Endless Oscar Predictions Ruining the Show?

As the film critic for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan loves the Oscars. But he hates the nonstop barrage of predictions that bombard us ahead of the show. His beef "is not that the pundits are often wrong but, frankly, that they are often right," he says. "The more academy votes and voters are studied, the more patterns emerge, the more identifiable signs and meanings become apparent, and the more the awards can be unceremoniously pinned to a board like a captured butterfly."

Where's the fun in that? Tomorrow night, for instance, you can safely wager that The King's Speech, Colin Firth, Natalie Portman, and Christian Bale will triumph. (Those aren't so much Turan's predictions as his begrudging acknowledgment that the forecasters have things figured out.) "I know that genie is never, ever going back into the bottle," he writes, "but part of me ... wishes that it could.