The Oscars were last night and those of you who know me (I say that a lot) know how huge of a fan of the cinema I am. So it might surprise you to hear that I barely watched the Academy Award telecast last night. Maybe 15 minutes. Naturally, I checked the MSN liveblog after the thing was over and I read a few reviews. As you might imagine, it was nearly-universally agreed that the entire show was an awful bore. It’s a frustrating paradox that so many fantastic films can be released every year just for the industry’s annual award show to be little more than smarmy, self-interested pats on the back between soulless and bored millionaires.

Even still, I almost always watch the Oscars, but this year I just couldn’t be bothered. Leora and I turned it on an hour after it started, watched a couple of the weird documentary awards or whatever, and then moved into the bedroom to unwind after a long day. Our weird “backup” TV in our room wouldn’t tune in the channel the Oscars were playing on. Leora asked me if I wanted to go back into the living room to continue watching, and I said “nah”. That might be due to this year’s award winners nearly all being slam dunks. No drama, no upsets, no point in watching.

The very first blog post I made on the Schadendude (if I recall) was a short little blurb about how the Academy increased the Best Picture nominations from 5 to 10 for this year’s program. If they thought that doing so would also increase the chances of the winner being a mystery, they were way off. As it was in the days of 5 nominations, this year there were only two movies with a real chance of winning – Avatar and The Hurt Locker. Thanks to being the movie with the latest buzz or Oscar “push”, The Hurt Locker won Best Picture last night. I haven’t seen the movie and I’m really not interested. I’ll tell you who HAS seen it, though – a lot of Iraq War veterans who, almost down to the last man, say that the so-called “hyper-realistic” war movie is laughably unrealistic in several vital spots. But it won Best Picture anyway. Huh.

Not to say that I necessarily thought Avatar deserved Best Picture either. Yes, the visual effects were the best I’ve ever seen, and it won that category, as it deserved to. But a film isn’t supposed to be all about eye candy. You can gussy up a movie with pretty landscapes and thrilling fight scenes all you want, but if the story isn’t up to par, there’s no way it should be considered for Best Picture (*ahem* Transformers 2 *ahem*). To be clear, Avatar is a billion times better than anything Michael Bay has ever touched, but when I’m watching a movie and can see plot points directly lifted from Ferngully, The Secret of NIMH, Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and The Last Samurai, and I’m not even TRYING to notice the DIRECT similarities, that’s a problem. Great movie, but not Best Picture.

So who should have won? Well as far as I’m concerned, I was all for a couple of the nominees who didn’t have a prayer. Most glaringly, District 9, which was spectacular, (especially considering that both the lead actor and director were working on their very first feature film) had zero chance of winning. I don’t get as much chance to get out and watch movies as I used to, but I saw most of the big ones last year – Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Star Trek, Avatar – and I probably enjoyed District 9 more than any of them. But let’s be honest – if the Academy hadn’t increased the nominations from 5 to 10, District 9 would clearly have been shut out. It’s almost more insulting that it WAS nominated because it’s pretty obvious that the Academy put it up as a pity nomination to try to change their image of only nominating dour and depressing dramas. That’s also why Up was nominated, another great movie that had no chance of winning.

My other favorite of the year was Up in the Air, which had early buzz pushing it to the top. Unfortunately, that fizzled out a couple months ago, to the point where it was completely shut out of its nominated categories. I would have been hard pressed to decide between District 9 and Up in the Air if I had a vote, but I think I would have ultimately gone with Up in the Air. I think its story was phenomenal and one for our present reality – an independent contractor who travels all over the country and fires people for a living, hired by managers hit hard by the recession who don’t have the guts to do it themselves. Who can’t relate to that these days? In what was literally the ONLY real surprise of the evening, Up in the Air lost Best Adapted Screenplay to Precious (another movie I have no interest in seeing). So it won nothing, evidently due to rich, white Academy voters experiencing pangs of white guilt and voting for the movie with the big, fat black girl who regularly gets the sh*t kicked out of her by her crazy mom. Yeah, that sounds like a GREAT time at the movies. And the only Oscar that Up in the Air had a realistic chance of winning goes…well…up in the air.

I was pleased that Jeff Bridges won Best Actor for Crazy Heart, which means Flynn from Tron and The Dude is now an Academy Award winner. Way overdue there. And Sandra Bullock won Best Actress, which makes her the first person ever to win a Razzie for WORST Actress (All About Steve) and the Oscar for BEST Actress (The Blind Side) in the same year. Weird!

But when it all comes down to it, I can’t get too annoyed by it all. To be honest, the Oscars are more about politics and Hollywood execs scratching the backs of the voters than they are about what movies really deserve to win the awards. When a movie portrays itself as showing a realistic view of the War in Iraq and veterans of said war say that it contains a myriad of glaring mistakes, should it still win Best Picture? Well, it did, so what does that tell you? When the obvious runner-up has a copycat plot that contains elements of at LEAST a half-dozen prominent feature films and barely has an ounce of originality, should it still win Best Picture? Well, it almost did, so what does THAT tell you?

I read a piece online yesterday by a guy who was a Corporal and served a 2-year stint in Iraq up until a couple years ago. He specifically listed 4 or 5 different instances in The Hurt Locker where a military character or group of characters did something that would NEVER happen in a real combat situation, either because it was monstrously stupid, expressly forbidden by regulations, or both. The interesting thing about the piece (besides outing The Hurt Locker for being unrealistic, counter to its claims of being “hyper-realistic”) was its tone. The author wasn’t being funny or smarmy or sarcastic. He was angry, angry at Hollywood for badly botching a real situation and misrepresenting contemporary war. Don’t get me wrong. I’m really happy for Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman ever to win a Best Director Oscar for her work in The Hurt Locker. Talk about an overdue achievement. But the fact that she won for what has been outed as a wildly imperfect film is a little oft-putting.

The troubling thing about all of this is that this either shows the declining quality of cinema or the declining relevance of the Oscars. When the Best Picture is a war movie that gets the “war” part wrong and the runner-up borrows nearly its entire plot from other movies, does that mean that movies are getting worse? Or is the Academy now so overrun by company hacks and self-involved executives that they wouldn’t know a good movie from a bad batch of caviar? Considering the fantastic movies that just didn’t have the political clout to come out winners last night, I’ll go with the latter.