Saturday, I saw The Tale of Princess Kaguya. Sunday, I saw the third Hobbit movie and made arrangements to go see Selma at some point. This evening, I made further arrangements with someone else to see Birdman and shifted a bunch of things to the top of my Netflix queue. A friend has invited me over to watch The Grand Budapest Hotel with her. In short, it is Oscar season, and I am continuing my annual tradition of attempting to see as many of the nominees as possible before the ceremony.

Why?

It is, after all, a legitimate question. Obviously, I am not a member of the Academy. Not even close. My first cousin once removed is, I believe, in SAG, and that’s about as close as I get. What’s more, while I am an amateur film critic, writing both here and on my personal Letterboxd page, I am not a critic that anyone who doesn’t actually know me actually cares about. I have twenty-eight whole followers on Letterboxd, at least one of whom is listed as following literally hundreds of people, so how much attention does that leave for me? While I am fascinated by film, while I read about it and watch hundreds of movies a year, I’m not actually a figure of any sort in the industry.

It certainly isn’t out of any enormous respect for the Academy. I once wrote a very long piece about places where I thought the Academy had gone wrong just with Best Picture winners. (It appears to have been eaten by another Rotten Tomatoes site redesign, and I’m angry at myself for not saving it anywhere else.) I could go on for quite some time about all the missed nominations and misplaced winners, and I think I can even get back to the first year of the awards with it.

I could also talk about the horrific lack of balance in the Academy itself. Speaking as a woman, I have a bit of a personal interest in that one, and I think it’s pretty clear that nominations and wins have been coloured by that imbalance. I think it’s even statistically worse than Hollywood as a whole, though I’d have to look it up.

Yet one of the pleasures I take at the prospect of owning my own home is that I may finally have a reasonable place in which to hold an Oscar party every year again, something I haven’t had since my landlord got rid of the cable in the cabana. I can tell you enormous numbers of past winners and nominees, and I have seen seventy-five out of eight-six Best Picture winners. (Though I admit that’s as much the library project as any kind of effort on my part.) Possibly seventy-six; I can’t remember if I’ve seen Going My Way or not.

What’s more, the ceremony itself is often ridiculous. I actively encourage people to seek out certain Original Song musical numbers—the one for “Theme from Shaft” is the most gloriously ’70s thing ever captured on television—but many others are frankly terrible. Not helped, let’s face it, by the fact that the nominees are sometimes terrible. There has not been a single year since I started faithfully watching that I couldn’t give advice on how to improve the actual staging of the ceremony, including such obvious ones as “you know, the people at home do actually want to see the tribute reel, too.”

And yet, and yet. I’m working out details of menu for Oscar party even though it’s a potluck as always. I’ll be buying candy to give out for my traditional “you get chocolate if you’ve actually seen a winner” awards. (Much better than a pool!) And I’ve already had the Meryl Streep argument like six times since nominations were announced. So why?

For one thing, I think the Oscars are oddly capable at capturing moments. Okay, there are misses, one of which I’ll be doing for the second round of Lovefest over on The Dissolve next month. On the other hand, I think it’s all those Titanic wins that finally allowed us to have a surfeit of Titanic and then move on. Or look at the Best Picture nominees of 1967—there was the old hold out of Doctor Doolittle, but the other four were about race relations and/or some sort of rebellion, even if it’s Benjamin Braddock’s rather tepid sort. I could frankly write an entire piece of the significance of 1940’s slate of Best Picture nominees as the US was poised on the brink of war.

For another, I really do genuinely believe that looking at a year’s slate of nominees will probably include most of that year’s actually best films. Not all of them, and the winners may be wrong, but there are worse ways to educate yourself on film than just watching as many nominees as possible. Look at 1939’s list, for heaven’s sake. Oh, you have to remind yourself of the Academy’s blind spots—motion capture, women, and minorities, for example—but any list will have those. Most will have the “women and minorities” blind spot.

I must also confess a weakness for the spectacle of the whole thing. I’ll probably transfer my prediction/summary dual pieces over here for this year, and one of the things that always ends up in my summary piece is a few paragraphs of picking on people’s clothes. Not that my own wardrobe is so hot, but hey, a fancy evening out for me is The Hobbit and Papa Murphy’s. So yeah, I don’t need formalwear for that. Though it would have shocked the hell out of the people putting together our pizza. Especially because doubtless my boyfriend still would have been wearing khakis.

I understand all the arguments for ignoring the Oscars. Some of them are even good ones. But you know, Neil Patrick Harris is hosting this year. And it could be worse—it could be the Golden Globes.