The Oscar nominations arrive tomorrow. Usually I would be sitting in front of the television with a sheet of paper hastily scrawling down the honorees in the key categories as they’re announced, giving me the data needed to do some rapid-fire calculations. Somewhere nearby I had my predictions and those of my cohort from the movie review show we did on 90FM in Stevens Point what now seems an eon ago. Once the announcement was complete, I quickly tallied up which one of the two of us did a better job forecasting the nominations. Overwhelmingly, he was the victor. I bested him once–once!–in over twenty years.

This year is different, though. We’ve mutually decided to skip the prediction ritual this year. There are some extenuating circumstances, but the sad truth is that the fun had simply drained out of it. I think we both recognized that our enthusiasm had dissipated in recent years, but neither one of us wanted to bring it up. There was time when each of would tinker with prediction lists for weeks, scratching out names and adding others as precursor awards were handed out, box office receipts seemingly reshaped perceptions and different performers and films gained or lost prominence. Increasingly, I pulled mine together at the last minute. I don’t think I was the only one. The enthusiasm simply wasn’t there any longer. Predicting the Oscars was a dead shark.

I think that’s largely for two reasons: there’s no shortage of people taking their own crack at predicting the Oscars, and the Oscar season, more than ever, is a long march towards an outcome so certain that it may as well be predetermined. As to the former point, when we first did this a couple decades ago (for those who want to precisely carbon date this, the first time we did it over the airwaves, we were correctly certain that Goodfellas and Dances With Wolves would be among the Best Picture nominees), there were few outlets devoting the necessary time or column inches to wagering on who would make the Academy’s first cut. With the Web provided boundless square footage for such things, it sometimes seems like every goof with a Netflix account shares what they see in their own crystal ball. As to the latter, the constant barrage of other awards that lead up to the Oscars (and the increasing uniformity with which they celebrate films and and performers) have shorn away much of the unpredictability of the Oscar nominations. Just about everybody will have Davis, Streep, Swinton and Williams on their Best Actress list, and, making matters even duller, people have probably had all four of those names on their anticipated list since the summer, well before two of the movies were even seen.

So, that’s enough for now. And that’s all right. We had a good run and we had fun. If we can find a way to approach the endeavor that makes it feel fresh again, I’m sure we’ll jump straight in. Until that point, we’ll stand down and let others wrap themselves in knots over trying to figure out which four actors will get to graciously applaud for Christopher Plummer on Oscar night.

This, of course, isn’t going to stop me from spouting off about the nominations tomorrow.