Oscar politics. (Now Playing).(best picture nominees)

Ah, Academy Awards season. A time for Hollywood cynics to shine like stars.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed each of the five Best Picture nominees. But I wish I could say they're being honored solely for their artistic accomplishments. The truth is that industry politics are at least as important to winning a top Oscar as a great story or a stirring performance. As a small antidote to the self-congratulatory hoopla we're now hearing from Hollywood, here's a look at some of the real reasons the following films are up for Best Picture this season:

Chicago

How does an entertaining--if never quite transporting--musical snag 13 Oscar nominations, making it the favorite to win as Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards? With lots of P.R., that's how. Miramax Films, known for its lavish and aggressive campaigns for awards, has carefully cultivated a climate in which an Oscar seems to be an inevitability. Of course a studio alone can't generate the kind of buzz necessary to make a film a contender. For that you need accomplices who allow all the promotion to affect their judgment--in this case Entertainment Weekly, which put Chicago on its first Oscar issue, and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which fawned over the film at its recent Golden Globes awards show. Just like that, a Best Picture favorite is born.

The Hours

Since the Oscars are essentially Hollywood applauding itself, the nominees often reveal what the industry wants to see when it looks in the mirror. Something like The Hours makes Hollywood types feel good about themselves. An adaptation of an honored novel, which was itself based on a Virginia Woolf classic, the movie has the sort of literary patina that Oscar voters are suckers for. Nominating it allows them to drape themselves in a cloak of "culture."

The Pianist