Editor's Note

The nominations for the 2012 Academy Awards were announced on Tuesday. As always, there were more than a few puzzling inclusions and exclusions.

Albert Brooks of Drive, for whom a Best Actor nomination was practically a foregone conclusion, might be the most entitled to feeling snubbed, but he’s not alone. Michael Fassbender is probably the latest victim of the Academy’s penis-envy vengeance; Patton Oswalt probably never had a chance in the first place, because he’s Patton Oswalt. Lars von Trier’s magnificent Melancholia was somehow deemed unworthy of a Best Picture nomination, even though the number of nominees appears to be completely arbitrary; I’m going to pretend that the Academy got that film’s approaching planet confused with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, an extremely average film that, incredibly, managed to find its way onto the ballot (we invite you to read our very own two-star review of that unexceptional piece of cinema over at our Playground blog).

I’d use more column space to complain, but this kind of stuff happens every year. I’ve got a soft spot for the Oscars: my mom loves them, and I’ve been watching them with her since I can remember, and it’s one of those really heartwarming mother-son traditions (and not anything like Motherboy) that gives me some psychic atonement for being a cynical a******e the rest of the time. And, as awards shows go, Oscar is a decidedly more merit-based prize than, say, the gilded gramophone. This year, the Grammys decided that Bruno Mars’ Doo-Wops and Hooligans was deserving of being considered for Album of the Year, but that Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was not, which, if ever there was an appropriate moment for one of Kanye’s awards show freakouts, this is it.

That may be some consolation, but it’s not exactly high praise for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Oscars, in fact, have a lot in common with the Republican debates we’ve seen over the past few months: both are amusing and sometimes horrifying mixtures of politics and performance art (though the latter may be in shorter supply without Rick Perry around). There’s little to suggest that the Academy’s voting procedures do anything to guarantee that the most deserving films are even nominated.

But even if we happened to create the perfect awards show, the one that really did privilege depth and beauty and creativity and all the other things we want out of music and film—even if we had such a thing, isn’t there something a little absurd about the idea of holding a competition between works of art that have completely divergent purposes? Cinema isn’t the same as sports. It makes sense for Lebron James and Kevin Durant to compete for the NBA championship, because each have the same ultimate goal: to make as many shots on a ten-foot goal as possible while preventing their opponents from doing so as often as possible. The same cannot be said about the The Tree of Life, which seeks to explain the origin and meaning of life itself, and The Help, which seeks to ease white people’s guilt.

Justin Vernon, who this year made a wonderful album as Bon Iver and was actually nominated for a Grammy, was once asked about his hypothetical acceptance speech. His response: “Everyone should go home, this is ridiculous. You should not be doing this. We should not be gathering in a big room and looking at each other and pretending this is important.”