"A self-indulgent man has appetite for everything pleasant or what is most pleasant, and he is driven by his appetite to choose pleasant things at the cost of everything else ..." (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 3.)

"Moderation ... is a special virtue of restraint [that operates] in areas in which we find ourselves specially and exceptionally tempted ... moderation properly controls [our desires] ..." (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, IIaIIIae pars, quest. 141)

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Some years, it's easy to discern a theme running through the various films up for Oscar consideration. For instance, 1999 was the year of Elizabeth the First. Two movies, Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth, set in Elizabethan England, were up for best picture. And two actresses, Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth and Dame Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love, portraying the "Virgin Queen," were nominated for their performances.

Other years, there is no theme or it's harder to discern. Last year, two Oscar nominees, The Sixth Sense and American Beauty, were, when you think about it, "ghost stories." Not as in "boo!" but in the sense that in both films death enables us to see our lives as they really are, or were about death as a metaphor for understanding.

This year, there was also a theme: indulgence and its corollary, self-denial. These terms refer to our relationship with our desires, both physical and emotional. Are we supposed to treat them as something that, however good, sometimes must be subordinated to something more important? Are we supposed to consider the satisfaction of these desires the most important thing in life? These questions were raised by several of the nominees.

The film with the most straightforward take on these questions was Quills. Its star, Geoffrey Rush, was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. While Rush lost out to Russell Crowe, there was one award the film could have taken home: most dishonest film nominated for a major award. Quills told the story of the Marquis de Sade. Moviegoers whose knowledge of the Marquis was limited to what they saw in Quills would have had little idea of why his name is synonymous with cruelty, and why it is the source of the word "sadism."

The film is set in an asylum where the 69-year-old de Sade is imprisoned, presumably because of his writings. We're left to assume that the Marquis was a martyr in the cause of freedom of speech — a victim of oppressive ecclesiastical and secular authorities. The problem is that real de Sade was never imprisoned for anything he wrote. He was in the asylum because his mother-in-law, tired of his mistreatment of her daughters, paid to have him confined to the asylum.

As part of his treatment, suggests the film, de Sade is encouraged to write by the cleric who runs the asylum. The hope is that writing will rid the Marquis of his demons. These manuscripts, which include some of his most notorious works, such as "Justine," are smuggled out of the asylum by a virginal chambermaid whose relationship with de Sade is strictly platonic. Wrong again. While de Sade was allowed to write as part of his treatment, his most notorious works had been written nearly two decades before. And his relationship with the chambermaid in question was hardly platonic.

The de Sade of Quills is an Age of Reason Larry Flint. He is a pornographer whose work is too sexually explicit for his sexually-repressed contemporaries — especially the authorities. There's no consideration of the sexual violence in the Marquis' work. Viewers aren't told that in De Sade's work, the link between sex and cruelty is unbreakable; qualms about hurting, and even killing, another person mustn't stand in the way of sensual pleasures; that, as de Sade put it, "guilt is an illusion." Nor are they told that de Sade's commitment to these ideals transcended literature: Quill's "martyr" tortured and poisoned real-life women.

So, why go to all this trouble to rehabilitate one of the most notorious men in western history? The answer is the lesson audiences are supposed to take home about our desires. In the world according to Quills, freedom and sexual license are intimately — no pun intended — linked. The Marquis is free — dare I say authentic? — precisely because he allows nothing to stand between him and his pleasures. He is to be emulated because he has the guts to do whatever he feels like doing, no matter what people, morality or propriety might say.

And in case you're wondering whether I've read too much into a movie, director Philip Kaufman told Sight & Sound magazine that a large part of the inspiration for the film came from following the Clinton impeachment scandal. He said that he saw a parallel between de Sade's principal tormentor in the film and independent counsel Kenneth Starr. In other words, he saw the film as a commentary on the importance of sexual freedom.

On the opposite side of the equation — at least in tone — was the Ang Lee fantasy/epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo Hu Zang Long). The film, which took home four Oscars including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Score, is the highest-grossing foreign language film ever released in the United States — despite being entirely in Mandarin, a language few Americans, including many Chinese-Americans, can begin to understand.

While Crouching stood out for its magical fight sequences in which people ran across water, fought in the treetops, and leapt effortlessly from rooftop-to-rooftop, the film didn't forget ideas, or at least one important idea: the need for self-denial. In the relationship between Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat), and Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) — a love that cannot be expressed — the requirements of honor and propriety take precedence over the needs and wants of the individuals. These demands are accentuated when Li and Shu meet Jiao Long Yu, the daughter of a provincial official. Jiao is as contemptuous of self-mastery, and the requirements of honor and propriety, as Li and Shu are beholden to them.

Who is right? Well, after all of the crouching and hiding, the answer is "neither." Both self-denial and indulgence prove to be unsatisfying. Jiao learns the hard way that contempt for discipline has disastrous consequences — both for her and for others. But circumstances don't leave Li and Shu feeling good about their choices, either. On the contrary, they have enough regrets to last a lifetime. Their sacrifices aren't so much tragic — which is often inescapable — as they are a waste. They are self-denial for its own sake.

So is there an alternative to letting nothing stand between us and our desires, and a rigorous self-denial that leaves us feeling cheated? Yes: the Christian tradition. Now, if what you know about Christianity and desire is, like your knowledge of the Marquis de Sade, the product of what you've learned from pop culture, this may be counter-intuitive. In any movie or television show, the biggest killjoy is sure to sport a Bible or another sign of Christian piety. Words like "puritanical" have helped solidify the image of Christianity as an abstemious kind of creed.

I won't lie to you, there are Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, who, for whatever reason, promote that impression. But what's also true is that they aren't acting in accordance with the Christian tradition. In Christianity, self-control is important, but not for its own sake. Christianity doesn't treat our desires as evil and inappropriate — as things that need to be repressed at all costs, or that are inimical to true spirituality. No, it regards our desires, at least in their original state, as good and placed there by God to serve a purpose — a purpose that has everything to do with our good. And while exercising self-control entails sacrifice, and may even, on rare occasions, have a tragic dimension (after all, some good desires go unfulfilled) it's never a waste.

It's never a waste because our desires are means, not ends. The quality of our lives isn't measured by whether we get what we want. Men such as Aristotle (whose insights were incorporated into Christian thought by Thomas Aquinas, among others), Thomas, and St. Paul understood that there's a higher goal to human existence — whether it's happiness or seeing God face-to-face. And it's for the sake for this goal that we, as Thomas put it, "properly control" our legitimate attractions to what Aristotle called "pleasant things." But the self-indulgent person sacrifices what's ultimately important for transient pleasures, and in the process, cheats himself and settles for less than he should.

But if self-indulgence cheats us out of our true purpose, so does its opposite: abstemiousness. Regarding desire as evil, all pleasures as something to be avoided, and having a good time as a sign of spiritual poverty misses the point as badly as self-indulgence. It forgets — if it ever knew — that in our pleasures we are given a preview of what it will be like when we see God face-to-face. What's more, this preview can take unexpected forms. For instance, C.S. Lewis, in Surprised By Joy, writes of experiencing what he called "joy" in the music of Richard Wagner. (Bach, I understand. But Wagner?) And, the Bible uses the image of a lover's caress. You can name your own example. Something so exquisite that, as Lewis said, "anyone who has experienced it will want it again." This is what the abstemious deny themselves.

So we are left with what the Bible calls "moderation in all things" if we want to experience life's pleasures while remaining their masters. While moderation may not be the stuff of award-winning cinema, it's what true happiness is made of.