And the Oscar for Pretentiousness Goes to....

Way back in the early days of the internet, I used to maintain an unvisited outpost of self-indulgence. A lot like...no...exactly like this blog (hence the reason the original site and the blog share the same name). One game I used to play purely for my own enjoyment was selection of personally sanctioned movie awards. The only qualification for consideration for my prestigious awards was that the film had to make a minimum of 100 million dollars. My motivation in doing this was that I found the Oscars to be less and less representative of reality. I also found them less and less watchable but that is another story. It seemed that as the movie industry began to loss that aura of exclusivity and superiority, the individuals responsible for the Oscars felt they needed to try harder and harder to separate themselves from the rabble. To distinguish themselves. To justify their existence. To establish that they maintain some singular skill and knowledge that the proletariat do not possess. The only way to do this of course is to summarily dismiss any movie that garners popular acclaim in favor of monotonous, ponderous, navel-gazing art house fare that rarely plays outside of L.A. multiplexes. Where once the Oscars honored true classics that are still beloved and watched today, the present day Oscars select movies that were never actually viewed by people who weren't paid to do so and are forgotten to time immortal as soon as the poorly watched telecast ends. Pollack, Atonement, Babel. These aren't good movies. Under any circumstance. They're not even watchable. And the grand tradition continues this year. Despite incredibly popular pieces of art like WALL-E and Dark Knight, we get nominations for Milk and The Reader. Sure, popularity does not equal quality - Twilight and Harry Potter any one - but if a piece of celluloid is really supposed to represent the best work from a period of 365 days, shouldn't someone actually be willing to watch it? As a final proof of how bad this year's nominees are, I give you the following video. The largest moneymaker of all the nominees isn't even original. It is a puffed up, padded, and pompous rip off of a much better movie. The Raspberry Awards have more relevance now a days than the Oscars.

On a side note, given the lobbying, pandering, and slandering that goes into a successful Oscar campaign, you almost have to wonder if this video is the product of the makers of Gran Torino or something.

This blog post is sponsored by Binford Tools.