1. I don’t remember going to the movies at all, this last year. Honestly, nothing I read about any of them in the reviews would have moved me off a rock ledge overhanging a thousand-foot drop, let alone wasting nearly $10 and two and a half hours of my life.

2. Ooops, I did go to one movie, but only because Blondie dragged me to “Phantom of the Opera”. Nice costumes, very operatic music, principal performers’ voices not really strong enough for the materiel, though.

3. The Oscars are different from how many similar entertainment award shows— how?

4. Four hours of self-congratulatory pap, by over-dressed, over-bejewelled, over-paid nit-wits. Sorry, guys, I am easily bored; I already know I would want those four hours of my life back.

5. I go to movies to be amused, enthralled and entertained; not to be grossed out, have my intelligence (and my values) insulted, or be deafened by the soundtrack. Curiously, this means I have never gone to a Tarantino movie. I may have seen an early Stanley Kubrick movie or two, but I just may be remembering reading the Mad Magazine parody.

6. Characters in movies as sick, psychopathic, or just plain nasty people; somehow these are the award-winning performances, but if I wouldn’t want to spend ten minutes with their real-life version…. Why the hell should I spend two-hours plus, with them in the multiplex?

7. Curiously enough, the movies from the past that over time emerge as truly stellar, intriguing, develop a popular or cult following… they were usually pretty well ignored by the Oscars for the year they were considered.

8. Hollywierd is an insular little world, and for the last thirty years dripped covert contempt for those of us in fly-over country. This year, that contempt became overt. Right back at ya, Hollywierd.

9. I actually have a life, and have to go to work tomorrow, where no one there gives a damn about the Oscars, either.

10. There’s no Lord of the Rings move in the running, this year, so why bother?