In about a week, the Oscar nominations will be announced, officially ending the season of Best of 2014 lists that starts in December. This stretch of time where journalists, critics, and Facebook friends discuss the best things they read, saw, and ate since last January has always made me prickly. It starts with feelings of irresponsibility -- I watch too many movies at home and don't go to the cinema often enough. Then it starts to feel a little boring -- yeah, I'm out of touch with the current cultural discourse, so what? Eventually, as the lists pile up, it starts to make me angry -- look, did anybody ask you to shove your favorite things in front of my face every day for a month? Don't you understand that I've got Christmas shopping to do and parties full of tolerable acquaintances to attend?

But the Oscar nominations, if they can be thought of as a big Best of 2014 list, don't bother me in the least. I look forward to them every year. There are many reasons for this, besides the fact that they signal the end of the month of lists. First, the nominations are just about the only list that doesn't come with a paragraph or two of preamble explaining the choices that will follow in what you're about to read. They're bold. Secondly, they don't stop at the list. They announce it, and then they give you time to go check out the stuff on the list (considerate), and then we all agree to meet again in late February to find out which things on the list were the very best (again, bold). In that period of time, we can go see movies that have already been in theaters for six months or that were brought back into theaters just to give us another chance. This is a period of forgiveness for irresponsible movie-goers, the most graceful gesture made by any industry to its fans.

That's all great, but the thing that makes the Oscar nominations the best Best of 2014 list is that they don't matter. They are a form of pure frivolity and overblown pomp, and it doesn't matter if you see any of these movies. You can still bet in the office pool based on what you read about the movies, and you can still watch (or hate-watch) the ceremony with the same involvement.

This is why I like books like Bringing Up Oscar by Debra Ann Pawlak. It's the story of early “flickers” and the creation of Hollywood, of guys like Sidney Grauman, who went to the Yukon with his dad in 1898 trying to strike it rich in the Alaskan Gold Rush, and eventually brought his gold fever to tinseltown. Pawlak tells the story of the Warner Brothers, shoe cobblers who bought their first film projector in 1904 and made makeshift theaters, bringing in their younger brother Jack to “sing and recite poetry in between showings, which guaranteed the audiences' quick exit making room for the next group.”

These little stories of business acumen, artistic innovation, and glitzy celebrity help locate the core of what's enjoyable about the Academy Awards. Whether or not you see Selma, Inherent Vice, and Boyhood, you can still watch the red carpet nonsense – sadly, without Joan Rivers this year. You can still make fun of the chuckle-inducing (at best) opening musical number, and try to catch the least flattering cutaway to a movie star in the audience, or pretend to be one of the few who understands that even when the writing tries to be ironic it still manages to be self-congratulatory. From the host onstage to the fans half-watching at home, everyone manages to simultaneously know and forget that this is utter nonsense, grandiosity for its own sake, and that the best movies weren't even nominated. The next day we'll complain, like always, that it was way too long. But you kept watching, didn't you?

Nathan Gelgud illustrates Debra Ann Pawlak's Bringing Up Oscar, 2015.[/caption]