Marc Singer elegantly addresses the annoying phenomnenon of the fanboy awards-entitlement disorder:

It happens like clockwork: every time an even halfway decent science fiction/fantasy/superhero movie comes out, the movie's fans (most frequently, fans of whatever preexisting property the movie animates) start claiming Oscars for it. Worse yet, the historic number of awards accorded to the bombastic Lord of the Rings: Just Get Up the Goddamn Volcano Already means we fanboys now expect to snag a couple as a matter of course.
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When I read a good book I don't immediately demand that it receive a Pulitzer; when I watch a good TV show I don't instantly clamor for an Emmy. That we automatically associate any halfway good movie or performance with Oscar's approval is probably more indicative of the Academy's successful marketing of itself than it is of any honor that still clings, like some obstinate but degraded radioactive isotope, to the golden statuette. Who cares how many awards Spider-Man 2 gets? I wouldn't want it to join any club that'd have American Beauty as a member anyway.

And don't forget, Roman Polanski and Michael Moore belong to that club now, too.

What I find mystifying about this is that I can think of few years where a better movie didn't lose to a lesser one for Best Picture: This year, Lost in Translation and Master and Commander were far, far better than LOTR (I never did get around to seeing it, but unless it was radically different from the first two, by which I mean they fired everyone but Sean Astin and Ian McKellen and didn't think dramatic pauses equalled drama, I can't imagine that this wasn't the case; anyway, having suffered through the first two oleaginous LOTR films I feel quite safe in my belief that the third was more of the same); LA Confidential was better than Titanic, Pulp Fiction was better than Forrest Gump, Goodfellas was better than Dances with Wolves, and on and on. So I don't put much stock in the pronouncements of the Academy. And yet, that damnable Oscar still has a totemic power of validation, even over the likes of me; I cursed when I saw, after the ceremony I didn't watch, that Bill Murray had lost for Best Actor to Sean Penn...