In the D: In an inane editorial for the Daily Dartmouth, Matt Soriano argues for a change in the way Oscar winners are chosen, specifically that the voting population be “a sort of three-fifths system where the Motion Picture Academy allows Internet voting to count for about 40 percent of the Oscar race.”

To begin with, this is the Acadamy Awards, in which the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honor one another. If one wants public choice, he need only turn to the MTV Movie Awards, the Golden Globe Awards (put on by the dubious Hollywood Foreign Press Association), the Screen Actors Guild Awards (with 96,000 members, the S.A.G is hardly “inside Hollywood”), or, indeed, the People’s Choice Awards. Anyone who’s ever watched this latter gala will agree that the public-at-large has no place choosing winners outside the box office (recent winners, e.g., include Mel Gibson, Tim Allen, Sandra Bullock, Ricky Martin, Celine Dion, Adam Sandler, and–proof in the pudding–Christina Applegate).

And so far as Internet voting is concerned, one need only read Fark for a week to know that Wil Wheaton or Christopher Walken would sweep.

None of this is to say that the Academy always or often gets it right, but A Beautiful Mind, e.g., has more of a claim to recognition than, say, Shrek or Pearl Harbor (the Peoples Choice “Best Picture” winner and runner-up, respectively).

Why so many weak columns lately? Does the D forbid its writers from expounding on dorm locking, the Women’s Resource Center, its own coverage of Zeta Psi, and other campus nuisances? Maybe by throwing topical and humorous Fred Ware out of its pages, the D’s editors have made their priorities known clearly enough: “drivel, drone, and deadlines.”