What can you say about the Academy Awards ceremony this year that you don’t say every year, if you happen to keep watching? It’s one of the few American events that still reliably draws a mass audience — the Super Bowl is another, far more popular event — and as such, it can be widely discussed the next day. If only you can find something worth discussing.

But what can you say about it, beyond complaining about the usual things? There are the general snob complaints about how stupid all these award ceremonies are, and marveling that any intelligent person could care about dumb prizes for dumb movies. There’s the sour observation that the Oscars are a messy annual spectacle, an old-fashioned variety-show kind of entertainment lingering on awkwardly in the twenty-first century, but on the other hand, any attempts to reformulate it to bring it up to date are invariably disastrous. I’ve argued that one myself, at length.

Then you can be a bit more specific about this year’s ceremony, but even at that you tend to echo the same kinds of complaints that get made every year, creating a haunting effect of déjà vu.