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Why The Oscars Don't Matter

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Last year, despite only seeing two or three of the films nominated, I stayed up late to watch the celebratory masturbation known as “The Academy Awards”, with an undying hope that any film –I didn’t care which, just any film – would take Best Picture away from Avatar. I have to say that I went to bed happy with the result, albeit I did feel like my time had been wasted. It is widely accepted, at least in my circles, that the Oscars are a joke, but each year we all follow along - at least peripherally - who will win best picture, actor, and director. But these awards don’t really mean anything, as history keeps showing how the Oscars get it wrong.
When you ask the typical movie-goer who the top five English speaking filmmakers are almost every list will include Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick despite the fact that all three of these directors never were recognized by the Academy. The films that define decades never win Oscars, and lose out to some of the most ridiculous of choices – I’m talking about Rocky beating Taxi Driver in 1976, Ordinary People beating Raging Bull in 1980, and Forrest Gump beating Pulp Fiction in 1994. Time has told us who the real winners are, so why bother with allowing overpaid sterile fatcats with no sense of posterity decide for us what the best film of the year was? Occasionally the academy does land on the money, such as with One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest or The Godfather, but the filmmakers should know better than to actually care about these awards. When Woody Allen won four of the top five Oscars for Annie Hall, he did not even bother to show up in person to receive them, and although he’s won something like twenty-one Oscars in his career, which has to be a record, he has never once come to collect. Terry Gilliam’s been calling out the Oscars ever since The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a film that had characters realistically age and deage by forty years, lost to Driving Miss Daisy, a film that starred Morgan Freeman as a black man and Jessica Tandy as an old woman, for Best Make Up.
And then there are those years where the Academy embarrasses itself completely. Shakespeare In Love, Titanic, The Lord of the Rings, and Crash are not even great movies, but they were the ones that simply had the studios pulling the best campaigns those years. Campaigns mean everything, films have to be released between labor day and Christmas to get the attention of the Los Angelos and New York film critics’ awards, followed by commercial success over the next two months as well as picking up mass critical praise from things like Time Magazine or people like Roger Ebert. The director or actors barely makes any contribution in this process, whereas the studio’s coldly calculate which the best movie they produced that year, how many theatres to expand it to each weekend, where to hold press screenings, what movies to play it off of, and so on.
Well, I believe that I have sufficiently proven that the Academy doesn’t deserve to chose what constitutes as good movies anymore. Here are my personal selections, having seen pretty much every film that mattered this year. Read these, and then get a good night’s sleep on the night of the actual Oscars. These are not my predictions – this is merely how it should look.

Best Picture: Black Swan, Inception, The Kids Are Alright, The Kings Speech, 127 Hours
Best Director: Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan)
Best Actor: Colin Firth (The Kings Speech)
Best Supporting Actor: Geoffrey Rush (The Kings Speech)
Best Actress: Julianne Moore (The Kids Are Alright)
Best Supporting Actress: Barbara Hershey (Black Swan)
Best Editing: 127 Hours
Best Original Screenplay: The Kids Are Alright
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Social Network
Best Animated Picture: Toy Story 3
Best Visual Effects : Inception
Best Costume Design: True Grit
Best Original Score: Tron Legacy

Even though I didn’t even think it should be Nominated (and only nominated 5, this change to ten is pointless), The Social Network will probably win Best Picture – this has more to do with Facebook and Zuckerberg than the film itself. If you want a real judge of films, checkout some AFI lists – if you want award shows follow Cannes.

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