I haven't watched the Oscars for a while now, because I see it as a pretentious snoozefest dedicated to blowing smoke up peoples' asses -- just like any awards show.

Also, WALL-E wasn't even nominated for Best Picture, something I will never forgive.

Incidentally, for extreme Oscar geekery: Empire did a comprehensive analysis of every best picture winner and whether it deserved it.

I was amused by the fact that the producer of the Hurt Locker got barred from the ceremony for trying to influence the Academy. If they had sensible rules about what sort of influence was and wasn't acceptable, and consistently barred everyone that broke them, they'd be doing the ceremony in a completely empty room...

You could have fooled me. In my school, at least, people wouldn't shut up about it.

Yeah, but the people in your school these days probably won't shut up about Twilight, and that doesn't mean the critical consensus is that Twilight is High Art for the ages :p

And to be fair, the Academy do seem to have had good taste this year with Best Picture as well. And if they've been similarly careful for the last 10 years or so then maybe Cracked are criticising a problem which has, in fact, already been recognised and dealt with.

I just said they'd mostly avoided *embarrassing* choices, but there is still the trend to give awards for lifetime achievement - and even the non-embarrassing choices are frequently ones that nobody could *really* have thought was the *best* film of the entire year. And just check out the acting categories!

The way the awards are decided is basically not especially conducive to making sane choices - there's a lot of pressure from studios (including studio employees harassing old academy members in hospitals and care homes) and a culture that favours conventional, middlebrow films and established actors/directors. They were geared up to award Avatar best picture this year until they realised this might make them a laughing stock.

@Kyra: Gosh, I had wondered why the series appeared to suddenly stop - especially since the second book came out hot on the heels of the first. I hope therapy works for him.

I think Forrest Gump is a bad example, because even at the time it wasn't very well-regarded.

You could have fooled me. In my school, at least, people wouldn't shut up about it.

And to be fair, the Academy do seem to have had good taste this year with Best Picture as well. And if they've been similarly careful for the last 10 years or so then maybe Cracked are criticising a problem which has, in fact, already been recognised and dealt with.

Awwww, Poor Scott Lynch :(

@ Arthur: I think Forrest Gump is a bad example, because even at the time it wasn't very well-regarded. I think it's sometimes clear even without hindsight when a film is basically a horrendous, sentimental piece of Hollywood tat. I don't think it's only with hindsight that people thought Forrest Gump was an awful choice for Best Picture.

Interestingly though, looking back at the last decade the Best Picture winners have mostly not been too embarrassing - I'd say only 3 embarrassing choices, as opposed to 5 or 6 in the 90s.

It would be if the point of the exercise was a crassly commercial celebration of all the films the studios want you to go and buy on DVD or Blu-ray (available now!).

So, in other words, the Oscars are never going to do it. But I reckon there's room for a film awards ceremony that does do it. (And to be fair, the National Film Registry in the states arguably does do precisely that.)

Am I missing the point here but would it be entirely stupid to have a time-delay on such awards? I mean, you can't really tell the cultural impact of something until, err, you've seen the cultural impact.

But this ignores the fact that the Academy aren't acting with the benefit of hindsight. I don't think anyone now would really say that Forrest Gump was more worthy of an Oscar than Pulp Fiction or even The Shawshank Redemption. But if you remember, at the time Forrest Gump was a big fucking deal.

You might argue that the Oscars are an irrelevance because they aren't able to rise above transient fads. But by that logic, no annual awards show has any relevance because none of them are immune to fads. Nobody could have said, back in 1994, that Forrest Gump's popularity was temporary where as Pulp Fiction's greatness would endure throughout the years - you need some distance to make that call.

The only way you can have an annual awards show which avoids this sort of thing is to have a ten-year time delay on it, so the awards show for 2010 honours the best releases of 2000.

To be fair, I don't think it's slamming the academey for not being able to predict what films will still be enjoying widesprad critical acclaim, I think it's criticising them for not *trying* to predict which films will have lasting critical acclaim. More specifically, I think it's making the specific criticism *that* the Oscars frequently fail to pick out the most significant films made in a year which is in support of its general theses that the Oscars are meaningless.

Yeah, I think the article's a bit weak in spots - mainly when it slams the Academy for not being able to predict what films will still be enjoying widespread critical acclaim after decades have passed. Annual award shows are inevitably going to reflect current fads and tastes, that's inevitable.

The practice of rewarding distinguished actors turning in unworthy performances in inferior films simply because they feel said actor is "due" an Oscar is risible though, and Cracked are quite right to point out how ludicrous it is.

Yep, good article, but I love Chariots of Fire so can't get behind point #4.

Cracked have a good article on precisely why the Oscars process is a huge joke.

I know Avatar probably deserved the Visual award, but I'm still kind of sad that Docto Parnassus didn't win. But that might just be my anti-Avatar bias talking.

I've still yet to see either film (and may never) but it seems the Academy still retains some vestiges of sanity.

"Still"? If we ignore Crash, Chicago, Forrest Gump, Driving Miss Daisy ... also just about every foreign picture result ever!

“Avatar” picks up three Academy Awards (Art Direction, Cinematography, and Visual Affects) but loses Best Picture and Directing to Kathryn Bigelow's “The Hurt Locker” (also Film Editing, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing).

I've still yet to see either film (and may never) but it seems the Academy still retains some vestiges of sanity.

(And now I think about it, I seem to remember there was a mild religious war in the adventure game community when Myst came out, and it seems that ever since then some people have considered any game with 3D graphics to not be a "true" adventure game. The adventure game community is weird.)

@Dan: Well, the genre seems to be going through a renaissance at the moment - thanks partly to great games like Phoenix Wright on the DS, partially down to some actually good games being developed by independent developers on the PC. From what I've read on adventure gaming forums most reasonable fans of the genre (as in the sort of people who don't praise a game simply because it's an adventure game) concede that the puzzle in question is a pretty horrible example of puzzle design. (Fans of the game in question object that the puzzle's an aberration and the rest of the game is much more sensible, but's right at the start of the thing so maybe if you'll play through that you'll play through anything.)

To be honest, I don't think adventure gaming ever died at all. The Roberta Williams quote at the beginning of this article is, to me, quite insightful: the genre's changed beyond recognition because technology has moved on and people have been able to add more features to their adventure games. If you're looking for classic point-and-click games then (except for the DS and indie releases) you're not going to get much.

On the other hand, I'd say that Silent Hill 2 and Project Zero have enormous adventure game sensibilities - you advance the plot by finding clues and solving puzzles, primarily. Yes, there's some action segments to them, but that's not really the point. There's this curious ideology amongst adventure game fans - and I remember it was also there back at the height of the genre, when I was as big a fan as any - where they're convinced that any action element at all immediately takes a game out of the adventure game category. Which is like saying that as soon as a game lets you fire a gun you're playing a FPS.

RPatz as Salvador Dali?. I feel really bad because I sniggered all the way through the trailer simply because it's Robert Pattinson. But still ... Dali and Lorca gaying it up, is that sound like a thousand beating wings the flutter of fangirl hearts? And is it overwhelmed by the shrieks of horror from the We Heart Not At All Gay Edward brigade!

I know this is rather late in coming, but I just watched Little Ashes, and it was actually quite good! I found it engaging and interesting, and RPattz did a good job. His Spanish accent wasn't totally spot on, and it was a bit obvious given that the actor playing Lorca is Spanish and his accent was natural. But I didn't spend the whole movie giggling that Edward Cullen was kissing some Spanish dude; he brought the character to life for me so that's praiseworthy, I think.

Anyway, I liked it. I'd like to hear what others who've seen it thought. ^_^

Oh also:

Possibly even more illuminating than the Gilbert article is the one it references, which gives a breakdown of the "last true adventure game" according to enthusiasts.

In this game you are required to disguise yourself as a man named Mosley in order to rent a motorcycle. In order to do this you must use a false mustache. But because Mosely does not *have* a mustache you must draw a false mustache on his passport with a marker pen.

I shit you not, this is what the srs adventure gamers were all raving about.

The video falls flat for me because Modern Warfare 2 is vastly less realistic than its predecessor. Or maybe that's the joke?

I might be wrong, but would I be a million miles away if I suggested that the reduction in realism might have drawn criticism from people who think that they want a TOTALLY REALISTIC WAR SIMULATION which would actually (as the video points out) essentially boil down to 91% mind numbing boredom, 8% shitting yourself panic and 1% getting killed by things you had no hope of even seeing coming.

Or maybe Grant Morrison will be a schoolgirl whose homework starts out being dazzlingly original and offbeat but nonetheless making a sort of intuitive sense but as it goes on it starts becoming more and more self-indulgent and solipsistic until it collapses into utter masturbatory incoherence.

Meanwhile, Warren Ellis is the main writer on the school newspaper. And has serious anger issues.