5 Reasons The Oscars Matter Even Less Than You Thought

5 The Circle of Ineptitude: Best Actor (1974, 1992, 2001)

In 1974, Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson were in their prime, and turned in two of the most iconic performances in the history of American cinema--Nicholson as J.J. Gittes in Chinatown, Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II. That year's Best Actor Academy Award was the acting equivalent of Magic versus Bird in the '84 NBA Finals.

But your prime isn't necessarily a good place to be in the eyes of the Academy. No matter what it says on the statue, most Oscars are at least partially lifetime achievement awards that factor in things like how "due" you are, and how likely you are to die before ever getting nominated again.

Of course, anyone who's gambled on little league baseball or participated in a record breaking gang bang can tell you, trying to give everyone a turn only penalizes the people with talent. The Academy proved this point by giving Best Actor to Art Carney for playing an old fart on a cross country trip with his cat in a movie called Harry and Tonto. This is the acting equivalent of the NBA giving the'84 MVP to Kurt Rambis.

Now we wouldn't begrudge an old man his moment of recognition if the Academy didn't operate in something we'll call "The Circle of Ineptitude."

See, skipping Pacino in 1974 meant that come 1992, he was "due." So 18 years after the initial screw up, the Academy gave Pacino the Oscar for doing a Yosemite Sam impression in Scent of a Woman. This, in turn screwed over Denzel Washington for Malcolm X, who then had to be given a make-up Oscar in 2001 for his role in Training Day that's mostly memorable for the Chappelle Show sketch it inspired.

This raises the important question: Who gives a shit? Why should we feel sorry for Al Pacino? The problem is that as little as they should matter, the actors, writers and directors who make our movies live and die with each Academy decision. It's why Pacino has shouted every line of dialog since 1992 in an inexplicable Cajun accent.

4 Genre Snobbery: Best Picture 1981, Best Actress 1986

Everyone remembers the slick bit of larceny that opens Raiders of the Lost Arkwhere Indy leaves a bag of sand on a podium and yoinks a golden statue. That year at the Academy Awards, Chariots of Fire pulled the same trick, snaking the statue out from under Spielberg. This is a good example of the genre snobbery that makes phrases like "Oscar Bait" even possible. All anyone really remembers from Chariots of Fire is the scene where a bunch of dudes in John Stockton shorts sprint along the edge of a beach. If that's all it takes to win an Oscar, where's the Best Picture for Rocky III? If it can't even legitimately win the Oscar in the category "Best Homoerotic Coastal Track Meet," how the hell does it end up winning Best Picture over what is arguably the finest example of pure cinema Spielberg ever created?

A little bit more of that genre snobbery, mixed with some patronizing grandstanding to look "understanding": Marlee Matlin turned in a good performance as a feisty deaf janitor who gets boned by William Hurt in Children of a Lesser God, but what Sigourney Weaver did with James Cameron's ALIENS is nothing short of a miracle. Think about what Ripley was on the page after Cameron was done with her: A strange riff on Rambo (which he'd just rewritten) as a repentant mother looking to redeem herself as a parent. He stuck this characterization into the middle of a movie about drooling, fanged penis monsters that shit eggs with face-raping catchers mitts inside of them. And Weaver made it one of the single most influential performances in the last 25 years, obliterating the restrictions on what a woman can do in a movie, and paving the way for characters like Sarah Connor, Buffy Summers and Beatrix Kiddo.

3 Anti-Balls Bias: Best Picture (1981, 1990, 1994, 1998) Best Actress (2000)

There seems to be an unwritten rule in the Academy: "The statue we're giving out doesn't have any balls; neither should the movie we give it to." Since the most interesting filmmakers of the past 30 years have mostly been interested in America's obsession with violence, this made for some pretty unforgivable bullshit.

In 1990, the Academy rewarded a boring love letter to the Noble Savage fallacy, Dances With Wolves, snubbing Goodfellas. Consider the legacy of those two films: Name a director worth a crap in the past 20 years, and they'll cite Goodfellas as a major influence. It's arguably the finest mob movie ever filmed. The only time Wolves is mentioned these days is to point out where Cameron ripped off the story for Avatar.

If Goodfellas isn't the most influential film of the past 25 years, it's a close second behind Pulp Fiction. Tarantino didn't just deconstruct the way people thought about filmmaking, he obliterated it in a coke-fueled fury, stabbing convention in the chest with a giant needle, rebuilding the noir as a candy coated cyanide pill cut with cayenne pepper, attached to a ball-gag and fitted to your unsuspecting head.

Of course, Pulp Fiction came out the same year as Shawshank Redemption, regarded by iMBD users and whoever programs TNT as the greatest film ever made. Pretty good year for movies, yet neither won Best Picture in 2004--that went to Bob Zemeckis's Forrest Gump. We suppose Gump was edgy in its own right, seeing as it was a revisionist history in which a retarded descendent of the Ku Klux Klan is given credit for everything good that happened in the 20th century. Gump was a pretty enjoyable film at the time, and hasn't aged quite as badly as Wolves. But Pulp Fiction changed the way people made movies for an entire decade. Forrest Gump changed the way people said the name Jenny for a couple of years.

By the year 2000, Julia Roberts made a lot of people a lot of money in Hollywood, without ever winning Best Actress, most likely because she's not that fucking good. The film she was in, Erin Brockovich was like cutting the crusts off Silkwood, shoving it in an Easy-Bake Oven and setting the dial to "feel-good." Her main competition, Ellen Burstyn, already won her statue back in the 70's for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, so it was safe to snub her portrayal of Sara Golfarb in Requiem for a Dream. Didn't matter that Burstyn turned in the performance of her fucking life: Not only was Roberts "due," but Requiem was about ugly people, doing gross things, not pretty people in halter-tops smiling like someone shoved a carrot up Mr. Ed's ass.

2 The Academy Hates Political Relevance: Best Picture (1989, 2005)

Accusing the Academy of making decisions for political reasons isn't necessarily a critique. Movies are cultural events. If the zeitgeist makes an "issue movie" more relevant, there's no reason that shouldn't be factored into the equation. The problem is how bad the Academy tends to fuck up the math.

Do The Right Thing is generally considered one of the most potent American films about race. It's one of only five movies ever to be selected by the United States Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry during its first year of eligibility.

The film's climactic race riot came three years before the entire city of Los Angeles followed suit. At the time of its release, Spike Lee's film was a wakeup call. Sure, racism still existed in 80s movies, but only as a setup for snappy one liners from the darker half of a buddy cop duo.

The Academy's choice for Best Picture in 1989 was Driving Miss Daisy, an ode to the quiet dignity of a black servant (Morgan Freeman) who spends the majority of his life eating the shit talked by a wrinkled sack of racism in a sundress. Daisy was 48 Hours for the art house set-which meant the film has less pulse than a bowl of oatmeal. Daisy got the award for being a palatable examination of race, an issue that was on people's minds that year. It just happened to be on people's minds because Do The Right Thing, which wasn't even nominated, had sounded the alarm.

Proving that the Circle of Ineptitude can extend to issues as well as actors, in 2005 the Academy's Best Picture winner Crash was a ridiculous fairy tale about race relations in Los Angeles that most people had already forgotten by the time the Oscars rolled around. Two far better and more politically relevant movies, Brokeback Mountain and Capote, were both overlooked, presumably for splitting the pro-homo vote.

1 The Academy Loves Irrelevant Studio Politics: Best Picture (1998, 1942)

With their track record of fuck-uppery, you'd think Hollywood would take the Oscars with a grain of salt. When the barometer for artistic success in your industry doesn't even really care if you're all that good at what you do, then why should you? If you took such an innocent attitude into an Oscar race against the Weinsteins, you'd wake up the morning of the Oscars wearing a necklace made from the teeth of the Chinese dignitary whose murder they'd framed you for.

Throughout the 90s, Miramax's entire business plan was built around creating films specifically tailored to the Academy's delicate sensibilities, banking on the added exposure a win would bring. This plan was put to the test in 1998, when Miramax's Shakespeare in Love was nominated alongside Saving Private Ryan, which spent the summer making every war film that had ever won an Oscar look like a high school play. It was a foregone conclusion Saving Private Ryan would win. And then the campaign started.

The month leading up to the Academy Awards are like an especially petty high school election, if high school students had access to the money cannon that made Transformers 2 possible. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, "Miramax spent an estimated $16 million (about $2,700 for each academy member) on its Shakespeare (in Love) campaign." Miramax also leaned on journalists to criticize Private Ryan for being historically inaccurate, a ballsy maneuver when you consider that Ryan's storming of Normandy made veterans of that battle shit their theater seats, and Miramax's film turned Shakespeare's creative process into a gender bending romantic comedy.

Didn't matter. On the night of the Awards, Shakespeare in Love shocked everyone by winning Best Picture award out from under the Citizen Kane of modern war films.

Which brings us to the Citizen Kane of all films: Citizen Kane. Anyone who cares a little too much about movies swears Orson Wells's 1942 film is the best thing ever projected onto a silver screen. And it's not like people didn't realize it at the time: It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, and was widely expected to win most if not all of them. Then William Randolph Hearst, the publishing giant whose life Kane is loosely based on, started a smear campaign that focused on director Orson Wells's contempt for Hollywood. On the night of the Awards, the audience of Academy members actually booed every time Wells's name was mentioned. The most influential film of all time lost Best Picture to How Green Was My Valley, a film that archeological records indicate nobody gave a shit about even then.

The passage of time reveals a movie's true quality, not the number of gold statues it won. Citizen Kane didn't win the Best Picture, neither did Raging Bull, or Dr. Strangelove, or Rear Window or Star Wars. Keep that in mind while you're watching the circus, and you'll have a better time all around.

For more on the Academy Awards, check out 5 Great Careers Destroyed By The Post-Oscar Curse and 6 Cheap Acting Tricks That Fool The Critics Every Time.

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