Unsurprisingly, last week’s 81st annual Oscar announcement brought about a familiar round of nomination consternation, a routine spell of hater-itis more often geared toward redefining the boundaries of one’s own cleverness than it is about movies.

(This year’s inevitable predictions of low telecast ratings were thankfully balanced out by some relatively groundbreaking LOLCat comparison and analysis).

Anyways, here is how clever I am:

I have absolutely no idea how The Reader was able to pull in so much Oscar love. To be sure, I’m all for a Kate Winslet the Naked Nazi film in theory, and she and her uncomfortably well-endowed young German costar were seriously phenomenal in practice.

But that script was something out of an episode of Three’s Company; an entire plot boiled down to one (slightly glorified) simple misunderstanding that could have been/should have been resolved with a relatively pain-free five minute conversation.

SPOILER

Yes yes, she can’t read, so how could she have been the mastermind behind the mass slaughter of hundreds of jews in a church fire, the only evidence of which is a handwritten report. Everyone in that court room should have recognized that Kate’s naked character wasn’t responsible. I know this, because everyone in the theater was clearly yelling, “just tell Mr. Roper you’re illiterate and be done with it!”

When one of your primary conflicts is less “wow…draama” than it is “that’s fucking annoying, this issue should take, like, 5 minutes to clear up,” something’s not exactly working.