[UPDATE: Read this terrific article from the Chicago Tribune.  It casts an even bleaker picture of the upcoming ratings and touches on some important points I don't mention.]

That headline does not refer to my being annoyed that my favorite film of 2008 was not nominated for Best Picture Director, or Adapted Screenplay because I personally thought it deserved to be.  This isn’t a fanboy rant — my favorite films of the year very rarely get nominated for Best Picture, so I’m over it.

What I am saying, instead, is that the Academy seems determined to destroy itself.

The Oscar ceremony has been faced with a ratings crisis over the past few years: as the Academy nominates more and more boutique indie movies and fewer movies that people actually see, less people watch.  Ratings for the ceremony aren’t at their peak when there’s a hotly contested race, like Crash vs. Brokeback Mountain.  They’re at their peak when there’s one massive blockbuster that gets a ton of nominations, like Titanic or The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.  Nominating The Dark Knight for Best Picture would’ve guaranteed a ratings boost.

Hold on a second, you say, from all this ratings talk.  The Academy votes for what they think are the best movies, right?  Integrity is better than ratings!

Not exactly.  Two points need to be addressed:

1.) The Oscars have always been political. It’s not about the best movies, it’s about which actors they like and who’s pushing the hardest: which studio spends the most on advertising, which celebrity goes on the right talk shows.  In 1999, Miramax’s advertising budget — which multiple full-page “For Your Consideration” ads in the Hollywood trade papers — was what led Chocolat to be nominated for Best Picture.

2.) The Academy has an inherent bias. This is going to happen with any finite voting body, which is why it hasn’t been considered that big of a deal for so long.  They really like Holocaust movies.  They really like period-piece dramas.  They like movies with Kate Winslet and Sean Penn and Russell Crowe and all of those so-called “awards-caliber” actors.  They hate comedies by anyone except Woody Allen.  They tend to award movies that come out at the end of the year and not ones that come out in the beginning.  Since so many of them live in L.A. or N.Y., they tend to ignore movies set in middle America (think Into the Wild).  Since so many of them are old men, they tend to nominate lots of pretty young girls (think Marisa Tomei, Juliette Binoche, Jennifer Connelly, Kate Hudson, Amy Adams, etc).

The problem has become that the Academy is now out of touch with reality.  The Dark Knight was far and away the most successful movie of the year with audiences.  It was also one of the most successful movies of the year with critics.  The Academy didn’t seem to get the memo.

I can’t overemphasize this enough: they’re stubbornly and ignorantly digging their own grave.

When you consider what got nominated in its place, things start to look really bad.  The surprise nominee was none other than The Reader: a Holocaust movie.  Starring an Oscar-friendly actress (Kate Winslet).  Who gets naked.   And it was released by the Weinstein brothers — the former heads of Miramax.  Put that way, it’s a wonder anyone thought The Dark Knight had a chance at all.

This bothers me so much because it’s bad for the movie business as a whole.  With smaller audiences, the boutique movies that the Academy thinks its rewarding won’t get enough attention.  Ratings will continue to decline.  The Academy will fade into complete irrelevance — in fact, I think it just did.  Did I mention that they also failed to give Gran Torino a single nomination?  They love Clint Eastwood, and Gran Torino is Eastwood’s biggest hit in years.  But whoops, it’s making money, so it must not be worth any awards.  I thought 2009 was going to be all about change?