Handicapping The Oscars: What’s The Point?

Handicapping Hollywood’s various awards shows used to be a simple matter of watching a lot of movies, and assessing which was the best. These days, you need a calculator, an official odds cheatsheet, and a serious knowledge of the industry’s increasingly absurd social order to even begin to make a prediction. “But don’t we risk losing some of the fun and surprise of awards night, by trying so hard to figure out something that is essentially unfathomable? Didn’t most critics get into arts writing because they didn’t want to grow up and become accountants?”