Making Oscars a mule race

IF you didn’t know any better, you’d assume that in America we secretly loathe our greatest movies -- otherwise why would we subject them to the demeaning, nauseatingly superficial ritual known as Oscar prognosticating?

When I went to an early screening of Terrence Malick’s “The New World” the other night, my first reaction was one of almost giddy pleasure. It felt too good to be true that this notoriously reclusive artist had delivered a film that is not only a spellbinding portrait of our country’s origins, but a singularly personal meditation on romance.

Of course, my next reaction brought me down to earth. What would happen to Malick’s film when it was ground through the sausage factory of Oscar blogs and websites that have transformed the Academy Awards from a celebration of movies into a silly exercise in Ouija board-style predictions and lamebrained analysis? In other words, forget about “The New World’s” artistry -- let’s get to the musings you can expect from Oscar pundits: Haven’t films set in the 19th century won more best pictures than movies set in the 17th century? What are the movie’s chances when no best picture winner over the last 25 years has won without a lead actor in serious contention for an actor prize? And, of course, will the academy punish Malick for refusing to participate in the humiliating spectacle known as Oscar campaigning?

If you think I’m exaggerating, you haven’t been reading many Oscar bloggers lately. They don’t even need to see the movie to declare it a best picture favorite -- or a nonstarter. MovieCityNews’ David Poland wrote a recent column in which he proclaimed, after seeing the trailer of “Munich,” that the film “is a prohibitive front-runner to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.” (This from the guy who said “The Phantom of the Opera” was the only movie that could beat “The Aviator” in last year’s Oscar race.) In the midst of comparing “Munich’s” best picture chances with those of “Memoirs of a Geisha,” Poland offers this sage analysis: “Oh boy, is there a lot of death in the movies that have won [Oscars]. Only four of the last 25 winners do not have death or war as a central part of the story. I’m sure someone will die dramatically in ‘Geisha,’ but ‘Munich’ wins the body count hands down.”

This arrived after Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells (the Lewis Black of Oscar bloggers) dismissed the movie’s chances, also solely on seeing the trailer. As he put it in his inimitable style: “[T]he whole ‘wait for ‘Munich’ ... this is the big one ... Oscar! Oscar! drumbeat is based on little more than a generic knee-jerk Spielberg kowtow.... Watch the teaser and explain to me how it makes ‘Munich’ look even a little bit challenging or startling ... it looks like a guilty license-to-kill so-whatter.”

Of course, The Times is in the Oscar business too, thanks to our new awards-oriented website, the Envelope, which in its first weeks of existence has offered a deluge of Oscar prognosticating. Our lead pundit, Gold Derby’s Tom O’Neil, is a master of the breathless overstatement, offering scoops on such weighty matters as the Oscar acting category George Clooney will campaign for in “Syriana.” First O’Neil trumpeted the news that Clooney was “definitely going to lead and screening tattletales claim he’s got a real shot at winning,” adding as compelling evidence that the actor not only gives a “powerhouse” performance but has “that whole body transformation thing going on. Voters love it when pretty stars go ugly.”

Just the other day O’Neil was back with another newsflash, saying “Clooney’s Oscar campaign strategy has flip-flopped” and that he’s now going after best supporting actor. O’Neil’s “scoops” were roundly lambasted by rival bloggers, with Oscar Watch’s Sasha Stone saying it best: “The Envelope’s Tom O’Neil is reporting his ‘exclusive’ news with as much pomp and circumstance as Vanity Fair reported Deep Throat was really Mark Felt. OH MY GOD, HE’S GOING SUPPORTING??!!!!!!”

It’s hard to say most of the time where the predictions end and the mud-wrestling begins. Kristopher Tapley of incontention.blogspot.com began one recent column by saying, “Pay no attention to Jeff Wells’ brief tantrum regarding my MovieCityNews column today,” which criticized Tapley’s support for “Geisha.” And before you knew it, Tapley was deriding Wells’ own assessments, including the choice of “The Constant Gardener” as a best picture contender. Before the virtual ink was dry on LA Weekly columnist Nikki Finke’s Web scoop -- she had “insiders” saying Steven Spielberg wouldn’t run an Oscar campaign for “Munich” -- the Envelope’s Oscar Beat columnist Steve Pond fired back, saying that “according to a source closely involved with the ‘Munich’ campaign, Finke’s information is ‘not remotely’ accurate.”

Before I go any further I should make it clear that I’m not one of these MSM (mainstream media, for the uninitiated) guys who resent my Internet brethren. Bloggers are the best thing to happen to journalism in years. They have not only broken innumerable stories but served as much-needed critics of lumbering old-school journalism, bringing a new energy and irreverence to what’s become a very staid, conventional-wisdom-bound profession.

But nowhere are the limitations of blogging more evident than in the inane shoot-from-the-lip world of Oscar punditry. While Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine is wrestling with media bias and objectivity, while Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish is criticizing Donald Rumsfeld’s ego and intransigence, while Daily Kos is debating an alleged Bush administration plan to bomb Al Jazeera, the Web’s Oscar dingbats are bickering over supporting actor nominations and movies they haven’t even seen yet.

I wish I could laugh off the bloggers’ harebrained predictions, but they are a symptom of a more serious disease. Nearly everyone today, including the mainstream media (led by Entertainment Weekly, which should have the slogan -- Everything About the Oscars All the Time -- permanently stamped on its cover) has become obsessed with handicapping the Oscars.

Why would anyone want to wrestle with questions about what our movies say about America today when we could give odds on who’ll be hosting the Oscars this year? (Full disclosure: I write an Oscar prediction column too, but I do it once a year, not 47 times a week. And, without getting into the Academy Award prediction business full-time, I may be doing an Oscar podcast in the near future too.)

Some people argue that Oscar bloggers are no worse than the baseball stats geeks who pen arcane essays about the value of slugging percentage and walks versus strikeouts ratios. But baseball is a game whose appeal is broad enough to make room for both Roger Angell-style romantics and Bill James-style sabermetricians. After all, statistics are an actual measure of a player’s performance. Too often the Oscar bloggers aren’t analyzing the art of the movies but simply the academy’s reaction to them, and only then in terms of supposed Oscar voter quirks and prejudices.

Last year Poland treated the academy’s reception to “The Passion of the Christ” as some sort of bizarre Jewish calculus problem, writing, “If you start with only 60% of the Academy being non-Jewish, with few Jews presumably willing to support the film for awards, you need 37.5% of those non-Jews to vote the film highly.... If you figure that half of the non-Jews never saw the film ... “

Why have things gotten so out of control? In short, because the Oscars are a drawing card, especially when it comes to attracting eyeballs on the Internet. That’s one reason why The Times started the Envelope, in the hope of reaching readers who no longer pick up a newspaper.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Anne Thompson, who has a foot in each world, writing a trade paper column while posting at her Risky Biz blog, puts it this way: “It’s a brand thing. If you’re on the Internet, writing about the Oscars or ‘Star Wars,’ you’re going to get more hits.”

The studios, which often spend millions on Oscar campaigns, have a love-hate relationship with the bloggers. Privately they complain that the bloggers petulantly punish films if they’re not among the first to see them. They also say the pundits are utterly lacking in objectivity, either campaigning for a favorite film or trying to destroy one they dislike. Wells, for example, recently wrote of “Geisha”: “Let’s start the ball rolling now. IM your friends and coworkers and tell them you’ve heard it’s a tedious costume-movie drag ... it’s porcelain, nothing, stupefying and every Godforsaken line of Chinese-accent English-language dialogue is like screeching chalk.”

Of course the studios support many of the sites with Oscar ads. Studio publicists say they cater to the bloggers because their top executives react hysterically to every little slight they see on the Web.

They also believe that the mainstream media -- people like me or, ahem, my editors -- are influenced by what we read on the sites, just as we are influenced by celeb scandal items we see on Defamer or the Drudge Report.

For anyone who loves the cinema, it’s hard not to feel a pang of sadness. Having already suffered for years over people’s obsession with opening weekend box-office tabulations, we now see our best, most ambitious films treated like a horse in the third race at Hollywood Park. A trophy for the winner, a trip to the glue factory for the losers. We’ve become a nation of handicappers and, if you hadn’t guessed already, it’s not just an insult to the Oscars, but to the people who make the movies too.

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“The Big Picture” appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Questions or suggestions can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.