If New Moon Doesn't Win Awards, What's the Point of Awards?

With the public gaga for stuff like Transformers and New Moon, why does Hollywood bother with awards?

Why does the movie industry even give out awards anymore? It's not like anybody cares what they think. New Moon was the biggest phenomenon of 2009, and the critics can't stand it.
—Glama, Detroit via the Answer B!tch inbox

Can't stand the movie, or can't stand that you could stand the movie—to the tune of an obscene $268 million domestically so far?

I could make up my own All-Twilight-Franchise Awards to please you people (Best Almost Kiss: Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner!) but that's already out there. It's called the MTV Movie Awards.

You're right, though. Increasingly, the movies Hollywood likes to honor are not the same movies people like you want to see. (The Hurt Locker was great, according to the Hollywood Foreign Press. Did you see it? Exactly.) There are some exceptions—I'll share some examples in a second—but the real question is why.

The answer may kind of insult you...

...and that's that Hollywood—the moviemakers and the critics—seems to kind of not like you.

In fact it just may resent you and your populist tastes real bad. At least, more than it did back when the Academy honored Titanic with the Best Picture crown.

No one can say for absolute certain whether today's Golden Globes nominations are a direct result of this film-geek resentment, or merely a schoolmarmish need to instruct us all on good taste, but it's the best guess box-office historians have got.

"Inherent in the awards process is that the Academy and other industry people want to be the ones who dictate the culture, so if the public has already chosen a movie before them, they'll naturally try to buck it," posits Brandon Gray, who runs numbers for Box Office Mojo. "Not to mention, as wannabe artistes and intellectuals, they think one must appreciate darkness, ambiguity, relativism, primitivism and the gutter among other things."

In other words, Hollywood knows you liked New Moon and Star Trek and Transformers 2—it's wallowing around in all that Twilight cash as I write this. But by nominating brutal fare like Precious and Hurt Locker for Globes and (I'm sure) Oscars, it's saying, "Here's what you should like—ya tools."

But it isn't working.

According to Gray, "2008's Oscar Best Picture nominees were the least popular as a whole in decades, despite Benjamin Button having passed $100 million at the box office," and the underdog appeal of Slumdog Millionaire.

How long has the gap between Hollywood and the masses been growing? For years now. The year 2003, when The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Seabiscuit and other popular titles were nominated, "was the last time the Best Pictures were popular as a whole. Each year since, there's been a tremendous disconnect overall."

Got your own theory as to why? Tweet me; would love to hear it.