My Oscar Pics

Tomorrow the Oscars will be held. I, frankly, could give a flying rip.

Oooh, Katherine Bigalow was married to James Cameron - it's Hurt Locker vs Avatar! Who will win?!

Someone is wearing a new dress! It looks great, no it looks terrible?

It took me a while, but I finally figured out what a prick waving sparkle fest the Oscars are. It's a showcase for what the industry that makes the films pretend which one was the most important. And with the addition of 5 more Best Picture nominations - what's important is Television ratings.

The Grammys figured out that television ratings were more important than musical excellence decades ago. If you disagree, please be sure to explain to me in the comments why Milli Vanilli won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist on 22 February 1990 for Girl You Know It's True? Feel free to also include your work. For bonus points please explain what, precisely, what tilted the voting for Taylor Swift to have the Album of Year, 2009. Was it her technique, the producing, the brilliance of her original songwriting? Again, please show your work. I'll show mine - the Nielson Ratings for the Grammy Awards program this year was up!

The 52nd Annual GRAMMY Awards posted the highest ratings for Music's Biggest Night since 2004 with an average audience of 25.8 million viewers, up 35 percent from last year's telecast, and marked increases across key demographics, according to preliminary ratings results from Nielsen. Compared to last year's telecast, the GRAMMYs posted a 36 percent increase in adults 25–54, and a 32 percent increase in both adults 18–34 and 18–49. (2/1)

My source? From the Grammy Website! What was it Taylor Swift brought the music industry? Oh, yeah, key demographic boosts and a raise in the advertising space price for CBS and the Grammy Telecast.

And that's just the Grammys. The Oscars have been marginalized and diluted with years of Best of Lists, and Golden Globes among a host of other red carpet - let's get a close up of Jack Nickelson wearing sunglasses - events. In the past, the Oscars was the premier exhibit for marketers to showcase the depressing films that wouldn't ordinarily get press, it has been a chance for jewlery makers and fabric slingers to dress their wears on famous faces -- rather than the usual coked out coat-rack shaped models of the Paris runways, and let's not forget the gambling.

Where else will you get to see a washed up hack tell jokes or tapdance for four hours in between professional actors failing to read a teleprompter with watered down jokes? The screaching of 'Up With People' to dance interpretations of Shindler's List, to the montage of dead writers and actors - highlighted with applause when the audience recognizes that the person -- or realizes that the individual has in fact slipped the mortal coil, and the project they were working on is probably now canceled? What was once special is now only the bookend of the gossip and politicking for the Industry. Immediately following, the next year starts up.

And then, if we really want to talk about excellence in filmmaking - why didn't Stanley Kubrick ever get one? How many does Hitchcock have? Well, technically 2, although Rebecca was the only one of his films to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, four others were nominated, but he never won an Academy Award for Best Director. He was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in 1967 -- which is the classic Oscar "Oh-oh, we better give an award to this guy before he a) dies b) blows our cover on this whole phony-baloney award show."

And to really highlight the fact that this award isn't about excellence - Peter O'Toole, Johnny Depp, Carry Grant, Ed Norton and Jeff Bridges don't have a gold statue on their mantles. Yes, Virginia, the Oscars are a sham!

So, I think I'll be sitting this one out. But Hurt Locker will win Best Picture because there was a 60 Minutes segment on it last week.