• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

I don’t think there’s any doubt that Americans are a gambling people. As a nation, we love the appeal of get-rich-quick schemes, and it’s no surprise that the potential to make money by chance has made Las Vegas the country’s fastest-growing city.

We’ll bet on just about anything, from sporting events to the chances of an event happening. In “Guys and Dolls,” a classic American musical about, well, gamblers, a character is hailed and admired because at one point, he bet a hefty amount that one raindrop would beat another raindrop down a window. It’s not that far from the truth.

With the Super Bowl occurring in a few days, updated gambling lines are reviewed as seriously as a professor’s study guide for a final. But where will our attention turn come Monday morning?

Strangely enough, the Oscars. The Golden Globes are over, the nominations came out Tuesday, and before you know it, Entertainment Weekly will publish its annual arbitrary handicap of every Oscar nominee’s chance of winning, from Best Picture favorite “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” to Best Live-Action Short unknown “Squash.”

And like most things published in Entertainment Weekly, we’ll pretend to ignore it but secretly read it and love every word. And we’ll study it. And we’ll use it in our Oscar pools, thinking we have some sort of inside information, not realizing every other person in the pool has read the same magazine. Because honestly, how many people know enough about the nominees for Best Live-Action Short to be able to make a prediction on their own?

But there’s a difference between declaring the New England Patriots a seven-point favorite over the Carolina Panthers and, like last year, declaring Roman Polanski an 8-1 underdog to win Best Director (according to oddsmakers at www.betwwts.com). While the Panthers are capable of causing their own upset, Polanski’s win had nothing to do with Polanski competing against anyone. In other words, I doubt he was on the set of “The Pianist” thinking he had to direct a scene a certain way to draw attention away from Martin Scorsese (“Gangs of New York”), Rob Marshall (“Chicago”) and Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”), who were all favored above him.

And more often than not, movies made specifically to get Oscar attention don’t end up the favorites: See every Tom Cruise movie.

For the top six Oscars last year, only three favorites won, stressing the relative difficulty in handicapping the awards. But with underdogs winning half the statuettes, the situation should also spark questions over the accuracy and usefulness of such odds.

And beyond that, doesn’t it seem insulting to an underdog who wins to have been considered an underdog? Everyone knows the Oscars, or any award given out for artistic merit, are highly subjective, so having winners who weren’t “supposed” to win almost implies they shouldn’t have won at all, even though they did.

Daniel Day-Lewis (“Gangs of New York”) was a 4-5 favorite to win Best Actor last year, so when Adrien Brody (“The Pianist”), a 9-2 underdog, won, it felt as though Day-Lewis was stripped of an award he had already won. Upset victories have no place in awards shows because they hand out the awards before they’re handed out.

The whole idea behind having presenters say “And the Oscar goes to ...” instead of “And the winner is ...” is to acknowledge how subjective the awards are.

And do you really think Las Vegas oddsmakers or the staff of Entertainment Weekly knows better than the Academy who should win an Oscar? Don’t answer that question.

So consult your Entertainment Weekly while filling out your own Oscar ballot, but don’t treat it as if it were the Gospel. If you do, you’ll be depriving yourself of four fantastic alternatives.

Tracer thinks Shohreh Aghdashloo deserves to win for Best Supporting Actress, even though she is a 15-1 underdog. E-mail him your picks at jtracer@media.ucla.edu.