It's The Oscars!

So, here it is again. The Oscars. And were they predictable this year? You betcha.

Helen Mirren winning Best Actress - could have put money on that, same with Forest Whitaker taking Best Actor. The Supporting categories were a little harder to place, though how stpid do three judges of American Idol feel after Jennifer Hudson won, huh?

No, where I was surprised was in the Best Director and Best Film categories. Sure, Scorcese's Oscar was long overdue but I felt that Paul Greengrass' incredible United 93 would get the nod. In fact, I was a little puzzled as to why the latter was not up for Best Film either. Could it be that Hollywood is beginning to get tired of films to do with 9/11? Has Michael Moore bored the whole of America with his rantings?

Sod's law says that Scorcese doesn't win another award now until his honary one, which will no doubt be handed to him in the next decade. Perhaps this is a LOTR award. What I mean by that is that no awards were given to Lord Of The Rings until the final film came out - a sort of ultimate recognition for the work done. Perhaps this is how the Academy feels about Scorcese, though heaven forbid he should stop making films.

So that's it for another year. Now we've got the summer to look forward to really for the next big movies, the ones which will not stand a chance of being nominated because they are Summer Blockbusters and nobody nominates these films for an awards other than sound and visual effects and animated feature and what not. Still, it would be pretty cool to see The Simpsons Movie up for Best Film - oh no, wait - they changed the rules, didn't they? It would only be able to win Best Animated Film, just like Pan's Labyrinth was only able to be up for Best Foreign Film, which it undeservedly lost. Thought I'd just put that rant in to keep Kermode happy.

What I was pleased to see was that Babel or Babble as the Americans pronounce it only won one award. Good, because the less pretentious nonsense that is made just to win awards the better. The same happens with literature and the Booker Prize over here. I am a strong believer in the idea of "story for story's sake", but every so ofetn you read a book so utterly pretentious, so mind-mubingly boring, that you just know it's been written just to win some fancy pants award. That is not what good entertainment is at all, and taht's why we watch movies and read books, isn't it? For entertainment.