The unbearable predictability of Oscar season

I wonder if I’m the only moviegoer who was suffering from Oscar fatigue even before the Academy Awards nominations were announced yesterday morning. After the Golden Globes, the People’s Choice awards, the critics’ awards and the guild nominations, any savvy handicapper could have boiled down the information and come up with a list of 95 per cent of the nominees in the major categories. The sheer amount of data is suggested by the ads for “Million Dollar Baby,” which boast of the movie’s being on the top-10 lists of 200 critics. That’s an exhausting number to contemplate, and it suggests that the Academy Awards are becoming as overrun with statistical calculation as baseball…

Like it or not, endless, repetitive Oscar prognostication is essential business for the ravenous entertainment media that feed off the Academy Awards 4 out of 12 months each year. That’s why the red carpet was invented. Fashion fills the void. For actual surprises, the prognosticators will have to make do between now and Feb. 27 when the awards are announced with scattered tidbits of controversy, most of which will have been digested by the time you read these words…

One thing for which I’m thankful is that the exclusion of both “The Passion of the Christ” and “Fahrenheit 9/11” for best picture nominations spares us the stale red state-blue state cliches.

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But if you take a step back, certain long-term trends are discernible in the nominations. The gap between Hollywood studios and what remains of the independent film movement continues…

The most encouraging sign to me that the nominations maintain a reasonable relationship to overall quality is the increasingly high level of acting. This year there were so many candidates for best actor that the limitation to five nominees shut out worthy contenders.

Excerpted from the Critic’s Notebook by Stephen Holden in the New York Times, January 26