As regards Oscar Award, I’ve got little to say since it has nothing to do with me except for telling me which western movies are worth watching. In fact, the Award has directed me to dozens of awesome movies, which are sure to be at the top of the field, in terms of their artistic expressions and contents, such as Forrest Gum, Titanic, The Silence of Lambs. But that’s all.

I would not excitingly keep an eye on its annual appraising process. Neither would I exclaim ‘bingo’ for Ang Lee, the Best Director Oscar for his adventure film "Life of Pi", nor am I likely to gossip about those amusing sidelights behind the glittering awarding stage. What I’d like to do is just scout the web for the available version of Argo and digest it by myself in one deep night, much like I did with other movie-competition-recommended movies.

I’m not crazy about Oscar partly because it’s not Chinese. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not a xenophobe. But a patriot I am! We have got our own movie awards, top 3 of which involve Golden Rooster Awards, Hundred Flowers Awards, and Ornamental Column Awards. To my disappointment, none of these awards overtake Oscar in terms of popularity and influence, home and abroad. Especially in recent years, natives seemed to pay less and less attention to them. They seem to be entertaining themselves as a flash in a pan. Our talent filmmakers produced about half of a thousand movies yearly, some of which failed to stir up a ripple. But there is little doubt that there are many pop-ups such as Lost on Journey (人在囧途)(2010)，well-known among our natives. On the one end of spectrum is our flourishing movie industry while on the other end, the unpopular, or even isolated, movie Awards. What’s the problem with our Awards? Why can’t they catch the eyes of domestic and abroad movie fans just as Oscar?

First of all, the phenomenon is closely related to state soft power. USA, as the sole superpower, its influence manifests itself in every aspects of our life, movie Awards being no exemption. However, this cannot explain why our Awards were so popular in 1980s-90s when our state power could not compare with that of today.

And then, it follows that the reason for our Awards’ loneliness is most likely to lie in our state policy orientation and the Awards themselves. Generally speaking, our Awards tend to take more political correctness into consideration than artistic beauty and story per se, while Oscar and the like does the opposite. On this point, as an outsider and a layman of movie appraisals, I am not sure. So I’d like to call it a stop. What I’m sure is we can learn a lot from Oscar and other prestigious western Awards, their evaluation criteria, their propaganda, and more importantly, their professional spirit.

Oscar exceeds our Awards, which cools down my enthusiastic about the world known feast. The same is true with the football Would Cup. That sounds unreasonable, and a little populism. But I cannot help myself to be so.

Ye, Argo is beckoning to me. It’s time for me to play knife and fork, anyhow.