Why the Oscars Are Irrelevant
30,000,000 people were foolish enough to waste their Sunday evening watching a self-congratulatory wankfest where a bunch of people worship themselves for their belief that they're better than you. Ostensibly this was to determine the best movies of the year
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I think there are two main categories of quality by which I judge a movie: its artistic merit (purpose, message, creativity, originality) and its spectacle merit (explosions, FX, fan-boy subject matter). The super popular movies tend to be high on spectacle but of indeterminate artistic merit -- they also have marketing budgets that tend to be many times greater than the production budgets of less spectacle-ridden movies.
I think there is some value in recognizing the movies that have made a real artistic success, independent of their box-office (spectacle) success. I'm not really suggesting that's what the Academy does though...
Certainly "good" is a subjective term, but there is a lot more to movies as far as I'm concerned. I've seen movies that I recognize as lacking any artistic merit, but are "entertaining" anyways. Sure I paid to see them along with everyone else, but I can also clearly see they deserve no awards for real artistic quality. I've also seen really profound and thought-provoking movies that convinced very few people to pay to see them.
I think the box office has far more to do with how much work went into convincing people to see the movie, not how much work went into the movie.
Of your second list of movies (I've seen nearly all of them), only The Dark Knight and The Incredibles were really good (in my opinion). In fact, I counted 15 of those movies that I will likely remember in 20 years as being TERRIBLE (with really good marketing).
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