Oscar Smackdown 2005!

You have to say that title in your head like you're a wrestling announcer or like you do those monster truck rally commercials. It sounds really cool like that. So, we're Oscar geeks in this house. We have an ongoing competition with my parents, sister, best friend and her husband. Nobody wins anything except bragging rights to "Biggest Movie Geek," but we love playing anyway. We've even developed our own scoring system and Excel spreadsheet to quickly and easily track points during the show. Some people have the Superbowl, we have the Oscars. Every year when Academy Award nominations come out, the trash talking starts and the crazy competitiveness begins. Andre likes to put out a couple of lists of "wrong" picks in order to throw people off the scent of his real choices. Nobody is fooled of course since he does this every year. Many e-mails fly back and forth bragging about past victories and claiming future ass-whuppings. Must go prepare now and get to as many handicapping websites and Oscar prediction pages as I can before February 27th. Especially since I haven't seen any of the movies.