The people responsible in part for the encroachment of Oscar Hell on an otherwise lovely holiday season are scrutinized this week in the Washington Post. The lesson: You can put lipstick on a pig!

As a survey of the high-powered publicists who shepherd their clients' awards bait through the fall, the story reveals just the type of exact science that Oscar campaigning has become since Warren Cowan set up Joan Crawford for a win in 1946, and even since the Weinsteins bludgeoned voters into submission throughout the '90s: Have a few million dollars to throw at the Academy; have a "story" for your movie (Lord of the Rings: "A gang of plucky New Zealanders bring the most popular novels in the world to life"); and have absolutely no compunctions about defiling the town's most celebrated annual ritual with materials unfit for a doorstop:

Do awards flacks ever worry that the movies they're pushing are unworthy? Are they worried, in short, about buying a bad movie an Oscar?

Not really, they say. "The Academy is not a critical body," says Fredell Pogodin, a publicist who specializes in foreign-language films. "People forget that."

Amanda Lundberg, a partner at 42West, puts it more bluntly. Asked about Crash, a movie she helped usher to an upset Oscar win in 2005, and a movie that many critics vocally hate, Lundberg is frank: "It doesn't matter what people think," she says. "It matters what people who have a ballot think."

*Sigh.* Sorry Synecdoche, we tried.