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

Access

The lessons of 2005 are, frankly, few and far between. But something that has really been hammered home as the Oscar season seeped further into our veins this fall was the ever-evolving status of the Oscarwatching contingent.

The film awards season and the Oscar ceremony have always carried an aura of excitement and anticipation around them. And like anything that is anticipated, a certain element of expectation is to be, well, expected. And with expectation comes the inevitable desire to "know" the outcome - hence the practice of predictions.

There has been a community of individuals embroiled in this world of Oscar prognostication for many years. Of course, the trades have cast their every expectant eye for a long time, while publications, most notably Entertainment Weekly, have consistently offered up their analysis once the season gets under way each year. But the practice of year-round coverage is an entirely different arena.

Sasha Stone has been doing it better and more consistently than anyone else for years over at Oscarwatch.com. Tom O'Neil's year-round awards-watching faction Gold Derby (focusing on other ceremonies such as the Emmys, the Tonys and the Grammys in addition to the Oscars) was there before her, but Sasha has kept the even, objective keel that few have maintained. As a result, she has established the mold that so many have employed as this community has grown drastically over the past five or six years.

Here at Movie City News, David Poland has been pounding away for three years, while the Los Angeles and New York Times have finally dipped their pens in the ink this year, introducing "old media" to the world. The former established TheEnvelope.com (including the folded-in Gold Derby) in November, and David Carr's Oscar blog, The Carpetbagger, was set up at the latter earlier this month.

But for every newly christened "official" awards-watching contingent, there seem to be four or five "amateur" gazers staking their own claims. Oscar Central (a domain formerly operated by yours truly), Everything Oscar, And the Oscar Goes To..., Cifra's Mania, The Film Experience, Oscar Sights, The Oscar Igloo, these sites stretch out as far as the eye can see, each one borrowing from the other in sense of style or template on one level or another, but collectively sharing a sense of unmitigated excitement and passion for the Oscar season.

As this rise in amateur opinion continued, the "professional" side of things felt a need to weigh in, rather negatively, on the matter.

Pete Hammond tried his hand a three years ago at observing this progression with a Variety piece that ultimately did little more than offer something of a slap in the face to these individuals and the love they have for their hobby. He hastily noted "Objectivity clearly isn't the goal for these site hosts, who freely mix personal opinions with plants from publicists and filmmakers," while also including quotes from industry insiders, points of view that were then, and are now, beside the point: "A lot of times they are handicapping movies that they haven't even seen. It's a little bit crazy."

That story, titled "Awards Sites Mushroom, But Who Reads Them?" is old news on one hand, but relevant still on the other. Why? Because the trend continues as "sanctioned" writers find newer methods of attack.

Last month, columnist Patrick Goldstein offered in his "The Big Picture" column at the Los Angeles Times a piece that, ironically enough, missed the big picture altogether. Titled "Beware of Blog," his article chalked up the practice of Oscar prognostication as "nauseatingly superficial." Nauseating is obviously a trying, strong and intentionally offensive description, but deeming the scenario superficial is nothing newsworthy in the slightest. But furthermore, according to Goldstein, now these "bloggers" were guilty of insulting the Oscars and "the people who make the movies." The vitriol was glorious, the direction and the aim, inexistent.

The Times offered the attacked bloggers the chance to respond to the embarrassing and aggressive column in print a few days later.

Now, this is not a column meant to attack. This is not a column meant to provoke anything other than thought, but these two key examples in a lineage of "sanctioned" versus "unsanctioned" opinion (to spare the worn-out "old media" versus "new media" debate) offer the beginnings of perspective on the matter.

The "whys" are numerous. And they begin at the top. Why do the Oscars exist? Why is an art, filmmaking, somehow in need of award? Why does anyone truly care about these awards? Why is there an industry built around these awards? And why is there no room for the opinions of many in such an "industry" in the views of a seemingly scorned few?

Long gone are the days of old, where access was limited. Al Pacino's line in The Insider never rang so true. "The press is free to anyone who owns one." The future really isn't as much ahead of us as it is in our faces and today anyone with a mind to do so can get online, start a blog or a website, and contemplate away on the state of film, the state of the Oscar race, the potential of film awards season to turn out this way or that. And the same is true of numerous other arenas, not the least of which being politics.

But the numbers are growing. Every day a new obssessee joins the chorus, finding in awards prognostication an outlet, if not a level of enjoyment, that makes his or her day. And these individuals are now accused of sucking the passion out of the industry, when their very passionate disposition is what fuels the fire of readership every time Patrick Goldstein offers up one of his yearly ("nauseatingly superficial") looks at the Oscar race, or every time Pete Hammond digs to the heart of matters covered a hundred times over at various "amateur" outlets in one of his awards season pieces.

I left that "amateur" contingent behind on one level the moment I received a paycheck for analyzing the Oscar race. But that does not now, nor will it ever, mean that my heart does not lie with the individuals who keep sites like those mentioned above up and running - individuals who frequent message boards at Oscarwatch or The Envelope, individuals who do this, not because they pretend to have an overly considered voice in this world, but because they have a passion for the art form they analyze, no matter how many hits they have to take from those who may (or may not) feel threatened in some small way by their existence.

And so, while this might read as an emboldened defense, let that not be the case. This is a statement of lesson - a statement of observation. What I have learned in the five years I've done this, both as an "amateur" and as a "professional," is that if a voice is loud enough, it will make itself heard. There is no place for heralding the ethics of journalism in a scenario that begs recognition of the joke, that being that petty dispute over opinion is wasted breath, space and time.

As we move forward into another year of this colorful circus, let us keep in mind that it should be seen as ridiculous that this industry built around the "superficial" should ever fall to such unnecessarily heated and nasty debate and interaction. Let us remember that discourse is the practice of the educated, and debate the method of the competitive. There is no competition, there is no finish line...there is no spoon.

Happy New Year.

December 27, 2005

Previous Oscartown Columns
12.20.05 - Leaning
12.13.05 - Father Christmas
12.06.05 - National Boring Review
11.29.05 - Breakthrough Gents
11.22.05 - Money Talks
11.15.05 - Where Have All The Cowgirls Gone?
11.08.05 - Imitation of Life
11.01.05 - Suggestion Card
10.25.05 - Youthful Digression
10.18.05 - Nothing New, Nothing Old... A Whole Lot of Nothing
09.01.05 - A Brave New 'Wood?

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