Robert Altman has his fingerprints all over 'Birdman'

In 1992 Robert Altman made "The Player," a scathing satire on how shallow Hollywood filmmaking had become, and it came damn close to winning him an Oscar for best director. The next year, he made "Short Cuts," based on the stories of Raymond Carver, and again came up short at the Oscars.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu — who has proven himself an acolyte of Altman with films such as "Babel" and "Amores Perros" — combined Hollywood-shaming comedy and Carver and went home with a fistful of Oscars for "Birdman."

The connection runs even deeper than that: Altman opened "The Player" with a bravura eight-minute continuous tracking shot, and Inarritu ups the game by shooting his entire film in a sequence of long shots edited together with such skill that you feel like the film is one continuous take. And, of course, Altman also made a film ("Brewster McCloud") about a guy who — like Inarittu's protagonist — dreamed of flying on bird wings.