The Oscar grouch.

Oh God, is it Oscar season again? But we just did this twelve months ago! Do we have to do it every year just because it's annual? I can't cope with this right now. Can we put this off until June maybe? June 2034 would be perfect.

I kick and I scream and I hold my breath until I turn blue, but this happens every year. Sort of like a colonoscopy. Although I don't think most doctors actually recommend annual colonoscopies. Just mine, apparently. Something about that makes me nervous. But we're getting off-topic.

Actually, I've been trying to write something about the Oscars all week, but for some reason I haven't been able to. I keep getting bored and stopping in midsentence, often not even bothering to finish the

This is very unlike me. Normally I get very worked up about this subject. I get vocal. I get conspiratorial. After "Crash" won Best Picture in 2005 I experienced about two weeks of missing time, during which I may or may not, in my shocked, addled state, have defaulted to stalking Natalie Portman. That's pretty much just what I do when my life in shambles (might I add, the letters from her attorneys are unnecessarily hurtful).

See, I just can't pull off this look. God knows I've tried.

But this year? Not so much. Maybe it's the lack of conflict. In a bizarre anomaly, I like almost all ten of this year's Best Picture nominees. I'm just not used to being this agreeable. It upsets my digestion.

Two exceptions: "127 Hours", a movie during which I began to speculate about whether that was a title or an estimated runtime, and "Winter's Bone", which is the one I didn't bother to see. You know how you can tell that "Winter's Bone" must be a movie with real artistic integrity? Because nobody with commercial interests of any kind would call a movie "Winter's Bone".

I have nothing in particular to root against, and nothing in particular to champion. "Black Swan" is my favorite, but not to such a degree that I will feel outrage when it loses. The critical argument against it is sound, even if I don't agree with it.

I may criticize the choice of "The King's Speech" as too safe and conventional, or argue that too many viewers and critics misinterpreted "The Social Network" in ways that are just plain embarrassing, but I can't argue that either is undeserving of the recognition.

"True Grit" may in fact be the best movie I saw all year, but I can't say that it was a particularly daring project, nor a huge leap forward for anyone involved, excepting that girl with the pigtails. In short, I'm occupying the middle ground on everything. I feel so bland and...reasonable. This almost never happens to me.

"Look at me. I need you to focus. It's about that time. Come on, swing it! Bringing this to the entire nation, come on, feel the vibration! Feel it, feel it!"

You might ask why I ever care about the awards in the first place. Most people don't, after all. And they are, as a point of fact, a fundamentally flawed institution based on nebulous, subjective criteria, which usually includes equal degrees of snobbery, politics, and favoritism. Why even pay attention? Why get worked up at all?

To which I reply: Why are you interrupting me? I'm in the middle of a spiel here, save your questions for the end. That's what the comment box is for, this box up here, this is my domain and I rule it like a king, a king I say! I'm king of the trees, I'm kind of the birds and I'm king of the bees! King of the air! Ah me, what a throne, what a wonderful chair!

But to answer your rude, intrusive question, I care because people in the movie industry care. For example, did you see "There Will Be Blood"? A lot of people did, and a lot of people liked it (I'm not a member of that second group, but that's a separate spiel). Paul Thomas Anderson has been making movies for about fifteen years now, and "There Will Be Blood" is a pretty typical example of his work: quiet, intense, opaque, and very, very difficult to market.

Anderson's movies are usually not commercial successes, and whatever financial gains they make are modest. Further, they tend to be expensive to make, prohibitively long, and sometimes threaten to draw the dreaded NC-17 rating (i.e., the Kiss of Death). He is not a safe investment.

"I know you said that a truly dedicated method actor would put his arm under a real boulder, but did you guys have to leave me down here alone all night? Hello? Danny? Are you there?"

But for all that, he still manages to find people to put money behind his projects. Because his movies are very good at getting Oscar nominations. And people like having their name attached to an Oscar-nominated film.

They call them "prestige pictures", movies that are meant not to make you money but to make you look like a person of depth and integrity, a patron of complex, thought-provoking art when you're not busy producing "Secret Agent Rooster 3" or "The Overweight Guy Who Does Pratfalls, starring Kevin James!"

Of course, the movies in question don't have to have any actual artistic merit; the recognition alone is enough. But, in spite of their many blunders and blind spots, the folks at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are generally pretty good at recognizing at least a few great movies every year. Very rarely do those movies win anything, but these people aren't utterly clueless. This isn't the Grammys.

So the Oscars are a big part of the reason that guys like Paul Thomas Anderson get to keep making movies. Big movies, with high production values and name actors that play on thousands of screens, rather than stuff shot in his backyard on a Hi8. Not that there's anything wrong with the backyard Hi8 productions. Did I mention that my wonderful colleagues at Viral Media Networks are part of the 48 Hour Film Festival this year?

Anderson hasn't done a movie this year to garner nominations, but the Coens did, and so did Chris Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, David O. Russell, Danny Boyle, and David Fincher (lotta D names? That's a little eerie...).

These are all the same people, like Kathryn Bigelow last years, who make the movies that I used to complain didn't get the recognition they deserved at Oscar time. They were "the MTV generation" of directors (a label which should tell you how up to date most movie critics are on pop culture). Now though they're, well, nominees one through five.

The Dude no longer abides.

Maybe that's one of the reasons I'm less agitated this year. My preferred generation and branof filmmakers are finally the standard. The gates to the Ivory Tower have been thrown open and the pillaging hordes have been invited in for tea. Damn it Academy voters, now how am I supposed to pretend like I'm avant garde? The only thing that made these mainstream films feel like edgy indie projects was that you spurned them!

Wow, I feel really old all of a sudden. Someone find me a machine to rage against. Other than eReaders, that's just exacerbating my problem. Everybody with an eReader, get off my lawn. Seriously, what are you doing out there anyway? The lighting is better inside.

Update Tuesday.