I love the Oscars. I mean, I really love the Oscars. For days leading up to the ceremony, I obsess over them. I think the Oscars are important. I think it’s important, culturally, to recognize and award films for their artistic achievement, and in an ideal world, that would be easy.

There are a lot of reasons why the Oscars don't work. For one thing, the idea of a "Best Picture" or "Best Director" of the year is kind of impossible. Technically that means they're putting Dodgeball and Saving Private Ryan in the same category. And let's face it slapstick comedies like Shallow Hal for instance, don't usually beat out more serious films like Schindler's List. But the problem is, shouldn’t the movies that are more successful at the box office technically be the best movies? If they weren't good, why would people go see them? It couldn't only be that major production studios have more money then smaller studios and can pay for tons of trailers and previews, commercials, and movie posters. If more people are going to see the movies that star major celebrities, and are directed by major directors, aren't those the better movies?

For example, in 1997 Titanic definitely should have won Best Picture. Poor Kate Winslet even wore diapers for her underwater scenes. The Best Picture should also win for editing, art direction, cinematography, and directing. It only makes sense.

Warner Brothers, Paramount and Fox were confident in the fact that, no matter what, as long as they put major money into their movies, they could bring home the gold. That is, until a lesser known film trilogy came along, Lord of the Rings. In 2001, Fellowship of the Rings won all the awards that movies like Lord of the Rings are supposed to win, you know, makeup, original score, visual effects, etc. etc. In 2002, The Two Towers took home the measly visual effects award, and sound editing. Things were good. The people were satisfied, the Academy was satisfied, Hollywood was satisfied, the hobbits weren't satisfied, but who cares about them?

And then came 2003. The infamous 76th Annual Academy Awards, known simply as "the year that Lord of the Rings won everything". It's talked about even today, two Oscars later. The Academy didn't know what hit them. They didn't know just how suicidal it was to give a film (granted, a pretty good film) about a wizard and his super-cool adventures in the mystical land of Middle-Hell an award. We could handle giving Best Animated Feature to Nemo instead of the brilliant Triplets of Belleville. We could deal with Master and Commander getting Cinematography. We could even handle giving Lord of the Rings best adapted screenplay over American Splendor (though that one was hard to deal with). But, come on! Lord of the Rings? Lord of the Rings? We all knew what was going to happen! Like you thought they wouldn't destroy the ring?

The Academy knew that this was the end. The glory years were over, the trust was broken, and it could never be repaired. The Academy knew that big changes were going to have to be made for 2004. So, they turned hip and cool and freaked us out. Morgan Freeman got an Oscar he should've gotten years ago, Hilary Swank won for best display of lower back, and when she got up to accept her award, the PA system announced that she was the "first actress to accept an award for playing a female boxer". Which is essentially the equivalent of saying Catalina Sandino Moreno was the first actress to be nominated for playing a drug smuggler from Mexico, which is essentially, meaningless. Cate Blanchett won a deserved award for her Katherine Hepburn imitation. And of course, the inevitable, Jamie Foxx won an award for his superb phoniness. The fact that Ray even got a nomination for Best Picture is absolutely outrageous, mainly because the movie wasn't even finished, and it closed with a Power Point Presentation of Ray Charles album covers.

The Academy had tried so hard to be new, to be different, to be young and hip. They did all they could. They allowed Scarlett Johansson, the indie it-girl of the moment, to present awards. They shortened acceptance speeches. They radically gave people awards in the middle of the aisle, instead of giving them the courtesy of being allowed to come up on stage. They picked family favorites like Jamie Foxx and The Incredibles. And when it got down to Best Picture, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind wasn't even nominated, and Sideways didn't win, which is just a sin. Frankly, the Oscars were embarrassing.

But if you're going to give them a second chance, why not a third chance?

The 78th Annual Academy Awards, which just passed, was revolutionary in a lot of ways. Not so much because of the of the gay thing, or the race thing, but because the films nominated for Best Picture, the films nominated overall, were smaller, more thought-provoking, more culturally important films than those nominated in the past. King Kong won the Visual Effects Award, which it deserved, but that’s it, despite its huge box office numbers. War of the Worlds, a star-studded film with Steven Spielberg backing it, was barely considered, and Star Wars didn’t even win the Makeup award.

But the Academy still managed to deviously strategize their awards system anyway. For instance, they didn't nominate Terrence Howard for Best Supporting Actor for Crash, they only nominated him for Best Actor for Hustle & Flow. Therefore, he wouldn't have to be nominated along with Matt Dillon. They placed him against the impossible to defeat Philip Seymour Hoffman and Heath Ledger. Paul Giamatti or Jake Gyllenhal should have won Best Supporting Actor, but because George Clooney wasn't going to win Best Director, Best Picture, or Best Original Screenplay, they gave him the less-deserved Best Supporting Actor award.

The Best Actress award was even more of a debacle. There's a reason why Dame Judi Dench is called Dame Judi Dench; she is one of the best actresses of all time, and by all rights she should have won Best Actress. But until she's dead she'll keep winning Oscars and other awards, so the Academy couldn't give her Best Actress. Charlize Theron and Keira Knightley deserve to be smothered, more than they deserve Oscars, and so the Academy was left with Felicity Huffman and Reese Witherspoon. Let’s face the facts; even if Reese Witherspoon was more enjoyable to watch, she was essentially playing herself. Felicity Huffman not only had the huge acting challenge of playing a born again Christian cross-dresser, she managed in the meantime to shatter her reputation as a Desperate Housewives mom and show everyone that, not only is she married to William H. Macy, but she's an amazing performer (and stylish to boot). So basically, there should've been no way for Reese Witherspoon to win, but she did. And, her acceptance speech was the most embarrassing moment of the night.

The Screenplay awards should have been easy. Brokeback Mountain definitely deserved Best Adapted Screenplay, which it got. Good Night and Good Luck should have gotten Best Original Screenplay, especially over the idiotic Crash. Best Director was obviously Ang Lee. I mean, the Academy can be messed up, but they aren't that messed up. Now, on to Best Picture.

It was obvious that Brokeback Mountain (regardless of whether or not it deserved to win, although it did) wasn't going to win. Everyone thought Brokeback Mountain was going to win, or at least, everyone thought everyone thought Brokeback Mountain was going to win, so the Academy couldn't give it the award because hey, that would make them predictable. It couldn't go to Good Night and Good Luck, because (regardless of its being an amazing film) it made very little money and wasn't shown in a lot of theaters. Munich wasn't going to win because it simply didn't get many good reviews, and it wasn't an Oscar winning kind of movie. Now, Capote definitely should have won. It got amazing reviews, everyone loved it, and it was just controversial enough to make no one happy and no one upset. But the Academy proved to be as dumb as they look.

Why did they choose Crash? The answer is easy, it was the family favorite, the movie that was "hard" and "moving" without being hard or moving. It was a movie without a villain, it was a movie about L.A., it was a movie that gave people an excuse, a million excuses rather, for being racist. It attacked everyone, but no one. It displayed no real human emotion, only over-the-top, extreme situations and emotions, and then, it showed us that those emotions were meaningless It was a dumb, dumb, dumb movie. And I'm being nice.

But the sad part is we need them. We need the Academy. Why?

Because every once and a while a deserving movie does win an award, because movie-makers around the world create their art because they aspire to walk the red carpet, because humans need a hierarchy, a reward system to make us happy. In the end, everyone loves the Oscars. They aren’t perfect, but they're great. In the end, the Oscars are like the movies they end up awarding: they're silly. In fact, the Oscars are just like Crash. It makes no sense, it has no point, it gives everyone false hope, and at the end, Ludacris unleashes a bunch of illegal aliens into the streets of L.A.