I can't believe I'm the first one to talk about this...

So I'm pretty fucking pissed off about the Oscar nominations. How was Crash nominated for Best Picture? How was A History of Violence NOT? And where the fuck were the nominations for 2046 in, like, every conceivable category?

I could go on. But honestly, I'm not so much angry as I am hurt and embarrassed. I've been a huge, huge Oscar buff for just about as long as I can remember. I remember when Anthony Hopkins won for The Silence of the Lambs and he got a standing ovation from the audience because I was like, "Wait, is this a lifetime achievement award? I thought he won for real." And while there were always one or two bullshit winners (Helen Hunt? The English Patient? What?) for the most part I thought the winners were deserving.

In retrospect, that was clearly untrue, and some of the winners I was okay with at the time are cringingly awful (Forrest Gump and American Beauty leap to mind.) And the Academy's tradition of lunacy dates back to the thirties when something called "Sweet Leilani" by God knows who beat out "They Can't Take That Away From Me" by the Gershwins. So EVER thinking that the Oscars had anything to do with justice was clearly just ignorance/naivete on my part.

Nevertheless, it feels like a delayed betrayal of my youthful ideals. There's no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny, and the Academy Awards are bullshit. Between this and George Lucas peeing all over my childhood, first by re-cutting the original Star Wars trilogy and inserting nonsense like Greedo shooting first, and then by making a new trilogy that is flat, poorly acted and boring as hell!

All this ranting is to no end, by the way. I'll still watch the Academy Awards telecast and I'll still participate in the pool (and hopefully avenge last year's staggering defeat.) But I watch now knowing that it's all horseshit, and fifty years from now Crash will be as foreign a name to even film buffs as "Sweet Leilani" is to us.