There is an interesting piece on Slate regarding the battle lines being drawn between people who love Juno and thought its Best Picture nomination was just buttons and those who hate the movie, its dialogue, its soundtrack, and its screenwriter in particular. I personally find Diablo Cody's sudden ubiquity obnoxious -- I have issues with people who commoditize their misery, as did Cody in her self-serving runaway stripper memoir. But I haven't seen the movie. It's not that I don't want to, and I've heard enough positive recommendations from people whose judgement I trust that I'll see it on DVD eventually. I just don't go to movies, because I'm cheap.

Anyway... it's easy to compare the righteousness of movie fans who constantly perceive the legitimacy of the Academy Awards to be under siege with the kind of people who tear their hair out over guys like Tony Perez and Phil Rizzuto being in baseball's Hall of Fame. All of these self-styled defenders seem to have huge blind spots when it comes to a long historical record in the cases of both institutions when it comes to popular opinion drowning out artistic merit (often) or screwball choices that defy all rational analysis (also often). The Oscars serve a very significant self-congratulatory function for Hollywood. Creative types are inscure, and the moviemaking community in particular needs to have several major annual events where they get to remind themselves how good and right they are. The "Best Picture" award, for as long as I've followed it, seems to track not the best movies of each individual year but rather the incorrect piece of contemporaneously popular opinion that got bucked: Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven make westerns fashionable again and get statuettes, Gladiator does the same thing with swords-'n'-sandals epics, Titanic serves as penance for the movies' forgetting about the older female demographic for a couple of years, Lord of the Rings gets a big win for the science fiction/cult community to make up for the systematic cinematic butchery of every major SF fiction and/or comic book property in the years following... you see how it works. The Academy Awards are instant revisionist history.

It's been the conventional wisdom in the movie biz the last few years that when it comes to comedies targeted at young audiences, girls will go to see movies with boys in the lead roles but boys won't go to see movies with girls. Hence... American Pie, Superbad, Van Wilder, Harold and Kumar, Loser, Accepted, Road Trip... and so on with low comedies good, bad, and in between featuring nonthreatening young male leads. Juno, which has made $100 million by getting the guys who went to see all those movies to care about (or at least pay to go see) a female protagonist, has one of those instant revisionist "We were so wrong, but we have all now realized it simultaneously and will celebrate our new insight with the giving of awards and wearing of hideously impractical clothing" stories to it. Don't count it out as a big winner on Oscar night... particularly with so many of the "serious" nominees fitting that "far easier to appreciate than to watch," Criterion Collection kind of label.