Do Oscar bloggers matter?

By Steven Zeitchik

Now that we've become Oscar bloggers -- or Oscar-bloggers-in-print, a level lower -- we watch with deep investment/bemusement the closest thing to a pundit foodfight this side of a post-screening flicking of celery sticks in the Academy lobby.

David Poland, Patrick Goldstein and Dave Karger are the key players in this hurling of bloggy hors d'oeuvres. And it's a tough one to figure out. Because, see, normally when people argue over the relevance of a new medium, it's the supporters who say said medium is relevant and critics who say that such relevance is overstated.

But in the topsy-turvy world of blogs, the opposite happens. Here, commentators who level Oscar pundits for endless "moronic" posts imply those pundits have plenty of power, while the bloggers defend themselves by saying they don't have much power at all.

"Anyone who doesn't believe that the Oscars haven't been thoroughly hijacked by a gang of daffy, clown-suit-clad Oscar bloggers making endlessly moronic best picture predictions just hasn't been paying attention," is how Goldstein describes the non-inkstained set in a post that somewhat unwieldily laments the problem of too much Oscar media and two very specific posts he doesn't like all at the same time.

On the other side, defending bloggers' importance with an unlikely argument, is Poland. He writes: "'If "Oscar bloggers" had hijacked the Oscars, we/they would have an awful lot of power, no?"

The putative reason for all this chopping of trees in the Web forest is a post from EW's Karger which argued that real-world events like Obama's landslide and the passage of Prop 8 will affect Oscar voting -- the former because Obamoptimism would align with a movie that showcases humanity's goodness, and the latter because Oscar voters enraged by Prop 8 would vote correctively for "Milk".

We'll admit that the "Knight" point, imaginative though it may be, is a stretch, especially when there are so many tangible real-world factors at play for the film (like a desire to give the statue to a studio movie after it's resided for four of the last five years in specialty-ville, or the impulse to honor not just Heath Ledger but Chris Nolan, who has never been nominated as a director).

But the Prop 8 argument rings true. Regular readers may recall that in our debut Open Season column about the positioning of "Milk" that got just, oh, a little bit of attention, we addressed this very topic.

The main point of that column - not the three grafs about the quiet around the movie ahead of the San Francisco premiere but the bulk of the column, about the chatter sure to come after -- was that, with "Milk," real-world events would interact with an awards campaign in ways we hadn't seen in a long while.

Exhibit A for this, we wrote, was the battle over Prop 8.

"Milk's fight against California's anti-gay-rights Proposition 6 -- a drama the movie deals with in great detail -- spookily parallels the current California fight over the anti-gay-rights Proposition 8," we said. "A win for John McCain or Prop 8 may drive voters to cast a ballot for Penn (a lock for an Oscar nom) or best picture."

Karger is right, and Goldstein's argument that the theory is bunk because the voters don't take into account the real world doesn't hold up.

As for the battle over whether Oscar bloggers matter or are less relevant than a panhandler at a Treasury meeting, no one seems to acknowledge a third possibility: Both arguments are true.

There's yet to be an unambiguous case where bloggers decidedly swing an election away from the direction print reporters and ads were already tilting it -- no documentable evidence that they've been the decisive factor in producing or destroying a major awards possibility at any point in their history. Does anyone really think that the eight-month juggernaut that was "No Country for Old Men," the outpouring of Marty love for the "The Departed" or the late-surging "Crash" -- the three Best Picture winners in the blog era -- would have found a different fate had bloggers or the Internet not yet been invented?

And yet Web journalism, as it has so many other places, has changed the game. It has affected how consultants position movies and when they screen them, how competitors react to those movies, how print media review them. As a result of all this and more, they're a factor. Those "moronic predictions" -- whatever you think of their volume and accuracy -- have impacted the process.

Of course it's impossible to prove definitive parallels between blogging and voting, just as it's difficult to prove how outside events figure into a race.

But given the role that the zeitgeist has historically played in Best Picture votes -- where "Ordinary People" and "Kramer Vs. Kramer" took statues because divorce was entering the mainstream as both a phenomenon and social topic; where "Platoon" won because as a country we were finally beginnning to reconcile ourselves to the painful legacy of Vietnam; where "Crash" drew voters intent on declaring their racial awareness in a still-ethnically stratified Los Angeles --  the real world is undoubtedly a factor in the race, and a more potent one than any of us noodling around on the Web.