The pilot turned his airliner upside down. On purpose. And it saved nearly a hundred lives.

That's the idea behind one of the most intense movie moments of the holiday season: the core scene of "Flight," starring Denzel Washington as pilot Whip Whitaker. Hollywood sure likes Washington's performance. The role earned him an Oscar nomination Thursday on the heels of a Golden Globe nod in December. The film also received a nod for best original screenplay.

Spinning movie sets combine with CGI to make the scene "more than gut-wrenching," wrote CNN's Tom Charity. Hitflix ranks it among the "most harrowing plane crashes ever seen."

(By the way, no spoilers here.)

Thanks to masterful editing, we see a series of jerky, split-second glimpses of an "engine failure" panel light and then an uncontrolled dive and a plunging altimeter. In a stunning command decision, Washington's character rolls the plane over on its back. We see tumbling passengers and tossed luggage and finally a smoky crash landing in an empty field.

The scene stands as a breathtaking masterpiece of Hollywood's dream machine, but it pales in comparison with United Flight 232, a deadly real-life airline disaster that -- like the movie --- could have been much worse if not for remarkable efforts by heroic crew members.

But first, is it possible to fly a commercial airliner upside down? Would excessive G-forces destroy it? That debate is raging right now on aviation Twitter feeds and websites.

In the film, the pilot rolls the plane over to keep it flying longer. He avoids crashing into a neighborhood, saving countless lives.

"Flight" director Robert Zemeckis, creator of the "Back to the Future" series, enjoyed a bit of artistic license here, said Larry Goodrich, the film's pilot consultant.

Goodrich, a 32-year pilot -- first with the Air Force, then with Delta Air Lines -- trained pilots to fly MD-88s, which the movie's plane most resembles.

During production, Goodrich said he reminded Zemeckis and Washington that "you can turn an airplane like this over, but it's not going to fly like this very long. It's gonna go down."

"He looked at me and he said, 'Can it fly upside down for a little bit?' I said, 'Yeah a little bit, but eventually you're gonna lose lift in the wings and you won't have the power to keep the airplane up.'"

"It's hard to do and the planes aren't built for it," said another veteran commercial airline pilot. "But when you're in that situation you'll do anything you can to save the airplane," said the pilot, who asked not to be named because he's not authorized by his airline to speak with the news media.

When asked about flying upside down, Boeing, which inherited the MD-80 series after its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, issued a no-nonsense statement.

"The MD-80 cannot sustain inverted flight," the statement said. "The MD-80, as with all commercial airliners, was designed to fly upright. Commercial airliners are only tested and certified for upright flight."

Another thing that didn't ring true with Goodrich was the pilot leaving the cockpit during an emergency, as Washington's character did. Goodrich said he advised Zemeckis this scenario wasn't likely.

The interaction between Washington's character and the co-pilot rubbed commercial airline pilot and blogger Patrick Smith the wrong way.

"Washington's character is arrogant and flip and condescending and his co-pilot's character is meek and weak and at times even scared and clueless," said Smith. "This isn't how pilots behave. It reinforces the myth that the co-pilot is some sort of apprentice pilot."

The real deal

But as we all know, there's Hollywood -- and then there's the real deal.