Here’s the thing: if you spend four and a half long hours glued to your television watching the Academy Awards — and I did last night, although I skipped most of the early speeches and spent the last half trading jokes about the ceremony with friends online — then I don’t think you’re really in a position to say that the awards ceremony is irrelevant and a complete waste of your time. Certainly you can critique the ceremony itself or find fault with some of its winners, some of its policies — most definitely its length — but to say that celebrities are inherently evil and then rant about how the Academy Awards are a meaningless exercise of self-congratulation that we as Americans should not be watching…well, maybe it’s just me, but isn’t that just a teensy bit hypocritical? If the show is such a waste of your time, why would you spend so much of your time watching it?

That is, I think, at least part of the problem with Cintra Wilson’s review of last night’s show in today’s Salon; she alternates almost schizophrenically between pointed (sometimes deserved) criticism and fanboy-esque prose that one would accept, maybe enjoy, but probably not admire in a weblog, much less in a professionally produced online magazine. She has interesting things to say, but just as often she’s embarrassingly angry or enthusiastic, declaring the Oscars “obscenely superfluous” while at the same time professing her love for elements of the show or individual presenters. Compare these two observations, for instance:

Again, maybe it’s just me, but do these even sound like they belong in the same article? And if the thrust of your argument is that the Oscars are “the gargantuan, ass-licking brainwash of the year,” why waste so much of your time anxiously discussing Tom Cruise’s teeth or Jennifer Lopez’s hair?