Forget the actual Oscars. Increasingly, the highlight of awards season is the sudden influx of Anonymous Oscar Ballots, in which actual Oscar voters scurry away to various industry publications to explain why they voted the way they did.
To be clear, the fun of these pieces isn’t getting to hear film-making veterans, who intrinsically have more insight into the production of feature films than a member of the public, laud the work that most impressed them this year. No, the fun of it is that these people are cartoonishly catty and vindictive, and it’s nuts to hear them indiscriminately badmouth everyone in sight.
