Sunday night marks the 80th Academy Awards ceremony. Though if the Oscars were as cool as the Super Bowl, they would use Roman numerals and call it Academy Awards LXXX.
It's natural to compare Academy Awards night to the Super Bowl. Natural, but wrong in one fundamental way. They're both over-hyped events, but at least NFL teams have to fight their way to the big game. And at the end of the night there's one undisputed champ.
The Oscars have more in common with the BCS. It's all a popularity contest, and you get voted in by people who may or may not know a damn thing about what's going on. And just as some jerks will complain that an undefeated Hawaii team should have a shot at the national title, you'll have yahoos complaining that Kevin James was snubbed for his understated subtlety in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.
I know the Oscar telecast will still draw in one of the biggest TV audiences of the year. But it seems to me like every year the Oscars seem less and less like a big deal. It's still the Big Game in awards ceremonies, but it's starting to feel more like a Thursday night NFL Network game between Detroit and Arizona.
Though I do love that a dopey movie like Transformers is up for three honors. Movie buffs around the world will tune in to find out if Michael Bay's ode to shiny switcheroo machines will bring home the gold for "Best Achievement in Sound," "Best Achievement in Sound Editing" (uh, could someone explain the difference of those two for me?) or "Best Achievement in Visual Effects."
You know how when winners ramble on too long during their acceptance speech the orchestra will start playing "get off the stage" music until the hint is taken? I think to combat the yakheads this year, the Oscar statues should be rigged to transform into mini Megatron death ray devices. Yeah! Eat a plasma bolt, Cate Blanchett!
Here's the Oscar category I hate: Best Costume.
I've noticed this award almost always goes to movies with historical costume. Now I don't design clothes or try on cocktail dresses (anymore), but I'm thinking, wouldn't it be harder to design clothes that people might be interested in wearing in the real world once they leave the theater than it is to design clothes for what people wore during some English monarch's heyday?
I would think historical dramas have to be the easiest movies to design costumes for. Say you're hired to design the threads for a flick that takes place on board the Titanic. So you find a book about the Titanic, you open the book, look at the pictures of what the people wore back then, and then sew costumes that look exactly like that.
Basically all you did was make sure none of the characters are walking around in NBA throwback jerseys. Does that strike you as something they should hand out awards for?
If you're still reading by this paragraph, you've probably guessed my point in writing all this: Gosh, I'm jealous that I never got to be a movie critic.
Oh, I'm sure I could start my own personal little movie blog to rhapsodize about a masterpiece like No Country For Old Men. And then I could type about how the latest Matthew McConaughey flop made me want to claw my eyes out with toenail clippers.
The main reason I get to be Oscar Madison instead of Jay Sherman is supply and demand. Readers devour sports news and commentary to such a degree that I'm even getting paid to add kindling to the fire.
Newspapers and magazines are shedding off film critics faster than Bobby Petrino scans the want ads. You'll know we're down to the last film critic in America when everything reviewed on rottentomatoes.com has either a 100 percent fresh or 0 percent rotten rating.
The movie critic game has pretty much run its course. It became intellectual in the '70s, Siskel and Ebert brought it into living rooms in the '80s, but now the only way America recognizes a good movie is if it wins the weekend box office.
Now movie critics are the out-of-touch eggheads that everyone ignores. The product they deliver -- introspective commentary about serious filmmaking -- no longer corresponds to the product Hollywood is turning out.
Look at the list of top grossing box office hits of 2007 (courtesy of boxofficemojo.com -- I study these stats almost as much as I study Fantasy football stats). You don't find a serious drama on the list until American Gangster at No. 18. When movie audiences want the same brainless sequels year in and year out, it's impossible to provide food for thought.
Here's one certain way that sports writing is better than movie reviewing: If a movie critic falls asleep during a movie and misses the ending, he's screwed beyond belief. If a sports writer falls asleep at a game, that's OK, he'll wake up when the crowd cheers on a great play. And he can always ask the players and coaches about it in the locker room afterward.
Also: Sports writers tell their opinion about an event that the reader also likely experienced. All participants are on the same wavelength. Movie critics have to tell about something the reader hasn't seen. But the critic can't give away the ending or any of the surprises or the readers will get so pissed they'll ask for the critic to be fired.
So critics have to learn how to tip-toe. A sports writer who tip-toes is not going to be a sports writer long. Opinions have to be forceful and direct, and when in doubt they can scream for the coach to be fired.
Maybe as more films gravitate toward the Web, I'll become a YouTube critic. I can start by comparing videos of white guys who play acoustic versions of hip hop songs, like Humpty Dance and Hey Ya.
And speaking of Humpty Dance, I nominate this video for Best Clip of the Year. If you went to high school in the early '90s and now have kids who spend five hours a day watching Playhouse Disney, I'm sure you'll agree.
So I'm sorry, movie critics, but it's time to move over. You're second-class citizens to sports writers. Just as movies have become second-class entertainment to sports. Seriously, it's only now that the NFL season is over that I have time to watch any of the DVDs I got for Christmas. And most of those DVDs are of the movies I did get to see during the year, so I already know how they end.
I'd tell the last movie critic who leaves the theater to turn the lights out, but it already is dark at the movie theater. So just do me a favor and let me know next week if Will Ferrell's Semi-Pro wins the weekend box office.
