Face it: This is not the Olympics

I used to watch the Academy Awards with a group of friends, mostly film students, writers and an aspiring actress, who regarded the ceremony with a mix of awe, disdain and a dash of demented personal resentment. The actress, in particular, seemed to treat the televised awards show as a sort of ritual bile cleanse, each envelope unleashing fresh agonies and howls of disbelief.

The outbursts bugged me, but I knew the feeling. I’d been similarly outraged by the egregious unfairness of the Miss Universe pageant as a kid (the prettiest girl never seemed to win), a contest that at the time I had no reason to believe was anything but a scientific evaluation designed to locate and tag the most quantifiably beautiful woman in the world and then re-release her into the ecosphere.

I see now that I was wrong (all the women looked too suspiciously alike to have been gathered in any sort of open-ended, comprehensive search anyway), that the contest was far from the perfectly designed empirical evaluation I’d imagined it to be. But sometimes, we need to believe such things exist. Looking back on my friend’s outbursts, I see she was doing more than putting her deep personal identification with Gwyneth Paltrow on display. She was expressing an atavistic, universal need to quantify artistic achievement and give it a medal.

Recently, host Chris Rock caused a minor stir with a comment about the silliness of giving awards to art (not exactly his words, but you get the idea). “Unless two people are doing the exact same thing,” he said, “how can you really say somebody’s better than the other?” He’s right in the sense that at the Academy Awards, the playing field is never really level and apples get compared to oranges all the time.

But the Oscars aren’t the Westminster Movie Show. They’re not the Art Olympics, either. Despite the status to which we’ve elevated them, they remain the annual gala of a professional organization honoring its members -- the older, more traditional and more British, the better.

There are no qualifying rounds, no technical hurdles to overcome, no strict Shar-Pei wrinkle-to-fold ratio to conform to. Once the nominations have been announced, they have nothing to do but wait and see -- like cheerleaders awaiting prom queen results.

If the awards were a true competition, selecting winners in this way would be a little (just a little) like the commissioner of baseball handing the Boston Red Sox the World Series for contributions to the sport. But they’re not. No matter how bent out of shape we get at its slights and omissions, it’s the academy’s prerogative to favor conventional three-act stories over flights of lunacy; professionalism over lyricism; polish over originality; reassuring ideas about who we think we are over scary ones about who we fear we might be.

This may help explain, say, why Paul Giamatti wasn’t nominated for his role as an angry alcoholic in “Sideways,” or Jeff Bridges for his manipulative Lothario in “The Door in the Floor,” or Mark Wahlberg for his anti-establishment firefighter in “I {heart} Huckabees,” or “The Life Aquatic” for anything at all. Or it may not.

But it’s hard to imagine that, in a qualifying championship, Julie Delpy wouldn’t have made it to the finals for her little dance at the end of “Before Sunset,” or Jude Law for his “Huckabees” meltdown, or Jim Carrey for his heartbreak in “Eternal Sunshine,” or composer Jon Brion for his work on “Eternal Sunshine” and “Huckabees.”

Not that knowing this will prevent anybody from nose-diving onto the floor tonight when the envelopes are opened and the names they’ve been waiting for aren’t called. On the contrary. The great thing about the Academy Awards is that it’s the crowds in the bleachers, not the members of the team, that have turned it into a competitive tournament and a communal rite. Chris Rock’s comments said more about the meaning we’ve invested in the awards than about what they really are.

Once a year the Academy Awards give us the opportunity to imagine we’re watching a sort of Super Bowl of the humanities, in which pure artistic achievement is rewarded without any consideration to other factors like the length of a nominee’s career, the size of its box office receipts, or the brilliance of its marketing campaign. They give us another opportunity to root for all the things we normally root for when we cheer men in tights: The underdogs. The home team. The winners. The ideas that express our worldview and affirm our position in it. Whatever makes us feel validated and included.

The resulting howls of disbelief, I’ve come to realize, are a good thing -- a touching story of redemption and the triumph of the human spirit; proof that our faith in science, justice, excellence and democracy remain unshaken, no matter how much proof we see to the contrary every day, far from the red carpet.