Everything That's Wrong with This Year's Awards Season

Zhang Ziyi is nominated for an NAACP Image Award. I know you don't technically have to be African-American to qualify for these things, but, just... I mean. Doesn't this just seem like some kind of last straw in some over-active publicist's carpet-bombing of awards-voting bodies? (In another note to the NAACP nominators: that Best Actor slot you doled out to Laurence Fishburne in Assault on Precinct 13 or Shemar Moore in Diary of a Mad Black Woman might have hung a little better on, say, Jeffrey Wright in Syriana.)

Anyway, it's a crazy busy week around here, but I really will try to scrape together some Oscar nomination predictions by Tuesday morning. It would help if I cared about any of this year's front-runners. Aside from outside shots for Joan Allen, Terrence Howard, Jeff Daniels, Maria Bello, or Amy Adams, or anything for The New World on the technical side, it's hard to even think of a nomination I'd truly be excited by. I always thought it would be a grand day when David Cronenberg finally made the Directors' list, which I expect him to, but I just don't dig A History of Violence enough to get jazzed about even that prospect—and even at that, I'd take him in a cake walk over Lee, Clooney, Meirelles, Spielberg, Haggis, or, for God's sake, Woody Allen or James Mangold.

Whatever. I'll throw something together, but in a turn of events so mind-bogglingly mismatched to everything I thought I knew and understood about my life, I am waaaaay more eager to find out who gets Auf Wiedersehen'd on Wednesday night than I am to watch Good Morning, America on Tuedsay at 8:30am.