I’m sick and tired of America’s obsession with defining winning or losing as the only two dimensions on which a person’s self-worth can exist… How perverse is it that we live in a society where audiences care about the gross receipts of a film, or how many awards it has won?

These are trinkets of greatest use to those whose salaries are affected by them… and of greatest detriment to audiences who want better films but are willing, unfortunately, to settle for whatever crap the studios will churn out from week to week. Why? Because these insincere definitions of “success” only reinforce appeals to the lowest common denominator. Competitive and financial models of success (as opposed to intrinsic artistic accomplishment) inherently favor mediocrity … the crap always floats to the top because it offends the least amount of people, threatens the fewest egos, reinforces the opinions of those who already agree with it, and, most importantly, doesn’t take risks.

When has Hollywood EVER been about genuinely promoting art in more than just the commercial sense of “progress”?

Hollywood won’t even dare laugh at itself, as evidenced by the morose reactions to Stewart’s riotously hilarious sendups (Clooney excluded… he actually seems to be the one guy in Hollywood with a sense of humor… if only they understood THAT is why audiences genuinely like him)… which shows just how little they think about anything beyond how their current project is going to influence their next paycheck. When you see stars with contract riders for umpteen bottles of Evian, or actors who demand multimillion dollar salaries (Reese Witherspoon with her $29 mil has inadvertently priced herself out of doing anything better than a shlockbuster) … or Will Smith with his $1 million trailer… What makes you genuinely believe them when they proffer their platitudes in acceptance speeches about “craft”… What makes you believe they are more interested in artistry than they are interested in themselves?

Does one not see the irony beset around the institution? Have we somehow deluded ourselves into believing this annual self-masturbatory ritual of populist cinema would actually favor subtlety over hamfisted melodrama?

Look no further than their hubris and hypocrisy… Throughout the evening, repeatedly chanting the mantra of “the theatrical experience…” Though I agree that theatrical exhibition superior to DVD in every aspect of picture and sound, the endless appeals to moviegoers during the 78th Annual Academy Awards struck me as utterly hilarious.

The industry restructured DVD releases due partly to their paranoia about piracy, but also due to the accounting shell-game in which the studios pay the artisans last, and yet count projected revenues from yet-to-be DVD sales up front… They can’t wait for those revenue streams more than two quarters, now, lest the SEC starts investigating them for accounting fraud in the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley. Couple that with consistently mediocre quality films week after week in which people increasingly feel screwed out of their nine dollars a head… (nearly $40 for a family of four, not counting the $97 in concessions…)

The studios have no one to blame but themselves for provoking piracy and/or driving consumers to DVD by clinging to what they believe are “safe bets”… cliché-ridden filth and a dead distro monopoly. Not only that, but by reducing the DVD release gap to roughly four months (again out of paranoia and greed), who the hell sees the benefit in shucking out nine dollars a head to go see a piece of junk at the theater when they’ll see it on DVD soon enough in the comfort of their own home without babies screaming and assholes on cell phones?

Also, the massive hype around home video is entirely the industry’s invention… They spend the gobs of money promoting it. Their publicists relentlessly spam the living hell out of every retail outlet, every critic, every movie-related publication or major web site.

Why? They design movies so shitty that they know they can’t bank on lasting power in the theater… Making better films is harder than throwing money at PR campaigns, so they now bank on home video to fill the gap when a movie fizzles out its of theatrical exhibition cycle. They plan their distribution and marketing strategies around the inevitable failure of these acrid films to woo audiences… and then they turn around and blame the audiences for preferring to wait for the planned multi-tiered, extra-special-super-duper-milk-it-one-more-time DVD releases.

Did you get that? The motion picture industry blames audiences for falling in lockstep with their idiotic marketing strategies — unimaginative responses to underwhelmed reactions to unimaginative movies. They blame us, threatening to sue every last 12 year old out there — constantly demanding the government require more intrusive measures by Internet Service Providers to monitor what you are doing. They blame US… the moviegoers.

… are you still wondering how the hell it is that a movie like “Crash” wins Best Picture? A movie which makes Hollywood feel good about itself for having churned out of the meat-grinder yet another paint-by-numbers “message” movie which insults its audience by expecting so little of our critical thinking skills you’d have had to fall down the stairs and hit your head NOT to be a winner in the “spot the racist” storyline. It’s a film that reinforces Hollywood’s condescending, abject hatred for you, the moviegoer… of course “Crash” won.