..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

7 WEEKS TO GO
It's The Movies, Stupid

It's not over yet. The Oscars themselves will be a big prize for someone this year. But the real get right now is the nomination. And, ironically, in all the endlessly increasing hype around the awards season (USA Today kicked off their blog, written by their two very bright young reporters, Bowles & Breznican, yesterday), every time a new answer arrives, it seems to scream, "Na-na na na-na-na… we really aren't paying attention to you!"

What's most fascinating to me is the panic it creates in various journalists, who are now exposing their fear in more and more informal media settings. In this atmosphere, David Carr has quickly become the Dean Martin of Oscar writers, blogging with a carefree disinterest in restraining word count and commenting on any little thing that amuses him. Tom O'Neil has become the Joey Bishop of the group. Anne Thompson is the Shirley MacLaine, part of the club, but not always approving of all the boy behavior. Pete Hammond is the Sammy Davis, Jr., tap dancing faster than anyone else. Scott Bowles is the Peter Lawford, slumming with the Oscar obsessives before going back to life as a Kennedy. Jeff Wells is like Bing Crosby doing a cameo in Robin & The Seven Hoods, hanging out with those kids all the time. Roger Friedman, the fat Angie Dickinson, promiscuous to a fault and sure to be forgotten in time. And that beats the analogy to death…

But the more times the media is told it's wrong, the more intransigent we seem to get about our positions. But only one vote really matters.

Two weeks ago, Capote was "out," behind King Kong. Match Point, and History of Violence. A few guild nominations and Capote is competing for the win and Match Point is dead with Kong monkeyed out of the race.

But what actually changed? Nothing. All that happened is a small percentage of the community was polled. And they found certain answers. We have no idea how close other movies were, how strong the nominees were in vote count, etc. We are still guessing.

And the lesson about the internet should reverberate through the halls of the Old Media outlets. It's simple. If people like reading David Carr, how right or wrong he is in reporting perception will be irrelevant. If a person has fun on the Oscarwatch boards, talking Oscar, they will go there and hang out and "right" and "wrong" is not really important. Even Crazy Jeffrey Wells earns what he gets by appealing to an audience that responds to his obsessive diatribes, pro and con… if he drives you nuts, it means you are reading him and as on TV, that "rating" is all that counts.

It's not that none of us are ever right about reading the temperature. Pete Hammond plugged into a Crash wave coming right before it happened. But he also thought The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada was going to be a surefire Best Picture candidate. We all have those moments. To be frank, one mistaken comment about a certain movie with a mask last year, which I stuck with for just two weeks of 20 Weeks To Oscar continues to get thrown in my face so often that I have to start seeing it as a compliment. It can be frustrating when it overshadows all of my very early and accurate calls last year. But I was hardly alone on Million Dollar Baby once people saw it or on Sideways after Toronto. So the one thing that sticks out for people is Phantom. But week in and week out, I have ideas and feelings that I share with you and you keep coming back to watch me guess Hollywood's weight.

This season, the ferocity has been heightened by the perfect storm of more people in the Oscar writing pool, more kinds of writers, and a season where there is no true frontrunner, no true two-film showdown (though the media creation of those showdowns often become true with enough hype and there are a few of us who are still pushing that agenda), and no sure answers about who will be crying come 6am, January 31.

What we do know is that any prediction we make in Best Picture within these 8 is better than 50/50 to make it. We know that The Constant Gardener, A History of Violence, Match Point, and yes, Munich, are fighting an uphill battle. But we also know that any one of our favorites (of course, we aren't playing favorites, right?) could fall out.

And so, drama every day. This one is a lock… that one is a lock… winning is a lock… this one is dead… this one must be killed… everyone thinks this… everyone know that…

But the truth is, it is a horse race. And there is no Secretariat this year. We in the media and those in the guilds and critics groups have narrowed the field. Only 7 or 8 are getting to go to the gates. But once the bell goes off, the odds are set, and it's up to the movies, anything can happen.

So why does that piss so many people off?

This Week's Oscar Charts
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2004 Oscar Columns

- Email David Poland