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It's just about the end of February, the shortest month of the year. With the Oscars quickly rushing upon us, I took it upon myself to right a personal cinematic wrong recently: I finally caught up with A Serious Man, the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, which has been nominated for two Oscars, including Best Picture. I'm a huge fan of the Coens, and consider Fargo and No Country for Old Men their best films. Suffice to say, I was very disappointed to have missed A Serious Man when it came out in theaters for what felt like a week, if that long. So, I was just a wee bit excited to partake in the movie, and was then sorely frustrated to find that A Serious Man is pretty damn insufferable.

I won't go into my full opinion here (the short take is that the movie looks great, but the characters are absolute morons and, thus, hard to deal with), but what I did take away is that the movie features, as its protagonist, a complete loser. Larry Gopnik, as played by Michael Stuhlbarg, is a college professor in Minnesota, a married man with children, but is a spineless wuss. Losers in film are not rare, though they are rarely the leads of a movie, if only because they'd better win before the movie is over, or else audiences are baffled, to say the least. Despite the fact that I couldn't stand A Serious Man, solid filmmaking aside, I was struck by the idea of the loser as protagonist in film. So, this week's A-List looks back into the annals of film to look at some of the greatest losers ever to hit the silver screen.

Before I get into my list, I want to throw a bone to one iconic character who won't be showing up, for reasons that I'll get into once we delve into my choices: Fred C. Dobbs. Woe to the person who needs to be told what character I'm referring to, but for those whose memories need to be jogged, I'm talking about the lead character of the brilliant drama The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, played by Humphrey Bogart. Bogart is well-known for his craggy features and laconic style, best visualized in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, but his role as the greedy, paranoid Dobbs is something he rarely played: a complete loser. Because he's Bogart, we may not put that word to his face, but it's clear as he scrambles for even the littlest bit of gold in Mexico. Dobbs is a great loser, and here are five more.

Richard Widmark in Night and the City

Jules Dassin is a director best known for his heist movies Topkapi and Rififi, the latter of which has been paid homage in many films, including the first Mission: Impossible. Before he went abroad, thanks to the scourge of the Red Scare fingering him as a Communist, Dassin worked in the States, crafting some of the darkest film noirs ever to hit the screen. One of the best was 1950's Night and the City, starring the weaselly Richard Widmark as Harry Fabian, a club hustler who desperately wants to "be somebody"; in this case, being somebody means controlling wrestling in the war-torn city of London, even if he's challenged by the menacing Mr. Kristo. Though it seems noble that a man would want to triumph over perceived evil, Harry Fabian is one of the truly unlikable film noir protagonists, a man who is focused on his personal gain, and only his.

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