Why does anyone watch the Oscars?

Like so many award shows, the Oscars are 95% predictable from start to finish. Best screenplay for Milk, best adaptation for Slumdog Millionaire, best animation for Wall-E, best art direction for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, what a surprise!

And as this classic Onion piece riffs on, all the vacuous, self-righteous gasbaggery of the proceedings never fails to ensure that they elicit the opposite of the intended emotional response. You’re supposed to come out of it all happy and proud of gays for achieving mainstream acceptance and touched by poignant tales of poverty in India, and you end up a homophobic proponent of colonialism.

“Only if you’re a curmudgeon,” my girlfriend points out. Fair enough.

And okay, Ben Stiller’s crack at Joaquin Phoenix was funny.