..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Week Three - 122 Days to Go
Channel #2

Can you smell it?

Come on, take a good, deep whiff…

There. See. It's the smell of shit.

Get used to it. Because we're going deep into it. If the first weeks of The Awards Season has offered us anything, it is a pretty good sense that the media, especially Big Media, has come to the dance with their guns drawn, ready to shoot at anything that moves, whether it deserves shooting or not.

As always, the story of the Oscars will be written by the movies and time. A combination of marketing, publicity, hype, timing, luck, personalities, coincidence and surprise will combine with the movies themselves. And within days of being told the ingredients of the stew - first in December with the critics groups and then with the Oscar nods in late January - most of us will slip right into the "I knew it" sensibility of believing that it was all inevitable from the start. Finally, when the awards are handed out and we start looking at whether John Travolta in a wig can compete with Johnny Depp with a barber's blade, we will quickly forget. "Who won Best Adapted Screenplay again?"

But in the meanwhile, we are in a media crisis that isn't getting any better with every repeated comment that the L.A. Times is a hugely successful business, making 20% on its annual expenditures. (Ironically, that's better than any movie studio did last year.) Last year was the warm-up. This year is the war zone.

Last year, the L.A. Times waddled into the Oscar business with the ever-smirky weight guesser Tom O'Neil and added sidekicks in the well-liked but unemployed Steve Pond and the well-liked but little-read Elizabeth Snead. They tried to drag Horn & Goldstein into the mix and The Boys finally allowed that they would spend 5 minutes chatting - sometimes over a phone - about the season for an audio snark that was called a Podcast even though it did not behave like one.

This year, Your Hometown Fishwrap brought longtime Hollywood Reporter ad sales queen Lynne Seagal aboard to try to build the awards franchise. She immediately worked on getting the paper to put into weekly print the very materials that no one wanted to read online last year. (It doesn't help that the print edition of The Envelope will have a 2 week lag time, so things you are reading in print might be weeks out of date by the time its on your doorstep… even if you're paying premium prices for ads.)

Patrick Goldstein's weekly column has, without any official announcement, become a part of The Envelope… which will make it interesting if he plans on doing his annual attack on the internet bloggers along with his annual misguided pick for Best Picture. (Dear God, for Patrick's sake, don't let him anywhere near Blood Diamond!) What is more amusing to watch than someone who likes to attack you in print becoming what he accused you of being and having to flip flop ever so gingerly?

And you can see the once-singular, reined in by the LAT, John Horn being aimed at more and more Oscar stories. Of course, John and Patrick are two of the most experienced, intelligent guys on the movie beat anywhere. But instead of aiming these guys at the stars, they seem to be targeting the same pile of dirt that everyone else is aiming at. A shame.

Meanwhile, on the other coast, the New York Times is trying to make sure that its dream of its entertainment section being "the third trade" isn't forgotten, though they are playing it a bit cooler. The Bagger will be back soon. And stories are flying fast and furious, even if they are overly aggressive and lack the real authority that The Paper of Record believes in so strongly.

And in the process, the two biggest newspapers that are really chasing down Oscar - along with the not-quite-doing-much-they-haven't-done-before USA Today that rarely chafes - get caught offending people like Paramount Vantage and Team Babel by jumping on old gossip and trying to turn it into new "exclusives." This is how the Los Angeles Times ends up running a link to a stolen copy of a song from the unreleased Dreamgirls and a couple of weeks later hypothesizing that the film could be knocked out of the race by an angry (if she's angry) Diana Ross. This is how The New York Times ends up submarining Clint Eastwood for no other reason than they couldn't wait a week to see how the story developed.

But Time also got into the act, mocking a World Trade Center event with ugly inferences and misleading suggestions.

And those are the adults in this media universe of ours.

The feeding frenzy this week is over Borat. Late next week, it will be The Pursuit of Happyness. The week after that, maybe Notes on A Scandal. And then Dreamgirls, unveiling nationally for press on November 15.

Controversies will be at a premium. Lesbianism in Notes. An almost exclusively black cast in Dreamgirls. Trying to lurk into the personal life of Happyness' Christopher Gardner. Rinko's vagina. The fictional star of Last King of Scotland. The real sex life of the lead character of Catch A Fire. The Nazi in The Good German. The Virgin Mary's pregnancy. How many interviews is Eddie Murphy doing? Etc., etc., etc.

Who will be the first to call it The Year Of The Blackademy Awards… and get yelled at for their trouble? Not me!

But the possibility of a blacklash is a real issue that will not likely be discussed. And there is something to be said for that, as it would require some serious reporting and a real sensitivity about the subject, not a glib, "The Academy Goes Black, But Will It Go Back" headline we can all see coming.

Of course, there will be other controversies and other misleading stories and all kinds of aggressions we can't even imagine yet. And with so many of us in the sandbox, throwing sand and clawing for canapés, this might be the least pleasant season ever.

And then it all comes down to Martin Scorsese's acceptance speech. Will he thank Harvey? That really is the most important story - once we get past Tara Reid's sad boob story - isn't it?

The Charts
Best Picture
Best Actor
Best Actress
Best Screenplay
Best Director

Week Two: Hope Floats
Week One: Ready, Steady ... Gold, Cat, Gold!
The August 11 Preview

- Email David Poland