Oscar Prediction: The Technical Awards

It's become something of an annual tradition on this blog for me to try to predict the outcomes of the Academy Awards, a task which I find enjoyable despite the fact that it is incredibly futile. The Oscars are always frustrating because they so often reward the least interesting films by giving them the highest accolade. On the few occasions when they do recognise films that are genuinely interesting and provocative, it only seems to underline how conservative their tastes are the rest of the time, and any gains tend to be undone the following year by a return to normalcy. (From a prognosticatory vantage, those years are also incredibly annoying because you tend to assume the Oscars will always go for the safe bet, so a curveball like The Hurt Locker winning Best Picture throws everything completely out of whack.)

You've Got To Accentuate The Positive: What's Good About The 2012 Oscar Nominations?

The Oscar nominations were announced today - not that anyone would notice since it's not like everybody is talking about it all the damn time - and they confirmed once again that the Oscars are worthless. And I don't mean that in the sense that all human endeavour is worthless because one day we'll all die and no one will care about anything we did in life, and besides which the sun will one day implode and destroy the Earth, eradicating all trace of all humanity, making our irritation at Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close getting an Oscar nomination seem pretty trivial.

No, I mean that the Oscars are worthless because they fail to do the thing that they are meant to, which is recognise the exceptional films released in any given year. Sure, they sometimes get it right - the nomination for The Tree of Life, in particular, strikes me as unusually spot on for once - but for the most part they celebrate the merely okay, rather than the excellent.

Considering that last year saw some truly great films released, ones that were bold, daring and strange, it would be easy to write about the many, many great films that were snubbed in favour of mediocrity. However, since everyone is going to be doing that, I've decided to set cynicism aside and focus on the positive, looking at the little delights sprinkled amongst the dullness.

Ed's Top 20 Films of 2011

They sure are happy to have the Number One spot.

First off, I'd just like to wish everyone reading this a Happy New Year. I hope that you all had a great couple of days and are quietly dreading the return to the normal grind of working life as much as I am. (If you work in a capacity that meant that you have not had any time off over the last few weeks, my heart goes out to you. I worked over Christmas and New Year the last few years and it is the worst.) I saw the New Year in by getting ferociously drunk in a cottage just outside of Blackpool with a bunch of my friends, and it was terrific.