Hugo is a mash-up of two other films. Can you guess?

You'd almost think it's a weird conspiracy but has anyone else noticed that, among the Oscar best-film nominations this year, "Hugo" is essentially a mash-up of two of the other films: extremely annoying precocious boy loses father, who was devoted to him and playful and engaged him in games (while mom is basically out of the picture), in tragic fire and then becomes isolated in the city and engaged in extremely implausible pursuit of a "key" that will unlock the mystery of his father's prized possession, as in the pretentious and almost unwatchable Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - meets - master of the silent film era slips into obscurity but is later recognized and acclaimed for the brilliance of his work, in a Hollywood self-aggrandizing tribute to the glories of a bygone era, as in The Artist. Pt it all together and you have Hugo, not one of Scorcese's masterpieces, to put it mildly. The production values are extraordinary - they essentially created an entire 1930s (I guess) Paris through digital imagery - but the plot is plodding and predictable - it's clearly a movie that adults think is for kids but has no sense of what kids actually like in movies: it's not over-explication. The Melies tribute is actually pretty good - it's fun to watch the clips of his old, colorized films - never struck me so strongly how weird they are and how much they're a precursor to Monte Python imagery. Some good things in Hugo but it's selfindulgent and would have been a much better film if it could have clocked in at 90 minutes (not 2+ hours, god help us).