THB #648: 8 Weeks to Oscar - The Loneliness of the Long Distance Prognosticator

I’ve been doing this for a really long time. About 30 years, focusing closely each year on the Oscar season, starting in the summer, as the horses are put in the gate and sent out to race in all the various ways that they are. (I hate the overused metaphor… but hard to fight it.)

A lot of things have changed over the years. But this remains a simple fact…

It’s not about me.

This self-awareness was hard to commit to back in the 1990s and it is nearly impossible, it seems, in this decade of the 2020s.

You have to have some ego to think that anyone should pay any attention to your opinion… but this has become, like film criticism, a subject that now somehow invites the claim of professionalism for every person who has an opinion.

I have nothing against people having their opinions. The Oscar season, like sporting events, inspires passions and rooting and people thinking they know best. Idiots, like myself, promoted the idea of there being a structure and landmarks that can be measured throu…