Heaven help us, the American Film Institute is back with another list.

In the five years since raising a lot of ire – as well as a hefty chunk of advertising revenue – with 1998’s televised “100 Greatest American Movies” special, the government-subsidized organization has taken pains to inform us as to which are America’s greatest comedies, thrillers, love stories and movie stars. Now we have the 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains, unveiled during a program which aired Tuesday night on CBS.

The top villain, Hannibal Lector, was hardly a surprise pick – along with Norman Bates and Darth Vader, he was a shoo-in to make the top three. But the favored hero was something of a surprise. Atticus Finch, Gregory Peck’s even-tempered, painfully righteous attorney from 1962’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” managed to best Indiana Jones and James Bond to gain first place. His selection is as stodgy as it is anticlimactic and will clue viewers into what is intrinsically flawed about the way these lists have been formulated.

We will leave aside for a moment the coplaint, oft-cited, that America’s leading guardian of film culture should have better things to do than engage in arbitrary listmaking. My main beef is that the “prestigious” film-industry types whose input AFI tabulates in formulating its list have become so hamstrung by political correctness that they are incapable of making interesting choices.

On the “heroes” list, not only is a gay-rights agenda represented (“Philadelphia’s” Andrew Beckett), but so too an anti-police agenda (Frank Serpico), an anti-Nixon agenda (Woodward and Bernstein), a feminist agenda (Thelma and Louise) and, in two separate instances, an anti-corporate, environmentalist agenda (Karen Silkwood and Erin Brockovich). Who was polled for this tedious, self-congratulatory list? The Humanities faculty at Ohio State?

None of the aforementioned characters come close to being great heroes because in most cases, their individuality is pushed to the margins of the screen by the importance of their causes. In the end, a hero’s actions must be righteous. But as with all great characters, he or she must also be complex, human, sometimes weak. In a moment of rare clarity, AFI got it right by naming to the list Oskar Schindler, a character who was not a demigod with a heroic plan to save thousands from the Holocaust, but rather a selfish opportunist who stumbled onto a great evil and was forced to reassess his priorities.

Another problem with the AFI polls has been a lack of adequate ground rules. “The Graduate” scored high on AFI’s list of great comedies because it was on the list of 400 nominees the institute sent out, despite the fact that no reasonable person would consider it a comedy. On the 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains list, such confusion reoccurs, with characters like Travis Bickle from “Taxi Driver” and Alex DeLarge from “A Clockwork Orange” rounded up into the “villains” camp.

True villains must be antagonists who create suspense by challenging the force of good. There is no good to be challenged by Travis and Alex, nor is there any suspense rooted in the outcome of their actions. From the filmmakers’ point of view, they are studies in depravity created by the harsh world that surrounds them.

The most galling pick on the “villains” list, however, was that of Michael Corleone – a character of depth and beauty, haunted by guilt and dashed intentions. How is it that AFI – an institute which, in addition to fundraising and producing television specials, purports to teach the craft of storytelling – doesn’t understand the difference between villains and tragic protagonists? If Michael Corleone is a villain, so is Hamlet. So is Charles Foster Kane.

There were some aspects of the list that pleasantly surprised me, such as the appearence of Marge Gunderson, the pregnant sheriff from “Fargo,” in the “hero” column. Ditto for HAL9000, the brooding computer from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” perhaps the most uncoventional of all villains. But there is simply too much to this “100 Greatest” enterprise that has become thematically incoherent and tainted by politics. The American Film Institute would do well by American cinema to make the most recent list its last.

Jordan Gentile is a senior in journalism. He can be reached at [email protected].