i guess i do this every year. every time the academy awards come by, i hunt my archives to find some post from previous years explaining why i hate the oscars so much so i won't have to write about it again. except it looks like i've never bothered to write my oscar rant. at least not here (which is not to say that i haven't ranted elsewhere).
i guess it's fair to say that i see a lot of movies. anyone who's been reading this site has probably noticed by now that it's not all that uncommon for me to babble on about something i've seen. and even then i only seem to write about a small minority of the films i watch (e.g. joyeux noel. i saw it yesterday but didn't mention it here. uh, until now, that is). i don't really consider myself to be a hardcore film buff, even though other people sometimes think that i am.
anyway, i'm really a subjectivist when it comes to movies. i don't believe in any truly "best" picture, just differing opinions on what the best might be. there are friends and movie reviewers whose opinions i respect. but that's just another way of saying that i tend to agree with them.
the academy awards, indeed all awards, annoy me because they put an objective label on something that is inherently subjective. at its heart, the best picture award is not really about which picture really is the best, it's just the picture that is 'the best" according to the academy, an organization that doesn't have particularly good tastes in my humble opinion. which is another way of saying that i don't agree with them all that often.
sometimes i do like hearing the opinions of people whose movie tastes differ from mine. other people with different viewpoints can bring out things that i never noticed in a movie that can spawn an interesting discussion. but the oscars and other awards are not there to start a discussion. they really can't. the academy does not give any reason for its awards, it just announces who wins and lets people make up after-the-fact theories to explain why. the theorizing itself might be interesting, but only if you care about the academy's opinion.
that's partly because the academy is a committee, and a semi-anonymous one at that (at least no one goes out of their way too make the membership public). what's worse, the academy awards were invented just as a way to advertise for the american film industry. almost 80 years ago the big hollywood studios decided it would help publicize their work if they spent one overhyped night a year giving awards to each other and then crowing about how well they did in their awards in the advertisements. the academy awards was, and still is, basically a marketing device.
that being said, this is a particularly hard year to be a grouch about the academy awards. i actually saw and liked all of the best picture nominees this year--i don't know when the last time that happened. and, of course, jon stewart is hosting the award ceremony. it will probably still suck, but it makes it hard for me to dismiss it out of hand. plus i'm going to an oscar party tonight. which means i will have to try my best not to bitch about the oscars throughout the evening.
okay, so that's the rant. i'm glad i got it off my chest. at least that's one less thing i have to do next year.
