Awards season is upon us!

The Academy Awards, Hollywood’s most pretentious night, is just around the corner, and it seems as if the battle for best picture will be one in which America’s most honest president and Ben Affleck duel head-to-head. Both Lincoln and Ben Affleck’s Argo are respectable pieces of film that portray politics with vigor and unrelenting tension. Both films deserve to be recognized and awarded, but that doesn’t mean that tinsel town’s favorite circus, known by most as award season, isn’t broken.

From the Golden Globes to the Screen Actors Guild Awards to Oscar night, the first two blustery months of the year are filled with award shows that honor film’s best. Typically on Sunday nights they interrupt some of ABC’s worst shows - including both Revenge and Happy Endings - that I admit are some of my favorite guilty pleasures. Don’t get me wrong. I love the thrill of Oscar night as much as the next heterosexual male that actually pays attention to the entertainment industry and doesn’t mind seeing films in which everything doesn’t have to go boom or every leading female doesn’t have to be a half-naked Megan Fox. But I can’t help but think that there must be a reason that most of America is uninterested in the Oscars.

Before I explain why the Oscars seem so awful, let’s all agree on one thing - Ryan Seacrest is the devil. While he might not have horns blooming from his forehead, the E! News host annually interviews all the big stars as they arrive on the red carpet for the Academy Awards. In the process, the talentless host kisses the derriere of every starlet in town and acts as if America loves him just as much as it did Dick Clark circa 1976. Plus, his bleached tips are just really out-of-style and annoying.

Perhaps that’s the first reason America isn’t digging the Oscars, the festival that is the red carpet. While the rest of America is sitting on their coaches outfitted in sweats and cramming Cheetos down their gaping gullets, Hollywood parades its nearly perfect genetics in nearly perfect clothing looking like gods in the process. Although, I don’t mind watching Sofia Vergara flaunt her hourglass body in seamless dresses, the red carpet spectacle is truly unnecessary and makes the rest of us feel like poor hippos.  
Secondly, the Oscars, as I noted before, remains the most pretentious award show in all of La La Land. The fact that a French film that has grossed nearly nothing at the box office titled Amour has received a Best Picture nod instead of the critically acclaimed and highly successful The Dark Night Rises doesn’t mean Batman wasn’t any good. Instead it shows that Hollywood chooses to honor Art House over memorable films as the year’s best. I’m still steamed that not one Harry Potter film was ever nominated for best picture, despite the fact that it remains the most successful film franchise in history and was lauded by critics worldwide.

The last reason why the awards may seem so awful is the shows themselves drag on. Nobody cares that Anne Hathaway wants to thank her mother, and we don’t need to see Adele moan her way through another rendition of “Skyfall.”

The Academy Awards, while both parts exciting and excruciating, do have an important place in society. They let the uncultured majority of America know what films actually matter and that there is still art in filmmaking. Unfortunately, they go about delivering this message and honoring those that deserve to be recognized in all the wrong fashion, leaving behind a mess of unnoticed glitter and gold as the circus leaves town until next year.