"The Oscars: Who Will Win and Who Should Win"

Despite the glitz and the glamour of the red carpet, there are some people out there (I hope) who actually care about the awards themselves, and are concerned that the films and people who really deserve statues are the ones that receive them.  There is nothing that can be done about the nominations anymore (click here to read my reaction to them), and by the time of the broadcast most animosities will have been tempered, and everyone who screamed "I am never watching the Oscars again" after last year's telecast will inevitably be seated in front of their televisions once again at 6pm pacific time.  As the final motion picture awards program of 2011, usually the Oscars are pretty much all sewn up well before the first presenter takes the stage, but those breathtaking moments before the winners are read still remain, upsets never outside the realm of possibility, I'm looking at you Crash.  This year the battle for most Oscar wins, and certainly for Best Picture, will be between Martin Scorsese's Hugo, with eleven nominations, and Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist, with ten nominations.  Both films share a passionate nostalgia for classic, silent-era films.  One of them, in fact, IS silent, while the other one is actually good.  Oops, here I am getting ahead of myself.  In the interest of any last minute changes you might wish to make to your office betting pools, or if you just want to amaze your friends with an uncanny prescience, or most importantly for the fulfillment of vanity and satisfaction of my own ego, the following are my predictions for what will win, and what should win on Sunday evening, February 26th, when the 84th Academy Awards will be broadcast on ABC.

Best Picture

Will Win

Should Win

Buzz for The Artist just keeps spreading and spreading.  It has already won Best Picture from nearly every major critics association, is present on countless top ten lists for 2011, and has grossed around thirty million dollars, despite being black and white, silent, and square (in shape).  Don't worry though, this film is going to do absolutely nothing to change the stigma surrounding black and white and silent films.  Not to dog on The Artist, if you want to read my thoughts on the film in detail click here, but the film is so safe it's barely even there, and as much as Hollywood loves itself, it would never pass up the opportunity to recognize something so overtly self-reflexive, even if it is a forgery.  But if you want to feel the real power of what film can do, The Tree Of Life is easily the best of the nine nominees.  Terrence Malick's fifth film in thirty-eight years is never the same thing each time you watch it, because you are never the same person each time you watch it.  A continuation of his late-career trend of direct address, existential musings over immaculately photographed scenes and images that tend aggressively toward the non-diegetic, the "story" that so many viewers complained was missing from the film, was actually missing from themselves, or perhaps they just weren't willing to listen.  If you open yourself to this film, at the very least, you will find a five minute segment that will open a door for you to either change your life, or the way you see the world.  And this thing is 140 minutes long.

Best Director

Will Win

Should Win

There is a little voice inside me screaming "Martin Scorsese" as loud as it possibly can.  How in the world can someone who is considered by many to be the greatest director alive, with a wealth of genre and generation-defining films to his credit, and also the man behind Hugo, the film with more nominations this year than any other film, lose this award to a man whose previous films have been obscure French comedies nobody has heard of?  Ask the Director's Guild of America, who already gave Michel Hazanavicius their Best Director award, an award that has only been unsuccessful at predicting the Oscar winner four times in sixty-two years. I'm not a betting man, but even I can't deny those odds.  But mark my words, if there is going to be an upset Sunday night, it is going to be in this category.  Terrence Malick, however, is one of cinema's truly dedicated auteurs, to borrow a French word.  The Tree Of Life is as much a moving poem as it is a moving picture, and Malick is its mad architect.  It might not be easy all the time to see why one particular scene follows another, but it's clear that the man's heart and soul went into every aesthetic decision.

Best Actor

Will Win

Should Win

In no way was George Clooney's performance in The Descendants the best male performance of the year, but he's the best of the what we've got, and a shoe-in to take home the award.  There has been some last minute buzz about Jean Dujardin as a dark horse possibility, but at some point the fact that The Artist is a silent film has got to catch up with it.  George Clooney is a consummate professional, a veritable institution in Hollywood, and probably the most liked, and likable actor in mainstream cinema today.  The moral center of Alexander Payne's career peak The Descendants, and present in every single frame, Clooney is invaluable to the film, continually grounding it at times when the airtight structure of Payne's narrative threatened its credibility.  If I ever watch this film again it will be for his performance.  While many of his roles are only a few tics removed from Danny Ocean, in the character of Matt King he has finally achieved the humility we all knew he was capable of.

Best Actress

Will Win

Should Win

Ditto for Michelle Williams's performance in My Week With Marilyn, but she's also the best of the nominees.  This is her third Oscar nomination, she has already won the Golden Globe, and in a year when Hollywood is feeling nostalgic and looking to honor itself, expect Michelle Williams to ride the wave of sentiment to victory.  Oh, and she is amazing too.  Nothing short of a revelation, not one of her previous roles prepared me for what she accomplishes in this film.  My Week With Marilyn is certainly not a great film, it has quite modest ambitions, but that ultimately only serves to help Williams, because she becomes the primary focal point.  This Marilyn Monroe is a jumble of contradictions and complications, and Williams effortlessly validates any opinion one could have of the icon, many times in the same moment, and same breath.  With her affected line readings and body language, Williams creates a Marilyn Monroe that I cannot imagine any other actress doing.  There are some murmurings that Viola Davis from The Help will take home this award.  But where she was good in a film that was not, Williams was great in a film that was better.

Best Supporting Actor:

Will Win

Should Win

Over eighty years old, and with 191 acting credits according to IMDB, Christopher Plummer has never won an Academy Award.  Ok, so Max von Sydow is also over eighty years old, also has never won an Academy Award, and has 145 acting credits according to IMDB, which include many Ingmar Bergman films like The Seventh Seal; but Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was a terrible film, a sentiment echoed by critics and audiences alike.  There may not be many opportunities remaining to reward Plummer, and his role in Beginners as Hal Fields, a man who openly acknowledges that he is gay after his wife dies, is respectably solid.  But for my money, the extremely talented Kenneth Branagh, criminally underappreciated over the years for his work in comedy, and who has also never won an Oscar, almost stole the show as Sir Lawrence Olivier in My Week With Marilyn...almost.  It certainly wasn't the best performance of his career, but after looking at his fellow nominees, that seems to be the theme of the category.

Best Supporting Actress

Will Win

Should Win

Probably the weakest category of the evening, expect Octavia Spencer to take home the Oscar, since she won the Golden Globe and just about every other Supporting Actress award from various critics associations.  I didn't like The Help, but I liked her in it.  The role of Minny Jackson was tailor made for this type of recognition; relieved of the burden of having the character arc and gravity of a lead role, she alone is the source of most of The Help's comic relief, and Spencer brings more to the role than it has any right to, easily a stark contrast to the scenery chewing of Jessica Chastain, who is also nominated, in the same film.  The Help will need to get some love Sunday night, and Octavia Spencer is the perfect way for the Academy to do it.

Best Original Screenplay

Will Win

Should Win

Woody Allen's best film since 2005's Match Point, but if we're talking about traditional Woody Allen comedies, we would have to go all the way back to 1979's Manhattan to find an equal.  Midnight In Paris is that good, and audiences clearly agree, helping it achieve a Woody Allen record of $150 million at the box office, on a budget of seventeen.  The screenplay categories are usually the Academy's way to recognize quirky Best Picture nominees that have no chance of winning the top prize, like Pulp Fiction, or The Usual Suspects.  Considering Allen's disdain for award shows, he probably will not be in attendance, but it won't affect his chances of winning.  This is a lock, as there is really no other award it can win.  Perhaps Art Direction, but that really won't honor Woody. 

Best Adapted Screenplay

Will Win

Should Win

The Descendants also has no chance of winning Best Picture, but considering throughout Alexander Payne's career he has consistently delivered critically lauded, script-centered, resonant dramas, like About Schmidt and Sideways, Adapted Screenplay is his to lose.  I found the film ever so slightly overwritten, which is why my pick goes to Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan's adaptation of John le Carre's seminal spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  You need to eat your Wheaties before watching this, as its mosaic structure, its wealth of characters and foreign names, and insistence upon using archaic spy terminology warrant multiple viewings, which the film rewards handsomely.  A work of staggering genius, the adaptation of such an immense tome in this risky fashion could have backfired and didn't, and is the most exemplary of the five nominees of what this category should be all about.

Best Animated Film

Will Win

Should Win

The backlash against Cars 2 ruined Pixar's chance to once again dominate this category.  But even if it had been nominated, it certainly wouldn't stop this existential masterpiece starring Johnny Depp as the titular lizard who fancies himself a thespian.  With scene after scene drenched in irony, Rango nearly takes the methodology of crafting an animated film for adults first and children second off the deep end, and parents should be prepared to do a lot of explaining.  But it is never pretentious, as Depp's brilliant voice acting helps consistently maintain humility.  It's rare to see a director of live action films so comfortable with animation, but helmer Gore Verbinski, director of the Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy, might have finally found his calling.  Rango is literally bursting at its splices with more style and technique in one reel than what can be found in the entire Pirates trilogy, evident after the second instance of deep focus photography.  Two of the films nominated are completely obscure, and Puss In Boots and Kung Fu Panda 2 are basically sequels, which leaves Rango, a completely original, jaw-dropping and mind-bending experience.  It's not only the best animated film of the year, but also one of the best films of the year period.

Everything else will pretty much be divided between Hugo and The Artist, with the former taking most of the technical awards like Best Sound and Best Cinematography, and The Artist taking the ones more suited to a Best Picture, like Film Editing and Original Score.  Although an argument could be made that turning the sound off completely is the most creative use of sound all year, I do not expect such a metaphysical sense of humor from the Oscars.  What I do expect is to be 100% correct with my picks, even though I secretly hope I am not.  Those are my breathtaking moments.  I have no problem being wrong if the Academy crowns the right film.  And if not, well I will just never watch the Oscars again.

"The Con-Artist: An Argument Against This Year's Oscar Front-Runner"

Why is this man smiling?  

When I first heard there was to be a black and white, silent film with a square aspect ratio set to be released, I’ll admit my interest was piqued.  I thought it should be irresistible to anyone with even a minute passion for film, regardless of whether its design was a gimmick, an homage to the birth of cinema, or better yet, a challenge to modern-day audience tolerances.  But as the days remaining in 2011 became fewer, and praise heaped on The Artist became greater, all the way up to its Golden Globe win for Best Musical or Comedy, I began to grow equally as suspicious.  What was it about this film that was transcending its self-imposed formal restrictions and resonating with both the art house and mainstream crowds? 

Many people, especially critics, have pronounced The Artist the film of the year.  Always searching for trends in cinema with which to link, as a thread, through the films on their top ten lists, many critics decided that last year was the year of the love letter to Hollywood, drawing from Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo as similar examples of which Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist could rest comfortably at the forefront, due to its quite literal fixations on, and reiterations of, ancient cinematic techniques.  That’s all well and good, but how does the film play?  When its artifice is stripped away, is there anything left?  Is it a compelling story?  Does the film’s screenplay make it worthy of the Best Picture award it is certainly destined to take home?  In words that Hollywood once should have been able to understand, not by any stretch of the imagination.

For those who have not seen the film, it begins conventionally enough in the ordinary world of silent film star George Valentin, riding high as his film studio’s current marquee star, turning out hit after hit.  An impromptu dalliance with Peppy Miller, a random woman on the street, in a scene that desperately wants you to think of Charlie Chaplin, has the ultimate effect of landing her on the cover of Variety, and pretty soon she finds herself cast in pictures due to public reception.  The incident also becomes another impediment in the loveless marriage between Valentin and his wife, who share a mansion together but rarely the same space within it.  Soon, the film has you believe, overnight, that silent films were replaced by talkies, as Valentin’s studio head tells him they are searching for new faces, and that basically his career is over.  The rest of the film, and I mean rest of the film, parallels Valentin’s descent into depression and self-loathing with Peppy Miller’s rise to superstardom, until he eventually hits rock bottom and Peppy has to save him from utter ruin.

If all this seems quite simple and concise, it’s because it is.  And for some reason, critics, and subsequently audiences, have seemed determined to mistake this coy simplicity for universality.  For an entire hour The Artist features scene after scene of Valentin’s downward spiral into depression, offering no additional information or story development.  We see him watching one of his films in an empty movie theatre, we see him walk by a huge line outside a screening of a Peppy Miller film, we see him drinking in a bar, we see a woman who doesn’t even recognize him approach to talk about his dog, we see him fire his butler, we see him sell off his estate, we see his wife leave him, and the list goes on, ad infinitum, to the point where more so than any other film in recent memory I’ve wanted desperately to fast forward through, not because it was bad per se, but because I had the overwhelming urge to scream “I get it already!”  There is nothing wrong with showing a man’s gradual decline into depression, but The Artist’s errs are three-fold.  First, Valentin’s character is completely undeveloped.  Unless you subscribe to the notion that owning a small dog is all that is required to establish a main character as a hero, there is literally nothing about Valentin that warrants emotional investment in his plight, and the character’s self-loathing comes off as whining, upper class laziness and miserablism.  It doesn’t help that Hazanavicius captures multiple times the complete transformation of Dujardin’s face, from furrow to smile, and a ridiculously over-the-top smile at that, inviting laughter instead of empathy.  Second, is the lack of subtext throughout the film.  My desire to scream at the screen, and there has to be others who feel the same way, comes from boredom at the film's redundnacy.  Another character or two, or something else at stake besides the popularity of a fading film star, would have solved this problem.  And third, the hour long montage of depression is edited together haphazardly random.  With scenes of gravity in front of more trifling ones, the simple compression of several years of time, a basic formal element of filmmaking, fails at delivering a cohesive sense of logical progression and therefore an effective emotional punch.

All of these problems are related, and could have been avoided quite easily.  The basic arc of the film is substantive, and it has an abundance of charm that despite my opinions, I was not able to resist completely.  But throughout, director Michel Hazanavicius makes the unwise choice to not complicate anything, most likely from a fear of alienating an audience already grappling with the film’s stylistic choices.  Did Hazanavicius forget that the silent film era produced D.W. Griffith’s The Birth Of A Nation and Intolerance, the latter of which was an epic three-and-a-half-hour film with four parallel storylines that spanned several centuries?  Or did he forget about Battleship Potemkin, a film that is still ranked among the greatest films ever made, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, the father of montage, who discovered that the human mind was actually able to extricate a distinct meaning from the juxtaposition of two seemingly random images?  For a film that wants very much to be a paean to the roots of filmmaking it is stubbornly ignorant.  The Artist remains little more than a regurgitation of a focus group’s idea of what silent films are, parading a general sense as gospel, while ignoring simple facts like how the cumbersome nature of film cameras meant little to no camera movement.  Yes, The Artist showcases the same willful negligence as most films that depict the process of filmmaking as a point and shoot, in-camera edited affair.  But who needs veracity when you have a smiling man with a dog?  Who needs substance when you’ve got the ultimate vehicle for millions of Americans so in love with and envious of the beautiful people they just won’t see Valentin for what he is, a lazy sad sack who sits around waiting for someone else to make it all better for him?

In the end, though, it matters not the things that don’t make it onto the screen.  The Artist contains all the hallmarks of a Best Picture winner:  oversimplification that borders on the juvenile, cliché emotions that assume resonance among an audience, and an unwillingness to ask anything of its viewers beyond a mere diversion between fistfuls of popcorn.  If the Academy truly wants to reward a film that could be called a love letter to Hollywood, Hugo clearly, and much more adequately fits the bill.  Scorsese doesn’t pander, you either get his references or you don’t; and if you don’t it doesn’t matter, the screenplay by John Logan is so well written the story provides more than enough value for your dollar, leaving the film’s inherent self-reflexivity a clever bonus for the true film lover.  The elephant in the room regarding The Artist, the question that nobody seems to be asking, is what would the Oscar nominations look like if there were nine other silent films made last year?  Would they all be nominated for Best Picture?  What makes The Artist so special that it could be singled out among other films with similar stylistic pretensions?  Nothing.  If the film were in color and had sound it would be unwatchable, laughable even.  Its artifice is just a gimmick.  Unfortunately the timing of the emergence of the Oscars allowed for only one silent film to be declared Best Picture, Wings, in 1927.  Prior to that there were many masterpieces worthy of distinction as the birth of cinema, efforts from Griffith, Eisenstein, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang to name just a few.  The Artist would stand shamefully among such company, a fact the Academy should be required to reflect on before casting their vote for Best Picture.  The film will forever remain a reluctant product of the 21^st century, a misguided example of Hollywood’s self-aggrandizing nature, lacking any ties to the art form that in many aspects changed the course of the twentieth century.  Back then the word “illusion” was commonly used when describing film.  The Artist succeeds only in being an illusion of quality cinema.

My Week With Oscar

So here we are as another year of Oscar comes to a close.  Another year of films that showcase an industry working at the height of its creativity, and another year of Oscar nominees that highlight the absolute best and most deserving of the bunch, right?  It would be difficult to find a list of nominees from any award show without flaw, but in the weeks following the Oscar announcements the press and bloggers are usually at their most vitriolic, as if they’ve been waiting eleven months to pull the word “snub” out of their lexicons just to throw it back at Tinsel Town.  On the morning of January 24^th the nominations were read for the 84^th Academy Awards, and unfortunately, while proving no exception, they are special in regards to several truly boneheaded and egregious choices that are important for the casual fan to recognize before taking a stroll down their hi-definition red carpets when the awards are televised on Sunday February 26^th.  After pondering the nominations, here are the main things that bother me.

A few years ago the Academy changed its rules regarding the category of Best Picture, increasing the number of nominees from five to ten titles, and this year, revising again to include anywhere FROM five to ten.  Sounding like a ploy to increase revenue, as more films would be able to make bank with the coveted “Nominated for Best Picture” tagline, the fact that each subsequent year has shown the category populated by five films that actually deserve the nod among some of the most inexplicable company, that theory seems well supported.  This year we have The Tree Of Life, Midnight In Paris, Hugo, The Artist, and The Descendants.  If only we could stop right there.  While we can casually disagree that those films are the five best of the year, they are at least drawn from the correct pool of acclaim.  The remaining nominees, padding out the category, include Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, an oversimplified, borderline offensive 9/11 tale, which, along with Spielberg’s maudlin War Horse, apparently does not have some of the best directing, writing, or lead acting of the year based on their omission from those categories, yet the Academy deems them both two of the nine best films of the year.  The Help is this year’s token 100-million-dollar-grossing nominee, aided by its social conscience, though also not up for screenplay or directing, even while adapted from a high-profile bestseller.  And finally, Moneyball, a Brad Pitt vehicle I found incredibly dull, but which most critics applauded, though I bet would not put in the same league as the first five films.

Of the lead acting categories, Best Actor is particularly noteworthy.  While I applaud the company of Gary Oldman, as stoic, steely-eyed spy Smiley in the underappreciated Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, among the equally deserving Clooney, and Dujardin, I have much disdain for the nomination of Demian Birchir, effective but stranded in Chris Weitz’s inert, manipulative movie-of-the-week about illegal immigration, A Better Life.  Nobody pats itself on the back better than Hollywood.  With a dearth of nominees, as is usually the case with Best Actress, Birchir’s inclusion could have been understandable, but in place of Michael Shannon’s devastating portrayal of undiagnosed schizophrenia in the SNUBBED Take Shelter, or Ryan Gosling’s career turns in both Drive and The Ides Of March, or Michael Fassbender’s brave performance as a sex addict in the SNUBBED Shame, it is inexcusable.  Brad Pitt’s nomination, lending support to Moneyball, is understandable, but similarly unjust at the expense of the others.  And what about SNUBBED Leonardo DiCaprio?  I’ll bet he thought this was his year, and it could have been had Eastwood not subjected a period piece about the FBI to his usual one-take, yearly rush job.  A great role is defined by the inability to see anyone else in his/her shoes; Moneyball fails that test.  If Brad Pitt had to be nominated it should have been for The Tree Of Life, where he was able to play against type as a domineering father, to great results.

The lead actress group is just as bad.  Unfortunately, most years prove so difficult for the Academy to actually choose five nominees; the silver lining being that the truly great performances usually do not go unrecognized.  That is not the case this year.  Michelle Williams and Rooney Mara are the only nominees that make sense.  As the titular character in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Mara helped the film become a marked improvement over the Swedish version, and Williams's nomination as Marilyn Monroe was a forgone conclusion, regardless of how good the film turned out to be.  But Glenn Close, as Albert Nobbs, seems more a nod to the film’s statement on sexism than the rather unemotional performance should warrant.  And of course the token nomination of Meryl Streep, as Margaret Thatcher, either cements her reputation as the world’s greatest living actress, or just betrays the laziness of an Academy that would ignore how savaged The Iron Lady was by the critical mass.  And Viola Davis, while good in The Help, hardly delivered an Oscar caliber performance.  If I were choosing the nominees, I would not have overlooked Tilda Swinton’s perfect synchronicity with the tone of director Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, the best film that will ever be made (I promise you) about a high school shooting.  And I would not have overlooked 2011 Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress winner Kirsten Dunst, from Lars von Trier’s astounding Melancholia, whose physical transformation into depression eclipsed even the planet the film depicted being on a collision course with Earth.  And Jessica Chastain, with her banner year in four different films, while not being overlooked because of her nod as Supporting Actress in The Help, should have been recognized as a lead actress instead, either as Michael Shannon’s wife in Take Shelter, or, perhaps more appropriately, as Brad Pitt’s wife in The Tree Of Life, the film’s conscience, and graceful, emotional center.  She was not acting in The Help, she was emoting, a drama school final exam lost in a Hollywood soundstage, and the fact that she is up against Octavia Spencer, who fared much better with her much better role, is a slap in the face for what Chastain accomplished this year.

The Best Adapted Screenplay category is one of the worst offenders.  While the Academy saw fit to nominate Bridesmaids and Margin Call for original screenplay, over The Tree Of Life, which basically turned narrative exposition into poetry, much more befuddling here is the nominations of The Ides Of March and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the adapted category, which happens to be the former film’s ONLY nomination.  This being the same year as Best Picture nominees The Help, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, War Horse, and also the year Christopher Hampton adapted two books, a 600 page nonfictional account of the birth of psychoanalysis and a play called “The Talking Cure” to create SNUBBED A Dangerous Method, and of course The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, apparently the writing of all of them did not hold a candle to the writing of The Ides Of March or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, yet neither of those two films had the writing caliber to be included as Best Picture nominees.  The issue is one of consistency.  How can a film be nominated for Best Picture, but not be nominated for lead acting, directing, OR writing?

Best Director is the only category the Academy got right.  Woody Allen from Midnight In Paris, Terrence Malick from The Tree Of Life, Alexander Payne from The Descendants, Michel Hazanavicius from The Artist, and Martin Scorsese from Hugo are the nominees, and if they sound familiar it is because they are the directors from the first five Best Picture nominees.

I won’t go into the lesser categories, except to make one comment:  it is about time the Academy starts taking the category of Best Original Score seriously, or drops it altogether.  Ever since 1993, when Michael Nyman was not even nominated for Jane Campion’s Best Picture nominee The Piano, the film about a mute woman who used her music to communicate, I have annually lambasted the Academy for their consistent ignorance with respect to composers.  This year we get two offerings from category stalwart John Williams, who after seeing just how many career nominations he has, you might think is either the greatest composer ever, or the only composer.  Nominated for just about everything he has ever done, Williams is worse than Meryl Streep, this year he takes two spots away from completely SNUBBED Alexandre Desplat, who along with scoring Best Picture nominees for the last two years, and last year’s winner The King’s Speech, this year has scored an impressive six features, including two current Best Picture nominees, The Ides Of March, and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.  He also scored 2011's Harry Potter installment.  Yes, even Harry Potter, the franchise that previously received a nomination in this category…when John Williams composed the score for it.  Anyone who can tell the difference between Williams’s scores for War Horse and Adventures of Tintin, or anything he has done in the last fifteen years for that matter, feel free to comment.  It should be bad enough that each year the Academy just chooses Original Score nominees that ride the coattails of their film’s other nominations, but in a John Williams year, it seems even that tradition gets sidelined in favor of either hero worship, or a complete lack of confidence among the Academy in their ability to tell what constitutes a good score.

And so closes another year of chest clearing.  Now I can watch the Oscars with a clear head, and for what they actually are, not so much a recognition of talent and craftsmanship as a recognition of people and films Hollywood thinks the audience wants to see take a stroll down the red carpet.  Award shows, and the Oscars in particular, are supposed to let audiences know what films are good, not the other way around; I'm not sure at what point that changed.  But perhaps it is for the best, since an award show that lacks common sense and follow-through is undeniably easier to watch after a long day at the office than something that requires more emotional investment, like many of the films that were SNUBBED.  Hmmm, I guess that makes the Oscars a perfect reflection of Tinsel Town after all.