Sasha Stone has just published a wonderful piece analyzing our culture's consistent defeat at the hands of spin as it pertains to three of the year's critical releases, "Flags of Our Fathers," "The Queen" and "United 93." Take a look:

Three films in the Best Picture race deal with real events that unfolded before our eyes. Two of them deal directly with media perception and the public’s need for mythic heroes. One deals with a more realistic look at real heroes. In all three cases, it’s easy to tell the real things from the fakers – those who made sacrifices for the greater good and those who used the moment as a way to get publicity, whether that publicity was necessary or not.

Stephen Frears’ “The Queen,” Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” and Paul Greengrass’ “United 93” are those films. They are based on those real people, those real events and they still cut deeply to the bone. Other films in contention this year based on real events would be “The Last King of Scotland,” but as of this writing, I have not seen that film, which makes analysis a bit difficult, however somehow I think it would fit and indeed shares themes with these other films.

“The Queen” and “United 93” take us, documentary-style, through the events as they happened. Point of view is key. We were all glued to our television sets when both Diana’s death and those hijacked planes hit the towers, the Pentagon and then that other flight that no one knew anything about, that crashed without explanation in the middle of a field. We watched the events unfold; we thought we knew what was going on. In fact, we had no idea.