Hm? What’s that you say? Oscar’s coming this weekend? How nice, where will he be staying? What? Oh, not Oscar like a person, the Oscars, the Academy Awards. Right, gotcha… yeah. Well, you see, I’ve been so busy at work and fretting over that whole flooded basement thing that I haven’t even thought about the Oscars this year.

Seriously, while everyone else in the blogosphere has been issuing their predictions and kvetching about who didn’t get nominated and all the usual stuff that people say about these things, I’ve been just a hairs-breadth away from total indifference. I mention this only because this is unusual behavior for me; I’ve followed the annual Oscar race pretty closely ever since my days working at a theater, and, once upon a time, I thought I was a pretty good handicapper when it came to picking the winners. But this year… well, it just hasn’t caught my interest, and I doubt if I’ll even bother watching the broadcast on Sunday night.

Partly, this is because I’ve seen only two of the nominated films — Good Night, and Good Luck and Brokeback Mountain. Partly it’s because I agree with all those predictions that say Brokeback is going to sweep; it just feels like one of those years, and the “total domination” scenario quite frankly makes for a pretty boring Oscar telecast. Partly it’s because I have no interest in Jon Stewart, this year’s host. He’s one of those so-called personalities that the kids seem to like but who has the same effect on me as Caffeine-Free Diet Coke: I just don’t see the point.

But mostly it’s because the whole award-show thing has finally reached critical mass for me; it’s all collapsing under the weight of its own self-importance. All the breathless, gushing press coverage about which designers the women are wearing, the gossip about who’s accompanying whom and who stayed home, the anxiety over whether someone will earn the dreaded seven-second delay for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time… who really cares, outside of the show’s producers, the watchdogs at the FCC, and the prudish far-right evangelicals? No doubt the Kodak Theater is one day going to implode into a black hole, just like Craig T. Nelson’s house in Poltergeist. At least that would be a spectacle and would therefore have some entertainment value; the actual awards are just no damn fun anymore…