In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive new monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese in February 2012.

February is Oscar® month on TCM, and I thought it would be interesting to focus on a few films by way of the categories for which they were nominated.

Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 Blow-Up (February 5, 3:15 am ET) is one of the key movies of the '60s, a transformative viewing experience that helped us to consider the ways we perceive and experience the world. Like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, another "mind-expanding" picture, it is usually described in visual terms. Rightly so, but people often forget that it was written (and nominated for Best Original Screenplay), and that it is, finally, a uniquely disturbing detective story. Antonioni worked with his usual writing partner, Tonino Guerra (who also collaborated with Tarkovsky, Fellini, Rosi, the Taviani brothers, and many others), on what became a very free adaptation of the great Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar's "Las Babas del Diablo." He also brought in the English playwright Edward Bond to help with the dialogue. Blow-Up is as carefully constructed as The Maltese Falcon. The difference is that the solution takes place in the inner world of the hero, and the spectator.

Josef von Sternberg's 1941 film version of John Colton's scandalous play The Shanghai Gesture (February 29, 8pm ET) was his return to stylistic and emotional extremes, the entrancing but frank poetry of his pictures with Marlene Dietrich. One of the aesthetic elements that makes this such a potent experience is the Art Direction--the crane shot that introduces the gambling casino where most of the picture takes place is astonishing but so is the set that it reveals, teeming with ornate detail and multiple levels of depraved gambling and nameless activities in the shadows. The casino was designed by Boris Leven, who was nominated for an Oscar® in 1941. Leven was one of the greatest artists in his field. He was born in Russia and emigrated to the US when he was 19. He started at 20th Century-Fox in the late '30s, and worked as Art Director or Production Designer on many pictures through the '80s, big and small, including Giant, Anatomy of a Murder, Criss Cross, The Prowler, West Side Story and The Sound of Music. He also worked on The Silver Chalice with Paul Newman, and his sets were revelatory--they created a whole new way of imagining the ancient world. I had the pleasure of working with Boris on four of my own pictures. He was a remarkable artist and a special man.

One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (February 6, 1:30am ET) was Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's sequel (of a kind) to The 49th Parallel, made one year earlier. It was nominated for Best Visual Effects, principally because of the stunning sequence in which an English bomber known as "B for Bertie" is shot down near the Zuider Zee in Holland on its way to a night raid on Stuttgart. The run over war-torn Europe is beautifully detailed, and the landscape is dotted with explosions and fires--at certain points, anti-aircraft flak streaks across our field of vision. It was all done with a camera on overhead tracks moving over an elaborate model that covered the entire floor of a soundstage, manned by an army of dedicated technicians. One of them was the young cameraman who received the nomination, future director Ronald Neame. A tour de force in a very special picture.