I'm late to the table on this one -- well, been meaning to get a post up -- but Tom O'Neil called up Sasha Stone last week to discuss the blood-sniffing detestment of Oscar blogdom by certain...parties.  It's a hoot to see the fire returned, especially when it's, in a word (Stone's word), silly to discover such territory-drunk or otherwise pompous musings making it to print in what some might consider respectable publications.

Stu VanAirsdale, meanwhile, continues to wonder why Vanity Fair is paying him to blog about the Oscars, offering this bit of insight in a valiant attempt to remain separatist:

I stop, however, at O’Neil’s muscular line of jive about this magnanimous “discussion of what great film is.” I guess I admire anyone who would climb so far out on a limb to say Citizen Kane was the superior film of its year or argue that “a Best Picture doesn’t exist.” That’s not a discussion, though; that’s a shrug. Really, though, the Oscars aren’t “absurd” at all—it’s Hollywood recognizing its own, no more or less “absurd” than the local board of Realtors inducting oldsters into its Hall of Fame. What’s absurd is that Tom O’Neil and Sasha Stone can record a phone call about the tradition of Oscar blogging, and not only will the L.A. Times post it online, but writers at publications from The New York Times to, yes, Vanity Fair and beyond will spend collective hours parsing it. That is absurd.

Is it really so absurd?  Is it really a symbol of decay, a foreshadowed apocalypse?

You tell me after you read the rest.