It’s Christmastime in the film industry – that fleeting moment spread over several tedious months when groups of card-carrying academy, union and guild members set aside their petty jealousies and secret hatreds to give each other a collective pat on the back for a mediocre job indifferently done. Yes, it’s awards season, represented most readily by the Oscars.

Today the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced their nominations of the films deemed most broadly appealing, least debated in terms of overall merit, and best indicative of a style and substance that hits a comfortable level of acceptable quality without being too innovative or intellectually challenging. The same people who brought you best-picture wins forDriving Miss Daisy, the audacious epic that dared show a black person and a white person actually being friends, Chicago, the murder-positive song-and-dance spectacle that provided the multi-untalented Richard Gere an opportunity to both sing poorly and dance ever more poorly, and A Beautiful Mind, which proved once and for all that insipid disease-of-the-week TV movies can no longer be claimed as sole property of the three-and-a-half major television networks, once again take it upon themselves to enlighten us simpletons as to which Hollywood movies were the good ones this year.

No one looks forward to this more than I do, because for me it can only mean one thing. Well, two actually. First, it means the garish train wreck that is the Oscar ceremonies is only a month away from horrifying and delighting me in ways that make me both fiercely proud and deathly embarrassed to be a film buff. I shudder with an almost orgasmic fervor, imagining what surreal nightmare of bad taste may be in store for me, disguised as a celebration of the cinematic crafts. Will it be able to equal my stunned amazement at the Lord of the Dance tribute to the art of film editing? Will it make me twitch and giggle as hard as when Rob Lowe and Snow White sang a firebrand duet of Proud Mary? Or will it make my vomit as copiously as when Whoopie Goldberg, in the single greatest moment of self-congratulatory bullshit in the middle of the ceremony that epitomizes self-congratulatory bullshit, couldn’t contain herself any longer and told the assembled audience of overpaid overhyped celebrities, “We’re so great”?

The second thing it means for me is free movies. As a member of Canada’s own Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television, I get to spend the next few weeks hopping from theatre to theatre, explaining to every dim bulb ticket machine jockey that yes indeed, my academy card entitles me to see all the Oscar-nominated movies for no cash down. Finally, I can sit through all those reputedly good movies I couldn’t be the least bit bothered to turn out for in the months leading up to this moment. Great movies, instant classics, modern masterpieces. Like the one…you know the one. It stars that guy, who was in the thing. And he, like, struggles against adversity and stuff. And guess what? He like, totally triumphs in the end. You know the one I’m talking about.

I can’t wait.

While you’re nosing around the site, check out the latest Longshot Comics Movie that adapts another one of 2003’s Hollywood releases. Suspiciously, this one didn’t get the Oscar nod. I can’t imagine why not. Oh wait, yes I can. Because it really really sucks.

Future updates of Movies in Longshot will be coming at the rate of one per week, so check in regularly.

I’m facing one of those rare situations when my plate is actually full. For the next little while, I’ll have just about all the work I can handle. Fries With That? starting up for a second round of episodes would have given me plenty to do between pitching and scripting as it is, but I also made the foolish mistake last month of telling the Writer’s Guild I’d be perfectly happy to act as a first round judge for this year’s Guild Awards.

Being a first round judge means I get to sort through one category worth of submitted fodder in an effort to weed it down for the judges who will make the actual decisions about who won what. It’s just like a nostalgic trip back to my days working as a reader, only this time I’m not getting paid fifty bucks a pop. The only real advantage is that my evaluation amounts to a simple ranking between one and ten for each script. Easy enough to fake if I were so inclined, but I’m too responsible to fob off on the job like that. Besides, some of the scripts actually look interesting, and there’s a few entries from my favourite Canadian TV show to go through. Confidentiality forbids me to mention which show that might be before the awards are divvied out, but I expect I’ll be biased in favour of those particular candidates.

My day job doesn’t end there, though. I’ve got some repair work to do on a feature screenplay I have in development, a major magazine submission I’ve been putting off for too many months, two other big jobs that might be on their way down the pike once some phone calls are made, and of course the final touches on this web site before we go live.

Look, I don’t wanna sound like I’m bragging or complaining here. It took years of work to get this busy and I can only hope it keeps up. I should be grateful, really I should.

But dammit, there are some video games out there in serious need of playtime. What are the poor bastards going to do without me?