As if the Oscars don't have enough laughably illogical rules, the top award in Hollyweird just decreed some new howlers.

Let's start with an old howler, for perspective's sake. The academy doesn't permit an actor to have more than one nomination per category, a restriction that strangely doesn't apply to other contenders like, say, directors. The academy saw nothing wrong with Steven Soderbergh's double noms for "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich" in 2000.

But now the academy says that no movie may have more than two songs nominated. Why two? Where's the logic in saying that actors can have only one bid per category, songwriters may have only two, but writers, directors and crafts folks can have lots and lots? Indeed, all five in a category, if so be it.

The new foreign-film rules aren't just howlers, they're a scream.

There was so much shrieking in recent years over the academy not nominating the critics' faves like "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days" that the Foreign Language Film Award Executive Committee will now be in charge of deciding three of the nine films that make the shortlist.

That makes no sense at all. The academy is conceding that the current method of voting doesn't work, so therefore it's announcing a new procedure. However, it's still permitting the old system to choose six of the nine finalists. The academy also concedes that letting the exec committee decide what should be on the shortlist isn't the ideal voting standard either since the panel can only pick three pix. So the solution is to combine two bad voting systems together?

Everybody knows that the academy is comprised of 5,800 graybeards who savor sugary celluloid with musical underscore to tell them what to feel. ("4 Months" has no underscore.) They seldom go for the movies that the film critics swoon over. When the New York Film Critics Circle or the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. pick "There Will Be Blood" or "Brokeback Mountain," they're trying to influence the Oscars. Otherwise, they go right back to "United 93" and kooky stuff like "Mulholland Drive," two flicks that academy members have never, and will never, watch. They tell you that — and they're proud of it.

So if we accept the fact that the academy isn't going to embrace critics' movies, why is there a separate standard in the foreign film race? Why the uproar there?

That's because we outsiders can watch the foreign-film voting process in its various stages and see how out-of-it the voters really are. We can see that "4 Months" doesn't make it onto the shortlist of nine contenders that then gets whittled down to five nominees. Oscar-watchers probably think, cluelessly, that "United 93" and "Mulholland Drive" would've made the equivalent shortl ist if one existed for best picture because, well, after all, their helmers were nominated for best director. Yeah, but that's different. There are only 370 members of the directing branch who determine those nominees and they're much more hip than the bulk of the academy geezerhood.

Now it's clear what the exec committee must do every year: survey the critics' lists and cram in the top three faves onto the Oscar short list to hush further screaming. Why bother? Geezer-packed or not, the academy should pick whatever it likes. Let's get their perspective on things, which has always been different from the critics. Why buckle to outside media pressure? The film critics already have their own awards, which often go their own way.

The answer: blame the blogosphere, kiddo. Nowadays there are millions of voices shrieking over how clueless the Oscars are, not just a few pointy-heads in the pages of Film Comment and Screen International. Obviously, the Oscars can't take the heat and are suddenly ashamed of their own selections.

The Grammys and Emmys, let's face it, are doing the same thing these days. Both awards have changed their voting process to accommodate outside fury. Now the Grammys no longer permit academy members to determine the nominees in the top four races: album, record, song and new artist of the year. NARAS members pick the top 20 in a popular vote, then a secret committee determines the final five in those races in order to weed out the embarrassments sung by Tony Bennett. Apparently, NARAS doesn't care about the embarrassing content of all of the other categories because those don't get so much scrutiny. After all, they just care about stopping the screaming.

The Emmys now have the most absurd voting process of all. Series contenders are subjected to a popular vote: everybody in the academy decides programs, but only actors decide actors. The top 10 finalists submit a sample episode to judges who actually view the DVDs and rank them 1 (best) to 10. Two years ago that was sufficient to determine the five nominees, but there were, of course, a few contenders submitted dumb episodes and got penalized. The academy couldn't let them suffer the fate they deserved because, well, there was so much screaming afterward when, for example, "Lost" wasn't nominated after having won best drama series the previous year. So the academy came up with the most absurd solution it could. Just the Oscars foreign-film process, it combined two voting processes that, separately, didn't work.