The Oscars are fine, but they've got nothing on sports

	An Incovenient Truth could be the title of many sports films. Paramount Home Video

Once I get confirmation this Sunday that I've completely screwed up the picks in my Oscar pool, I'll be able to focus on screwing up my picks in the NCAA tournament pool.

The strategy is pretty much the same: go with mostly the big names while trying to pick the right upsets in the right spots. The biggest difference is that when you get one of your early Oscar picks wrong, it doesn't keep coming back to screw you all the way through til the end. I'm looking at you, George Mason.

There are, of course, several other differences between the Academy Awards and sports in general, and it's pretty clear that sports has the upper hand.

Even the Academy recognizes sports' inherent dominance. Bend It Like Beckham won for best foreign film a few years ago. The big winner two years ago was Million Dollar Baby, a boxing movie. As for last year, one of the pivotal scenes in Best Picture nominee Brokeback Mountain was when Heath Ledger's character's wife finds out that he didn't go fishing. (The moral: Always go fishing.) So many of the best movies have had sports themes that until I saw it I had to assume that The Last King of Scotland was a documentary about Tiger Woods' consecutive wins at St. Andrews.

In fact it's almost as if sports fans wrote the titles for most of the nominees. An Inconvenient Truth sounds like an expose of the Tour de France. Deliver Us From Evil would make a great title for a feature about Detroit Lions fans. Little Miss Sunshine could be a Terrell Owens biopic.

Anyone looking to see the best submissions from Europe or learn about foreign cultures should skip the foreign film category and turn on the NHL. You know, assuming you can find the Versus channel.

You want to talk acting? Just try to find an article about Best Supporting Actor nominee Jackie Earle Haley that doesn't mention his role as rebel Kelly Leak in The Bad News Bears. And plenty of athletes have found success as actors. I'm not counting Shaq, whose many big-screen performances could hardly be called "success." But how about O.J. Simpson in the Naked Gun movies? He absolutely killed! OK, bad example. Mike Piazza, though, was solid when, as a 16-year-old, he played the bully in Teen Wolf. Kareem Abdul Jabbar wasn't bad as Arnold's teacher on Diff'rent Strokes. Even Babe Ruth starred in a movie. It was called The Babe Ruth Story. Turns out the Bambino had even less range on screen than he did in right field.

Forget the nominees -- even their winners don't measure up to ours. Their reigning best song is It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp. We've got Take Me Out to the Ballgame. OK, maybe the Oscars win that one. It really is hard out here for a pimp, and I most certainly do care if I ever get back. And would Cracker Jack even still be in business today if it weren't for that song? But if you think that Three 6 Mafia winning an Oscar was last year's big Cinderella story, you obviously haven't heard of Jason McElwain. Try telling the members of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that Crash's Best Picture win was a big upset. There are so many Cinderella stories in sports that Disney should be paying us royalties.