, “I believe this is my masterpiece,” after branding Hans Landa’s forehead. Brad Pitt is merely intoning Tarantino’s own sense of accomplishment.

I liken seeing Inglourious Basterds to watching 2001 for the first time, and getting that same sensation that what I was witnessing was truly the fullest possible expression of what film can be as it is presently constituted; making the absolute most of the elements of sound, image, light, darkness, character, and story.

So why didn’t it win?

True, Hollywood has a shameful history of bypassing legendary auteurs at the height of their directorial zeniths (that the Oscar committee knows damn well are legendary directors at the time). I’m not going to mention anyone because I would undoubtedly omit somebody deserving from this unfortunate list (Martin Scorsese and Goodfellas).

Well, ironically, the scoop with I.B. is that the very twist that makes this film so monumentally legendary is what also may have earned it a snub ticket. Namely, Shosanna Dreyfus’ Nazi funeral pyre.

Apparently many on the 2009 Oscar voting committee viewed Tarantino as too cavalier with his alternate universe, re-writing of history. By having the Nazi Party burned alive amidst a hail of bullets and flames, thereby satisfying our primal thirst for human justice while simultaneously thwarting our known expectations of WWII films and history (see 2008′s Valkyrie for the opposite effect), Tarantino managed to blow away the audience and offend certain Oscar voters in one fell swoop.

The reason? In short, some Oscar voters believed Tarantino wasn’t being sensitive to the memory of true history, and by extension, that of holocaust survivors and victims. A fair point if you want to believe that Quentin Tarentino has too much of a comic-booky streak in him to be delving into such weighty waters as the holocaust. Moreover, some must have feared that awarding excellence upon I.B. would trivialize the murders of over six million innocent human beings, a precedent the Oscar committee no doubt wanted to avoid going forward into the future of film as an art form.

So what do you think?