We're hours away from the pinnacle of the 2012 Awards Season, and I'll make no bones about being excited -- perpetually, inextricably -- by the Academy Awards. It's the Super Bowl with sequined dresses, a monster truck rally with orchestral interludes. It's every good reason to scream at the TV with friends over arbitrary and meaningless decisions. Like a NASCAR race, I'm half in it for the crashes, like (well) seeing Crash expose the cowardliness and self-satisfaction of the Academy voters who favored that tripe over Brokeback Mountain and Munich (let alone the not-even-nominated A History of Violence).
I don't have any particularly strong feelings about the Oscar contenders this time around, other than a suspicion that Argo will emerge as this year's "safe" choice (by engaging Middle Eastern politics and terrorism without all the baggage of Zero Dark Thirty) -- that is, unless Silver Linings Playbook takes the cake in the same lighthearted spirit that gave the Oscar to Shakespeare in Love over The Thin Red Line and other headier historical dramas. I do have more to say about whether awards shows such as this, and indeed the entire critical establishment we still rely upon to single out "quality" artworks amongst the rabble, still play a useful role in the era of internet anarchy, where anyone with an internet connection can bypass the cultural gatekeepers of the Analog Age to find an audience. For the time being, however, I have something far more modest in mind.
