The Academy Awards are tomorrow night, and since the WGA strike has been resolved, it is actually going to be a real awards show, with real celebrities. And people like Paris Hilton.

I must admit, I've been pretty bad at watching movies this year. Sure, I've seen the major blockbusters (Transformers, Live Free or Die Hard, The Simpsons, 300, etc), but I haven't made much time to see anything outside of that.

I always find it interesting that ninety percent of the time, the Oscars are completely irrelevant to what moviegoers like. For the most part, the Oscars are largely based on what the Academy thinks, rather than what the box office numbers say.

There are always exceptions to this rule. Take, for example, the 1998 Academy Awards. The film Titanic was nominated for 14 awards, won 11 of them, including Best Picture. It was also a huge blockbuster.

This year's best picture nominees are as follows: I've seen two of these films (No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood), and read the book version of Atonement. Most people that I have asked have seen Juno, and that's it. I don't think that it's entirely impossible to think that this year's version of the awards show is going to be virtually meaningless to the majority of filmgoers. It's not difficult to pick at least five movies from the past year that were awesome in their own right, but maybe were not award worthy. A quick informal poll (of Mack and myself) yielded these results:
  • Transformers (#3)
  • Simpsons (#12)
  • Live Free or Die Hard (#16)
  • Bourne Ultimatum (#7)
  • Pirates 3 (#4)
  • Shooter (#59)
  • Harry Potter 5 (#5)
  • Spiderman 3 (#1)
  • 300 (#10)
  • The Good Shepherd (Not on the top 150)
All of these films were blockbusters (with the exception of The Good Shepherd and Shooter), and none of them garnered any Academy Award nominations for any of the major categories, despite making piles of money at the box office in 2007. This is problemlatic to me, mostly because there's a huge disconnect between what people watch and what seems to be "important".

I teach films in school, and one of the things that my kids have a real problem with is how the films we teach are not "relevant" to what they like. I asked some of my grade 11 kids what kinds of movies they like, and they're all about stuff like "Borat" and 'Supertroopers" and other more 'mainstream' things. I did an exercise with them at the very beginning of the semester, and gave them a list of 15 films (all Oscar nominees from the past 3 years), and less than 5 percent of those films had been seen by anyone except for me.

That's not to say that they don't watch movies, but they don't watch the films that are supposedly important. The major problem with all of this is that when I say something like "film" in class, they get irritated. They think of films as the Oscar nominees, not something that is viewer friendly, which is what they call a movie. One of the things I'm trying to do is get them to see that films are not necessarily "artsy". We're doing a novel study of 'The Alchemist" in May, and I'm combining that with a film study of "Kingdom of Heaven", in hopes that I can get them to see that all films are not "too smart" for them.

If the Academy wants to continue to be a relevant organization, something needs to be done, or else the idea of an awards show becomes almost laughable, as no one will be watching since the films mentioned don't matter to the general moviegoing population.