Unless my recent listing in Movie Maker as one of the top 50 filmmaking blogs has massively increased my readership amongst Academy members, the chances are that your opinion on who is going to win an Oscars TM Award is entirely irrelevant to the record of human history. As in most things in life, frankly, you don’t matter.

Sorry if that’s a little brusque but I’m fed up of the way the media constantly hollers at me that I should ‘have my say’ on the matters of the day as if my angrily hammering out an email to the Today programme is going to achieve anything except a momentary continuation of the pre-existing tedium in the daily working routine of whoever it is that reads the emails that come into the Today programme (which, by the way, for those Academy members currently reading this in LA, is a thing on British Radio that exists purely to make middle class english people feel like they are still in school and the headmaster is still cross…)

However, whilst I detest the entirely fallacious sense of democracy created by this constant summons to pointless spouting off, I love gambling – so therefore I’m urging you to click on the link below and try and second guess the Academy on the off chance that in so doing you’ll win dollar bills. Unless of course you are one my new readers from the Academy in which case I don’t think it’d be ethical for you to enter this competition.

http://shootingpeople.org/poll/oscars2010/

Remember though folks, it’s a gambling quiz not a chance to influence the voting for the real an Oscars Awards TM. So whichever planks out there have voted for District 9 for best picture – you really need to sort yourself out. It’s not going to win. You’ve just wasted like 80 seconds of your life having that thought and clicking the button. Did you imagine that my readers from the Academy would glance at the pie charts and see the way you’d angled the voting and change their minds? These guys are intelligent, free thinking, cineliterate types – they’re not going to be swayed by 1.7% of the Shooting People population voting for a film. They’re clearly only going to vote for the film that offers them the best goodies or for Jeff Bridges because he hasn’t won one yet and it’s legally his go. That said District 9 is by the guy who invented that dancing citroen robot (which is why all the aliens look like dancing citroen robots). Now I always thought that carbot was too realistic to just be CG. Perhaps he’s actually made a whole bunch of them and he’s giving them away to members of the Academy. Sound unlikey? Well – THAT IS THE ONLY REASON WHY DISTRICT 9 COULD WIN BEST PICTURE. So don’t click on it because then you can’t win the money. OK?

THIS IS NOT REAL.