I don’t know why I keep watching the Oscars year after year. It’s not like it was back in the old days when I worked at the theater. Back then, I saw pretty much every movie that came out within a week or two of its release, I had very strong opinions about them all, and I enjoyed the validation that the Oscars provided, either by honoring the movies I liked or by giving me the chance to feel superior to those jerks on the Academy when they honored the stuff I didn’t like.

Times change, though. I still see a helluva lot of movies compared to the average joe or jane, but I find that I don’t keep up terribly well on the current stuff anymore, at least not on the stuff that the Academy has been favoring in recent years. This year, for example, of all the films nominated in the major categories (i.e., Best Picture, Best Director, and the acting awards), I’ve seen exactly three: Juno, Michael Clayton, and Sweeney Todd. Partly that’s because Salt Lake is pretty far down the distribution road for almost everything except the big-name blockbusters. Independent films, period dramas, arthouse fare, foreign movies, and documentaries tend to arrive here weeks or months after the coastal cities see them, and then they don’t stick around for very long, which means I often miss the ones I’m interested in because I can’t manage to fit them into my schedule during their limited runs. The bigger problem, however, is that I seem to be increasingly disconnected from the movies that critics and many intellectuals consider “important.” Important movies tend to be serious movies, and the serious movies that seem to be in vogue these days usually strike me as too dreary and/or too weird to make me feel really enthusiastic about giving up two hours of my precious leisure time.

Case in point: I find I’m almost utterly indifferent to the two biggies that everyone was banking on winning Best Picture last night, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. I’m sure they’re fine films that are everything their admirers say they are. But they just don’t appeal to me. I guess I’m not in the proper headspace at the moment to want to see dark ‘n’ gloomy pics about reprehensible people doing reprehensible things. That’s not to say I no longer like dramatic movies. Quite the contrary, I probably watch more drama than anything, and I liked Michael Clayton a great deal. But the dramas that I find intriguing are not awash in the grim-faced certainty that the world is fetid stinkhole inhabited by predatory sociopaths who grind up everyone they encounter, and that’s definitely the vibe I get from No Country and Blood. Perhaps I’m wrong about what these movies are all about — my apologies if I’m misjudging them — but as I said, I’m just not in a receptive place for those sorts of stories at the moment.

So, coming back from that tangent, if I haven’t seen the nominees, why do I bother watching the Oscars? It’s always the same stale jokes about the length of the proceedings, the awesomeness of Jack, etc. I find the production numbers interminable. But I do like seeing who’s there and who’s not, and what my old heroes are looking like these days, and I enjoy the video-clip montages. (Last night’s joke montages on the use of binoculars and periscopes were pretty funny, I thought.) And I have to be honest: I like sharing in the emotions of the nominees, vicariously experiencing their joy and (frequently) surprise when they win, commiserating with them in their disappointment when they lose.

What I really like, though, are the moments of unscripted authenticity. The moment from last night that most stands out for me was when Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova won for the Best Original Song, a ballad called “Falling Slowly” from one of those arthouse movies that I haven’t managed to catch yet, an Irish indie called Once. The two of them were so obviously stunned that they’d shut down frickin’ Alan Menken, and so warm and genuine in their acceptance speeches. And what made their moment all the more affecting was the way Irglova got cut off by the music, only to have host Jon Stewart return her to the stage a short time later to let her say what she wanted to say. I don’t know if that was gallantry on Stewart’s part or some unseen show runner somewhere — the cynical voice inside me notes that the broadcast came in a little short, so maybe somebody just said, “ah, what the hell…” — but it was a decent thing to do, and small gestures of simple human decency always give me a warm little glow. And that, I suppose, made watching the Oscars last night worthwhile…