5 Dumb Reasons Competitors Got Disqualified – Cracked.com

Or how about this instead? We already measure runners’ exact start times and finish times in milliseconds. So why don’t we just give the medal to whoever finishes the race quickest, no matter who finishes first? If you start 100 milliseconds before your competitor and finish 20 milliseconds before them, we don’t need to disqualify you. We just place you after them because you took 80 milliseconds longer. If you start 100 milliseconds before your competitor and finish 120 milliseconds before them? You win. 

4 Tron Was Ineligible for a Best Special Effects Oscar Because Computer Effects Were Considered Cheating

The Oscars are a giant pile of wormy bullshit. Complaining may be missing the point. It’s a group of insiders giving awards to themselves — if we care about who really deserves praise, we should listen to critics’ choices, not awards (or we should listen to the Critics’ Choice Awards). Heck, the only reason the Academy Awards exist is because Louis B. Mayer thought awards were a great way of keeping people in movie business from unionizing. That sounds like a nonsensical conspiracy theory, but it’s true. 

Still, we feel bitter when the Oscars get it especially wrong. Like in 1983, when Disney submitted the previous year’s Tron for Academy consideration. The Academy said it was ineligible for the Best Visual Effects award because its use of computers constituted cheating. 

This was a ludicrous decision, on several levels. First, we all know in hindsight that computer effects are indeed visual effects. Though practical effects often look better than computer effects, we also have computers to thank for some of the best special effects ever, and Tron’s were groundbreaking. But it was also an absurd decision because most of Tron’s effects didn’t even use computers. The production made hundreds of matte paintings. They inked tens of thousands of frames by hand to achieve that distinctive glow. Then when it came to CGI, the movie arguably contained no computer animation because they could only use computers to create individual still images, and the filmmakers had to use traditional methods to string those stills together.