I’ve been running my Oscars website for eleven years. It used to be called Oscarwatch.com until I was sued for copyright infringement. I changed the site to Awards Daily and it has never been more popular, or profitable. I have always been embarrassed to admit to “real people out there in the world” what I do because their answer is always the same: The Oscars are meaningless. That is when they are being charitable. What they usually say is “the Oscars are so lame.” And that has been sort of true but for every once in a while when their role in the whole ugly game shifts ever so slightly in a more interesting direction.

What I have finally concluded, though, after these many years of day in and day out Oscar watching is that they don’t vote for the best. They vote for their favorite. They vote for what they “like” best. That makes it far less of a meaningful award than if they were looking at things that matter in the long run. Films that have lasting impact are not films that are easily digested in one viewing, I don’t think. Frankly, it’s a miracle the great films that have won managed to impress the 6,000 people who vote on the awards, chief among them the last four of five wins: No Country for Old Men, The Departed, The Hurt Locker. Slumdog Millionaire is even a better film than the film that is about to sweep the Oscars.

The funny part is, I got into the Oscar watching business knowing this. My premise when I started was “how was it that a movie like Citizen Kane lost against a movie like How Green Was My Valley.” My pursuit of this question took me, again and again, down the road of cynicism, like everyone else in the world who thinks the Oscars are meaningless because of their bad choices. Well, it’s a mixed bag, isn’t it. The Oscars have many fans too – they have fans who love their history, for instance. Journalists will always lead an obit with “Academy Award winner so and so” as if that means anything at all. What it means is that they were once popular with their peers.

The King’s Speech is a very very good film. It is held up by one of the year’s best performances in Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. It is a film that is affecting people everywhere. Who wouldn’t be affected by it though? It is a tried and true sentimental formula that works. There is nothing new here. There is nothing innovative. It is simply a good story that may or may not be completely true. It’s mostly true. The performances are true. But what is most astonishing about this year’s Best Picture winner (all over but the shouting) is how bland it is standing next to the admittedly more difficult to respond to emotionally but brilliant nonetheless main rival, The Social Network.

Nothing about The Social Network makes sense to people “out there in the world.” They see it and they think it’s good – but they don’t recognize its greatness right off the bat. The critics did. The critics put their full might behind the film because, guess what, it needed it. And even that wasn’t enough.

Why does it matter to me that a film like The Social Network win the Best Picture Oscar? Because it would mean that, as my friend Scott Feinberg once said, the Academy Awards can step out of their pre-programmed go-vote-like-a-lemming mold and give a better written, better directed film their win. It would be nothing short of a miracle if this happened. It won’t. And this year will go down as one of the most baffling of all. The King’s Speech winning not just over The Social Network, but over Black Swan, Inception, True Grit, Winter’s Bone — it is such a giant mistake on their part. The actors should win. The screenwriter. But the best picture of 2010 is, in no way, shape or form, The King’s Speech. No one can even argue that with a straight face. People vote for it ONLY because they like the characters.

And if that’s so, if that’s what it really is when you boil it down, then there is no point in thinking or hoping that anything is ever going to really change. So, it’s now a matter of seeing them for what they really are: one small step up from the People’s Choice awards.

I make a living off of the Oscar race. I make a good living, in fact. But I have never felt so much like it was the grandest of all time-wasters as I do during this, the worst Oscar year since Crash. Even with Crash, we didn’t see it coming. With the King’s Speech I saw it coming but I couldn’t believe, refused to believe, that any thinking body would give that film its award for Best Picture with all of these other magnificent films to choose from.

It is the Oscar race itself that is wrong. The King’s Speech people did not want to be in the Oscar race particularly (although you don’t make a period film with hints of Nazi-ism and not think about the Oscars). But it was a formula that was having an impact on audiences. It was testing extremely well. The critics tend to vote on films that are different from what came before. Or they vote on cinematic excellence. We are now seeing just how the Oscar race really works and believe me, folks, it is not a pretty picture.

I have to admit that my opinion on the whole thing, on the Oscars, on my participation in the race is at an all-time low. I’m simply grossed out by the process anymore. It’s just such a grand waste of my precious time I don’t even know where to begin to try to dig myself out. I can’t imagine beginning another year of a futile exercise of choosing the most watered down winner.

The only way to continue with it is to recognize them and accept them for what they are. It’s like Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People (a great film that beat a better film, Raging Bull) — Judd Hirsch tells Timothy Hutton that he just has to accept the limitations of his cold, unfeeling mother who loved her other son more. Her lack of love for him was no reflection on him. Just as their majority vote is no reflection on the better films that were made this year. Only conclusion: they mean nothing.

So I will have to be satisfied with this conclusion. Eleven years later. Why did Citizen Kane lose the Oscar for Best Picture? They liked the other movie better.