If I were feeling less generous and more cynical on this holiest of all Oscar-calendar mornings, I might say that to decipher this year’s Academy Awards contest, we need only look for inspiration to the GOP presidential race. The Artist is Mitt Romney — desperate to please, doesn’t stand for anything in particular, not especially popular with the general public, will eventually keep most of its money offshore, and, though dinged up and trash-talked, will probably cross the finish line first by default. The Descendants is Newt Gingrich (emotionally unsteady, hard on wives, doing better than expected, but probably can’t go all the way). Hugo is Rick Santorum (a little slow, doesn’t really like anything that changed in the culture in the last 80 years). And The Tree of Life is Jon Huntsman (believes in evolution, probably a little too classy for this field).

It’s been ten years since 9/11 and thus the time is ripe for Hollywood to step in and remind us how to feel about it. The mechanism? An adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s earnest and thinky 2005 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which, judging from the just-released trailer, maintains the importance of being earnest but drops the thinkiness down a few pegs. To sum up: Tom Hanks is a perfectly Tom Hanks-ian father to a moon-faced, inquisitive, tambourine-playing son. Sandra Bullock, having finally gained industry permission to play the sort of toothless, maternal roles as the rest of the over-40 actresses in town, plays the boy’s mom. Then the planes start hitting buildings, U2 starts chiming on the soundtrack, and we appear to be on a one-way journey to schmaltzville, replete with a magical-realist quest (Hanks leaves a mysterious key from beyond the grave), fast flashes grief-stricken ethnic faces, and exactly the sort of stolid supporting performers you want to invest in if you hope to strike Academy gold in the motion picture postseason (Jeffrey Wright, Viola Davis, John Goodman).