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You might have checked out this year's list of Calvin Award winners in the category of Best Overlooked Film. If you did, you might have had the same thought that I did: "these films were overlooked? I've seen most of these and heard of all of them." Some of these films had wide releases. Two of them have been nominated for Best Picture at this year's Oscars and the winner of the award is the prohibitive frontrunner to win that one, too. Some of the movies grossed more than $10 million, and one has made more than $20 million. Sure, none of them made Trannies 2 numbers, but the only ones that I would consider to have been seriously overlooked were Moon and In the Loop.

In his analysis of this year's list David Mumpower brought up similar concerns: can movies that are getting this much attention really be considered overlooked? Is $25 million too high a cutoff for determining whether a film can have that term bestowed upon it? The answers to those questions, in my opinion, are no and yes. Looking back at the list of films that have won this award, many of them made significant bank, and while none of them got as much attention as they deserved considering their quality, it would be hard to qualify most of them as having been overlooked.

But what if we significantly lowered the cut off? What if we divided it by five? Any film that made more than $5 million at the domestic box office probably got at least some attention from real movie fans, the sort of people who read this Web site. In addition, I would add another rule: if you won an Oscar, you probably weren't overlooked by people who care about movies. Whether or not everyone saw a movie, if it won an Oscar people are aware of its existence. The exceptions to this rule are films in the Documentary and Foreign Film category, because most people ignore the movies in this category unless they are very high profile.

With those rules in place, I am going to go through the last five years and determine what my ballot would have been for the "Best Actually Overlooked Film" category. I'll start today with the 2005 Calvin Award, which was won by Shaun of the Dead, a film that can only be considered a cult classic if you are talking about a cult that's bigger than the Church of Scientology.

Number ten on my ballot would be The Door in the Floor, a beautifully told story adapted from the first part of John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year. The film is about a young aspiring writer who becomes the assistant to a philandering children's book author and finds himself caught in the middle of the man's crumbling marriage. Things get more complicated when the young assistant starts having an affair with the author's wife. The film is anchored by two understated and fantastic performances by veterans Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger. Basinger is already an Oscar winner and Bridges will be one within the month, but the performances they give in this film are some of the best of their career.

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