The Oscars are like watching an each-way bet on a long shot

I have just read an interesting article about Oscar nominations and whether the best picture actually wins. Well as we all know this does not happen very often and it got me thinking why do I like to watch the Oscars? I think it is because to me it’s like betting each-way on an outside horse, you know your horse probably will not win, but you get the thrill of watching anyway. That is how I feel about the Oscars, I never watch them live, I record it and watch the next day then I can fast forward past all the mushy crap and get to the bits I want to see.


Back to the Oscars and this year’s nominations, the article I was reading was saying how often does the best film win, and they used something called Metacritic to analyse all reviews on the internet, to gain an aggregate score. I’ve added the link to it below.

http://www.significancemagazine.org/details/webexclusive/988675/The-Oscars---do-the-best-pictures-win.html

In summary though, basically it says that it does not happen very often; only 6 times in the last 18 years, has the best film (or best aggregate score) won, which is not very good. Then I thought some more, because if you look at the films nominated this year, as seen below, the highest is The Social Network and the lowest is Inception, which to me shows a lack of faith in the audience. In fact of all the films on the list, the ones I regard as the best, only Toy Story 3 scores highly (which shows how little I know), the others Inception was bottom, Black Swan and True Grit did not do much better.

I think the biggest thing it shows, is the diversity in people’s appreciation of films and how different they are, and also the massive gap between what a film critic thinks, and what the audience (the films are basically supposed to attract) thinks.


Finally in one of the comments someone added this link below it is an excellent article about why Oscars don’t necessarily award the best actors, actresses, or films.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18460_5-reasons-oscars-matter-even-less-than-you-thought.html