And the nominees are....uh....

The 78th Academy Awards take place this Sunday at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. That's pretty much all this page knows about the Oscars.

This page doesn't get the Oscars in the same way some people don't get the Super Bowl. There are many people who will be glued to their TV's to see if they can pick the winners and cash in on their Oscar pool entries. In football, the teams that scores the most points win. At the Oscars, the movies that strike the right thematic (read: political) tone with the judges while retaining a requisite of technical merit win. If the winner of the Super Bowl was picked the same way the Oscars are, it would have been the New Orleans Saints hoisting the Lombardi Trophy this year.

There are others who see the awards as an exercise in liberal cultural elitism, particularly in recent years with Michael Moore calling out George W. Bush, or the flurry of nominations for Brokeback Mountain. This page enjoys a good Bush - bashing or cowboy coming out as much as the next person, but I find that far too much of the celebrity soapbox is mounted on issues that aren't that immediate to most people. I'd like to hear something from the Extra/Entertainment Tonight crowd about public transit or trade unions or socialized medicine. Why should I care when Pamela Anderson yelps about boycotting fur when I can't afford to wear it in the first place?

I see an elitism, but it's a different elitism. To really appreciate the Oscars, one would need to see all the nominated pictures, which means putting up with perpetually increasing prices for tickets and concession items: religion is not the opiate of the masses, it's a $4 bag of popcorn. The movies are probably the only entertainment venue in North America where the cost of the product bears no relation to the cost of producing the product. You pay the same ticket price to see a small, independent film like Little Miss Sunshine as you do to see a big budget extravaganza like Pirates of the Caribbean. By comparison, I pay $6 to see the Vancouver Canadians play baseball in the Northwest League, which is short-season class A, entry-level professional baseball. I pay $20 to see the Seattle Mariners in Major League Baseball. The Mariners have a payroll of $100 million, while the Canadians play for meal money.

The "masses" go to "franchise" movies like Pirates, as well as the other escapist fare based on comic books and fantasy novels because they know that somebody put a lot of time and money into them, so they can expect to be entertained and get their money's worth. That doesn't make these people stupid or "dumbed down", it just makes them smart shoppers, especially since most of these movies are released in the summer, the perfect time for three hours in a large, dark, air-conditioned room.

These people find the Super Bowl more interesting than the Oscars, largely because they can see all the NFL playoff games leading up to the Super Bowl on television for free. I'm one of these people, and on Sunday night, rather than subject myself to the hypocrisy of Al Gore's acceptance speech/surprise 2008 Presidential campaign launch for An Inconvenient Truth sandwiched between SUV commercials, I'll actually watch a movie on TCM

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