A prestigious stink fills the air. Film critics howl in the distance. Amongst the shadows looms the monstrous silhouette of Meryl Streep, statuettes clenched like daggers in her firsts.

Oscar season is upon us.

But this year, PG-13 for Ugly Cast will not be joining the bandwagon hoppers, the arbitrary list-makers, the red carpet-stalkers, the bean-counting prognosticators, or any other group that can be dismissed with a quippy epithet. The world has enough awards buzz, enough moths drawn blindly towards the Oscars’ fickle flame.

Instead, PG-13 for Ugly cast will offer a series of Movie Things We Loved. A “movie thing” may be a performance, or a plot twist, or a musical sting, or a particularly dashing haircut. A “movie thing” is anything that happened in a movie, or in our thoughts as we watched a movie, or within a 200-foot radius of Brad Pitt or Michael Fassbender.

No categories. No nominees. No arbitrary formulas. No fussy debates over whether The Artist was delightful, or paper-thin, or perhaps delightfully papery. Just Movie Things We Loved. Because without love, we’re just a bunch of people watching movies we don’t care about, in which case we’d be better off outside playing Frisbee.

Come watch our love-fest unfold in the coming weeks, and be sure to tune in the day after the Oscars, when we’ll come to a thunderous anticlimax by announcing the Movie Thing We Loved Most in the Year 2011. It will probably not be your favorite movie thing, but it will be ours, so nyeh nyeh.