Every year before the Academy Awards, a slew of negative press dominates headlines, usually attacking the best-picture front-runners. Last year, best picture winner “Slumdog Millionaire” was accused of child exploitation just days before it took home the golden statue. This year, with the Oscars airing Sunday, front-runners “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar” are the latest targets of the media’s desperate search for controversy.

At least one relatively substantial piece of news concerns “The Hurt Locker.” Recently, a producer of the film, Nicholas Chartier, was denied an invitation to the Oscars for sending a mass e-mail to voters trying to promote his film. The e-mail requested Academy members vote for his independent film and “not a $500M film,” Chartier said, in a jab against “Avatar.”

The e-mail was so distasteful, it nearly prompted Academy members to take “The Hurt Locker” out of the running for best picture. Fortunately, they settled for simply denying Chartier his invitation. Along with claims of having sleazy, cheating producers, “The Hurt Locker” is also being sued for millions of dollars by Michigan resident Master Sgt. Jeffrey S. Sarver.

He claims the film’s main character, a leading bomb specialist, is based on him. Curiously, this realization did not occur in the subsequent eight months since the film’s July release. Fewer recent controversies surround “Avatar,” but a recent Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog post is a startlingly ridiculous attempt to sway public opinion on the $2.5 billion grossing film. Mark Driscoll, founder of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church, wrote “Avatar” is “the most demonic, satanic film” ever made.

His reasoning is that the film celebrates created things, as in nature, rather than the creator. Essentially, it is celebrating something real rather than something questionable. Driscoll’s argument says more about the fallacies of religion than the film itself, but more importantly, it represents a shameful attempt at last0minute controversy.

Now that both “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar” have nine Academy Awards nominations each, American media cannot handle all of the praise and must balance it out with a negative spotlight.

It all seems rather pointless. Academy voters cannot be swayed in their opinions at this point in the Oscar season, and casual audiences are not even voting. Our society enjoys putting down a success story just as much as the success story itself.

The Oscars used to be a fun American television event, where audiences and filmmakers could celebrate the year’s great achievements in film, but now it is all politics. No longer do we wait in suspense to see who will win best picture. There is a one-month period between the announcement of the nominees and the actual show. Every studio battles one another with trash talk before it is finally over, and the better campaign emerges as the winner.

The question is whether Academy members will go for “The Hurt Locker’s” very personal war story or “Avatar’s” spectacular entertainment value. As much as I love the grand scale of James Cameron’s universe, I say “Inglourious Basterds” for the win. The show needs an element of surprise, rather than a series of meaningless media squabbles that are finally over.