Jennifer Aniston in “Cake.” Photograph by Tony Rivetti, Jr.

Sometimes the jockeying for position in the Oscar race has as little to do with the art of the cinema as political ads do with the complexities of governing. But just as successful ads tap (perhaps perversely) into authentic (though sometimes dubious) passions, so Oscar campaigns may reveal emotions and ideas that are deeply rooted in the practice and history of movies.

The strangest turn in this year's race is the prominence in the Best Actress category of performers in two movies that haven't even been released yet, except for qualifying runs in Los Angeles: Jennifer Aniston, in “Cake” (directed by Daniel Barnz) and Julianne Moore, in “Still Alice” (directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland). They're basically the same movie. Both feature an accomplished and famous actress in a lead role that keeps her onscreen for almost the entire movie; both also feature these noteworthy actresses in roles of more or less unrelieved suffering in situations of irreparable woe.

“Still Alice” is the story of Alice Howland (Moore), a fifty-year-old professor of psychology at Columbia University, a star in her field, who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. “Cake” is about Claire Bennett (Aniston), a Los Angeles lawyer of indeterminate age, seemingly around forty, who is heavily scarred by injuries suffered in a car accident in which her young son was killed, and who, finding both her physical and mental pain unbearable, is addicted to prescription painkillers.

Both movies surround the lead actresses with comparably talented and recognized actors to work as worthy foils: “Still Alice” puts Moore alongside Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, and Kate Bosworth. “Cake” pairs Aniston with Adriana Barraza, Anna Kendrick, Sam Worthington, and Felicity Huffman. Both movies are elevated by these supporting performances—in the case of “Cake,” Barraza captures worlds of experience in a gesture or an inflection; in “Still Alice,” Stewart’s natural inexpressiveness is the neutral background for her sharply delineated, spontaneously stylized gestural intensity. (She’s the dramatic counterpart to Virginia O'Brien.)

Both protagonists are upper-middle-class. Alice is married to a doctor and professor (Alec Baldwin), and they live in a townhouse on 112th Street. Claire—who is separated from her husband (Chris Messina), also a lawyer—lives in comfort and plenty in a suburban house. In both movies, these milieux and their characters’ places in them go utterly unconsidered. Both movies are virtually undirected; they're spotlights for a succession of moments of performance. “Cake” offers a slightly wider array of emotions and contexts; “Still Alice,” which stays limited to its overtly intellectual setting, packs it with unsubtle ironies. (Claire’s field of study is language-learning.)

Despite the torments endured by the protagonists, both movies are grotesquely tasteful. Their genteel restraint in desperate situations is part of their playing to the gallery—to a gallery that includes members of the Academy (the industry's motto could be borrowed from Gene Kelly in “Singin’ in the Rain”: “Dignity, always dignity.”) and another paradoxical bunch, critics, who tend to admire nothing so much as earnestness (to resist the absurdity to which criticism tends) and technical skill (which they're trained to recognize). These constituencies—which are different from the general public—are the reason why these two movies, which have an excess of incidental emotion-wringing and button-pushing subplots, are never allowed to be the one thing that they are: ridiculous, or, in other words, melodrama.

The beauty of melodrama is the power of excess. Sophisticated art-house viewers join oh-so-knowing critics in laughing at melodrama. That laughter is confirmation of the power of the genre—of the grand disproportion between the ordinariness of the lives of the characters and the extraordinary emotion that an excess of dramatic circumstances arouses. Melodrama lends big emotions big expressions in modest circumstances; the classic Hollywood melodrama transfers tragic fury from royal courts and castles to the small town, the suburb, the city apartment. Modern Hollywood, fearing ridicule above all, will have none of it.

Moore and Aniston, excellent actors, cut their performances to the pseudo-refined scope of the drama. They map their expressions one-to-one to the needs of each scene. They're virtuosi who are here misdirected to turn ballades and fantasies into drawing-room miniatures. Moore’s subtlety is a natural register; her formidable technique is utterly internalized. For Aniston, whose comic gifts are hard to stifle, the mode is uneasy, and she seems constantly on the verge of breaking out; her technique involves a self-restraint that she imposes on herself, and that effortful self-mastery is part of what wins acclaim. Moore shows off the graceful ease with which she can work hard; Aniston shows off the fierce effort with which she achieves graceful ease. They play each scene with restrained and unambiguous precision, as if filling out each moment of screen time by clicking out cinemoticons. Neither actor—and neither movie—ever comes close to letting go.

I don't blame Aniston or Moore, but, rather, the Pavlovian reward system—based on false critical values—that makes such self-denying work pay off. Aniston is a genre unto herself, who should have had her Oscar for Best Actress a long time ago—for her exciting, spontaneous, and multi-registered performance in “The Break-Up,” Peyton Reed's version of Douglas Sirk for fourteen-year-olds. Comedy gets no respect. Skim back over the nominations for Best Actor and Actress; there are a few that one could stretch to consider mildly comedy-tinged, but, by and large, the heavier the drama, the likelier the award. Reese Witherspoon is widely considered to be in the mix this year for her work in “Wild” (and she has already won an Oscar, for “Walk the Line”), but she's a superb natural comedian, whose star turns in “Legally Blonde” and “Election” should have been recognized from the start.

The Golden Globes have separate Comedy-or-Musical categories, but the Oscars don’t—and critics usually relegate such performances to a subordinate category, acting-with-an-asterisk. Michelle Williams gave one of the most brilliant of recent supporting performances in “The Baxter,” from 2005, and her comedic genius should have been rewarded. Instead, she has been slogging through cinematic heavy weather as if to prove merit that was already brightly apparent. Renée Zellweger won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for “Cold Mountain,” from 2003, when she should have been considered for Best Actress, in the same year, for “Down with Love.”

The misallocation of praise and blame—to begin with, from critics—sends some of the finest actors of their generation wandering down a blind path toward a dead end in pursuit of withheld acclaim. As Lichtenberg said about the man who fought a Thirty Years’ War with himself, “A compromise peace was made; but the time had been lost." Acting is, in some measure, a race against the clock, a fact that Russell Crowe, in his oblivious remarks in this month's Australian Women’s Weekly**,** works hard to ignore: