Sometimes it actually works out that Oscar manna falls upon the year’s worthiest movies, but this year is one of grim forebodings. For instance, there are nine nominees for Best Picture; I wouldn’t have put any of the nine anywhere near my list of the year’s best movies. But the problem with the Academy Awards isn’t the unreliability of the Academy—which, judging from past performance, is utterly foreseeable—but, rather, the unyielding routine to which it answers. Just as locks are designed so that each can be opened by only one key, so the categories of the Oscars need to be reconfigured each year to make sure that the actual best movies are the only ones that can reasonably correspond to them. It’s the “Jeopardy” version of the Oscars: the movies and the artists are the answers; the award categories, the questions.

Last June, long before the season was upon us, I bestowed an award in advance on the assumption that no worthier candidate would emerge: the Oscar for Best Use of the Word “Clinically” to “Damsels in Distress,” for a discussion regarding being “clinically depressed” and the line of dialogue: “Have you been to a clinic?” But as the rest of the year’s movies appeared, other categories were revealed, like photographic prints in a developing bath (Best Darkroom Scene: “The Master”)…