Spoiler alert: if you don’t want your Oscar night feast of bad dresses and unbearable smugness ruined, stop reading.
Also, if you don’t care about the Oscars, stop reading. So that should leave us with only people who sort of like the Oscars a bit but they’re not women or gay or anything. Welcome aboard, tiny remaining audience.
Excuse our preamble, because we’re about to tell you who’ll win all the Oscars. We mean it – bookies say they’ve never been more convinced. Slumdog Millionaire, by the way. There, that’s saved you about four hours of your life. Spend it wisely.
Television ratings for the Oscars have been in freefall for the last few years, but at least the Oscar organisers have identified the problem. No, it’s not because the Oscar ceremony is essentially an uncomfortably long game of soggy biscuit exclusively played by smug millionaires who genuinely believe that they can change the world by making a barely-watched movie that mentions Iraq three or four times – it’s because people don’t like seeing clever people say funny things, and they don’t like having their surprises ruined.
That’s why Jon Stewart‘s intelligent quips have been replaced at this year’s Oscars by a shrieking Australian man in a pair of spangly trousers, and it’s also why the names of this year’s Oscars presenters are being kept secret.
It’s a decent enough policy – maintaining a spontaneous, anything-goes attitude towards the Oscars that can’t be ruined in advance. Or at least it would be, were it not for the fact that everyone is pretty much convinced that they know who’ll win all of the Oscars this year.
Thanks to a number of factors, like complex betting patterns and the fact that about four billion other awards shows have taken place in the last couple of months and THEY’VE ALL GIVEN PRIZES TO THE EXACT SAME EFFING PEOPLE, it seems like Slumdog Millionaire winning Best Picture at Sunday’s Oscars is a near-inevitability. Bloomberg reports:
?Slumdog Millionaire? had a 90 percent chance of winning as of yesterday, making it the biggest favorite since 2002, according to Intrade.com, a Dublin-based Web site. If Intrade and other oddsmakers are right, Mickey Rourke, Kate Winslet and the late Heath Ledger will all win statuettes. Nate Silver, of the Web site Fivethirtyeight.com, puts the film?s prospects at 99 percent.
Now, we should probably point out that this is all speculation – the Oscar winners aren’t guaranteed yet, and there’s still a chance that Slumdog Millionaire will walk away empty-handed on Sunday. Or, better still, that Kate Winslet won’t win her Oscar and a camera will be pointing right into her crumpled face at the exact moment that she realises someone has booted her dreams into mush yet again. Because, come on, why else would anyone want to watch the Oscars?
Also, we can’t help feeling that this trend of speculative analysis is killing the Oscars. While it’s good for films like Slumdog Millionaire and everything, if it continues any longer everyone will know if they’ve won or not before they even set out for the Kodak theatre. And then we’ll never get to see Eddie Murphy storm off in a huff when he doesn’t win again. Where’s the bloody fun in that?
BR says
Nothing to see really, I mean, we know who will win so whats the point?