I mean everything I said in that title.

Honestly, the Academy Awards for Best Original Score are humiliating to the Academy, and I'm amazed they even bother saying it's worth watching at all - it's descended into a worthless, obscure popularity contest. Not necessarily the rest of it - but the Best Original Score category is truly pathetic.

Let's take a look at previous Best Original Score nominees:

1. The Social Network

2. Inception

3. How to Train Your Dragon

4. The King's Speech

5. 127 Hours

Notice anything in common for the five nominees?

I'll spell it out:

1. The Social Network (nominated for Best Picture)

2. Inception (nominated for Best Picture)

3. How to Train Your Dragon (nominated for Best Animated Feature Film)

4. The King's Speech (nominated for Best Picture)

5. 127 Hours (nominated for Best Picture).

Why is this sad? Well, any true follower of film music will have noticed one thing: 2010 was an uncommonly good year for film music. Many movies had truly outstanding scores, no matter how bad the movie itself was. For instance, James Newton Howard's incredible and deep effort for The Last Airbender was an amazing film score. The movie was horrible, and this is likely the sole reason for why it wasn't nominated. Or Alice in Wonderland - an excellent return to Danny Elfman's charming fantasy scores of old. Or Space Battleship Yamato - a foreign film whose brilliant score flew completely under the radar.

And there are countless other scores that are better than all the choices (besides How to Train Your Dragon and Inception, the only truly worthy scores here): The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Tangled, Tron Legacy, The Wolfman, and even Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows all had scores several times better than the nominees.

Then you look at the winner: The Social Network.

First off, they only awarded this award to The Social Network to bandage the losses sustained earlier. The Social Network lost in literally every category to either Inception or The King's Speech, and thus the Academy felt obliged to give the movie one of the "less important awards." Since the music was admittedly very new in style, the Academy had even more facades to erect to pass this award off as a legitimate one.

However, if any true music collector listens to The Social Network's score, they'll likely find it a massively overrated piece of ear puke that sounds like a horrific mesh of every teen-reject band's songs' bass lines put through a blender. The attempts at music here are simply pathetic, brief flashes of themes that are repeatedly endlessly and mercilessly. The only people who can possibly legitimately enjoy this trash are fans of the band that composed this horror - Nine Inch Nails. I've read reviews bashing The Social Network's score, and I've read countless fans of NIN trolling the webpages - how people can't "accept electric sounds for music," how people don't notice "how well the music fits the film," and how "new styles deserve recognition."

First off, I can totally accept electric sounds for music that sound adept. That's why I praised Tron Legacy and Inception's scores; both relied heavily on electronic sounds, and both sounded excellent. The composers here are completely inept at composing the slightest themes using electric sounds, which is why I have to call their work absolutely awful.

Granted, the music fits the film well - but so did The Last Airbender's, as did Tron: Legacy's, Inception's, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, How to Train Your Dragon, and so many others. Music that fits well isn't enough to make the music gain an Oscar - true composer ability is demonstrated in being able to make the music not only fit, but also sound phenomenal off screen, a talent that neither Atticus Ross nor Trent Reznor have demonstrated. I'm not saying they can't do it, but they clearly didn't show it in their work for The Social Network.

Finally, new styles aren't always good. Different isn't always good. Plus, it's not the Academy's job to award fresh ideas, but to award good ones. The Social Network's music isn't in any way good.

In the end, I can only say that the Academy's Best Original Score category is a shameless popularity contest that exists for the sole reason of looking prestigious. I say either let the Academy abandon the category, or let real music aficianados do the voting.

What my list of nominees for Best Original Score would've been:

1. Space Battleship Yamato

2. The Last Airbender

3. How to Train Your Dragon

4. Inception

5. Alice in Wonderland.

And my winner:

The Last Airbender, by James Newton Howard. Though admittedly, Space Battleship Yamato does come extremely close. Sad though it may be, I have never heard the original anime themes and thus cannot enjoy the no doubt massive sense of nostalgia most fans felt when listening to SBY's score.