I'd like to thank...

Thus far, Ben Affleck has swept Awards Season.

Awards Season is one of my favorite times of the year because it brings a competitive vibe to the entertainment industry. You pick a person or film in each category, rooting for and defending them as you would your favorite professional sports team.

This year, the two films I was rooting for were eliminated during the playoffs. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, aka the people behind The Oscars, the most prestigious of all the awards shows, failed to nominate Argo director Ben Affleck and Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow. My initial reaction was one of anger and disappointment, but after digesting the news, I realized that life would go on. Argo won awards for Directing and Best Picture at both the Critics' Choice Awards and the Golden Globes. Jessica Chastain, who plays the lead character Maya in Zero Dark Thirty, won Best Actress at both (she has a great chance of winning The Oscar for Actress in a Leading Role, which would help to validate Zero Dark Thirty).

Though these awards essentially equate to regular season honors like offensive and defensive MVP, that doesn't mean that they're meaningless and should be forgotten.

--------------------

When The Academy expanded the Best Picture category from 5 films to a maximum of 10, I had the same reaction I did to the Affleck and Bigelow snubs. Since reviving this practice at the 82nd Oscars (it was suspended during the 16th), the winner for Directing has been the harbinger for the winner of Best Picture. Why bother with potentially 10 nominees when we know that only the 5 who are also up for directing have a real chance? The answer came to me a week after the nominees were announced.

Imagine the NFL without Wild Card teams? In recent years, the Packers, Steelers, and Giants have all won Super Bowls as Wild Card teams. This is a rather new phenomenon. Wild Card teams used to get demolished by the division winners. But now that the NFL has parity across the board (the reason it's the most popular sport in America), it isn't inconceivable for a Wild Card team to make a run in the playoffs.

2012 was a very strong year for films. Argo and Zero Dark Thirty entered Awards Season as teams who had bye weeks and were upset in the Championship Game by two Wild Card teams. Amour, an emotional foreign language film, and Beasts of the Southern Wild, a fantasy film with a performance for the ages by Quvenzhane Wallis, who at the time of filming was 6 years old, are tailor made for The Oscars. Winning an Oscar requires the team behind that film to think outside of the box. The Academy doesn't honor publicly lauded films, they honor the little guy, the film that stays true to the medium.

If the best and most flashiest team always won in sports, would we watch? The answer is no. The same goes for The Oscars. In a year when parity across all genres of film was paramount, the fact that two of the heavy favorites got knocked out by underdogs shouldn't upset or surprise anyone. Instead, it should be celebrated.