Envelope please…

It’s a sad state of affairs when a presidential election campaign that has been going on for two years, and still has almost a year to go, is more interesting than the campaign for the Academy Awards, a race that is now much briefer than it was in earlier years. Why, exactly, is that?

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I suppose it is because the stories playing out in the political campaign media coverage are, at the moment anyway, more compelling than the ones we see in the Oscar race. (It’s hardly worth the effort of clicking a mouse button, but you can see my Oscar predictions here.) Last year, I was emotionally involved in whether Peter O’Toole would finally get his statuette. (He didn’t.) This year, it would be great to see Julie Christie get an Oscar, but it wouldn’t have the same impact, since presumably she still has the one she won in 1966 for Darling. I have a rooting interest in seeing The Diving Bell and the Butterfly get major awards, since it is head and shoulders above anything else I saw from last year. But it is nominated only in four categories, only two of which can be considered major ones. So that’s not exactly the same rush I got when The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King got ten nominations—winning in all of them. Moreover, those nominations were groundbreaking because of a long history of snubbing movies in the science fiction and fantasy genres. While Diving Bell is a great film, the paltry few Academy Award nominations it did receive are hardly noteworthy for a movie in the genre of people heroically battling injuries/illnesses/handicaps. The real scandal—if you can take the Oscars seriously enough to be scandalized by them—is the lack of recognition for Mathieu Amalric’s acting feat in an extremely difficult role.

The presidential campaign, on the other hand, has many suspenseful and dramatic elements that have not been seen in many, if not any, people’s lifetimes: the first plausible candidates from the African-American, female-American and former-first-spouse communities, the first simultaneous wide-open primaries for both major parties, a compressed primary/caucus schedule and what is perhaps the biggest element of suspense and entertainment: Florida is still a state.

So, rather than fight against it, I am going to give in to election fever and forget about the Academy Awards. Instead, I am offering my own personal Oscars to various politicians: