You know what the "biggest Oscar shock" of all time is? That intelligent people expend properly serious discussion, any year, ever, on who might or might not get any of the awards. "Like it or not," they often remark, "it's big business." Well, quite. So stop giving it a reach-around.
The idea that anyone could possibly find such activity anything other than hilarious – or at an absolute stretch, a bit of fun – should be about as credible as the traditional claim that a billion people watch the ceremony. Cate Blanchett once revealed to Oprah that the Academy Awards organisers point up this latter claim to the nominees "every two seconds", which is probably why it is so frequently mentioned in their acceptance speeches, as they contemplate the scale of their reach at that pan-global moment in time.
For the record, 40 million Americans actually watched the thing last year, and though I'm sure the 960-million viewer deficit was made up by all the Chinese farmers and Philippine fishermen rushing home to remark that Ben Affleck had been unforgivably snubbed and that Faye Dunaway is too old not to have covered her arms, we may have to flag that 1bn statistic as one of Hollywood's more deluded fantasies. Which, considering the competition, makes it utterly certifiable.
Still, if you want the Oscars in numbers ahead of Sunday's ceremony, let me give you the only one you need to know: last week, more Americans went to see The Lego Movie than all the nine movies nominated for Best Picture combined.
That's who should be on that red carpet: a brick. Or rather, a game human dressed as a brick, and if I had an all-access pass, I'd do it myself, just for the fun of walking the entertainment reporters' line. "Who are you wearing?" Thermoplastic. "What's going through your head right now?" I'm a brick. "Can you show your nails to our mani-cam?" I. Am. A. Brick. "How does it feel to have the world watching?" B-R-I-C-K.
Quantity does not equal quality, of course, and the mere suggestion that a movie's monster box office in some way validates it over something in which people are Somali or have Aids or whatever will obviously send proper critics into the most incensed of tailspins. You can't play numbers games with the purity of art and blah blah blah, even though the major studios are estimated to fritter – simply on the pursuit of Oscar statuettes – more than double the total spend of all the parties in the last UK general election campaign.
Thus the odds of Sunday's host, Ellen DeGeneres, mentioning the brick in the room during her opening monologue are approximately one billion to one against. Such a transgression would be a cultural insult on the scale of defecating on Steven Spielberg's Walk of Fame star, or claiming not to have a view on nude shades.
Like my brick stunt, in fact, it would land Ellen straight in Oscars jail, which is reputed to be far more infernal a hole than even Guantánamo Bay. You'll be familiar with the Sartrean concept that hell is other people, so you may care to know that this year's designated cellmates for any Oscar miscreants are: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow and Alec Baldwin. The sinner, confined with those three, in a small room. FOR ALL ETERNITY. And even Susan Sarandon will draw the line at campaigning for their release.
The standard advice for watching the Oscars, other than "don't", is to get through it with a drinking game. This is nonsense. The actual secret is to be drunk from the start of awards season, which, by my calculations, started at least three months ago. It's a little hazy, in all honesty. This is the first year Lost in Showbiz has drunk a bleach daiquiri every time the season is even mentioned and, having now downed 4,397 of the things, feels immeasurably better for it.
The narcotising fog of strawberry-flavoured peroxide has insulated me from giving one thousandth of a toss about all the big Oscar pseudo-controversies, ranging from how "authentic" The Dallas Buyers Club is to how "authentic" American Hustle is, by way of how "authentic" Captain Phillips is.
But if you're still finding yourself caught up in the hoopla, it's worth remembering that the Oscars is an event at which the goody bags alone function as the most eloquent satire on the occasion, and quite possibly on late-stage capitalism itself. These are the hugely valuable hauls of freebies handed to nominees, which this year are estimated to be worth $80,000, and which genuinely contain – among other lunacies – horse shampoo for humans, mace pepper spray guns, electrolyte pet therapy, and a voucher for vaginal rejuvenation therapy. Yup, $2,700 of female genital enhancement.
So there you have it. If at any stage you find yourself even threatening to simulate emotion one way or the other about Sunday night's proceedings, then just consider that on what could well be one of the biggest nights of her career so far, the exalted Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will in effect be gifting the lovely Jennifer Lawrence, 23, a vaginal rejuvenation treatment. Ditto Judi Dench, 79. That's showbiz, as I believe the expression goes, and if every single recipient of those bags doesn't end the night perched on the edge of a bed in their vast hotel suite, contemplating that voucher and all it implies, then I'm afraid to say the Oscars will have won.
• Alec Badwin: another star we must bid farewell to
