Attention, Oscar Whiners: Get Over It!

Attention, Oscar Whiners: Get Over It!
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OK, that's it - I'm officially tuning out all further Academy Award whining, prognosticating, analyzing, deconstructing and every other kind of Oscar bloviating before the event itself.

There's almost a month to go til the event - and still a week or two until the ballots are due - but you'd think everything was already decided and set in stone. And so much of it is the chorus of bitter tears from critics and observers who can't believe - don't want to believe, don't want to go on living in a world where - The King's Speech wins over The Social Network.

This face-off was already being touted back in September, when the first huzzahs for Social Network were being trumpeted on the Internet, even as similar hosannas were issuing from the Toronto Film Festival, where The King's Speech was being unwrapped. And it's only gotten worse.

For a while - back when critics' groups were voting in December - it was all Social Network all the time. It seemed like an almost-daily occurrence that Social Network and its writer and director, Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher, collected another critics' prize.

Then, in the last couple of weeks, at least according to those "in the know," the tide shifted. The King's Speech won awards from industry groups - producers, directors, actors - whose members vote in the Oscar race, unlike critics. And suddenly the sky was falling: "What were they thinking?" one critic howled in print, adding, "They weren't thinking - they were feeling."

Which, to most critics, is the cardinal sin. You don't vote for a movie because it makes you feel; you vote for it because it makes you think.

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