If there's a hell, it might look, feel and sound like the slapfight between aggrieved Oscar bloggers Patrick Goldstein, David Poland and Tom O'Neil, who today aired their tired tussle for all the world to overlook. But with your awards-season intelligence at stake, you really mustn't miss a minute of the wheezing action that so influences how Hollywood's biggest prizes are distributed every year. Your highlight reel follows the jump.· Back before the Internet, Patrick Goldstein used to sit at an old-fashioned typewriter and daydream and have the whooooole Oscar beat to himself at the LA Times. Then came bloggers, whom he couldn't read on his typewriter. Word got back to him they were writing about the Academy Awards! The effrontery! Grumpy Goldie upgraded and eventually wound up blogging himself, culminating in today's bitter screed arguing: "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." He specifically referred to political commentary like yesterday's insane EW item "How Obama Helps Batman," but the point was clear: Patrick misses his typewriter! · Not one to back down from an opportunity to write 5,000 words of self-defense from a piece where he isn't even mentioned, early blog adapter David Poland fired back:
[W]e don’t all think like you, Patrick. Sorry. Honestly, I seem to recall you having a broader mind a few years back. But lunch by lunch with agents and studio execs and hack producers trying to get you to peddle their wares, you seem to have forgotten that ideas do not live and die in your cul de sac… except when they are in your word processing program… you BLOGGER!
Oooooohh, that's hateful. But the first rule of Oscar Club is that you don't talk about Oscar club — especially the part about the clown suit. · Speaking of which, skin-crawling awards freak Tom O'Neil looked down at his floppy shoes and jump suit with animal balloons dangling from its belt loops, grabbed his big red nose and honked out his own reply:
If Goldstein wants to take aim at anything, why not those best-picture victories by Gandhi or Dances With Wolves or the fact that one was denied to what the American Film Institute repeatedly hails as the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane?
No, Tom, you'll do, but thanks! Is it March yet?