In anticipation of next Sunday’s broadcast of the 83rd Academy Awards ceremony, last week I sent my annual Oscar e-mail to fellow film buffs and buffettes, soliciting their votes for our annual Loose Caboose Fantasy Oscar Awards.

Hey! We’ve got fantasy football, fantasy baseball and fantasy b-ball, why not a fantasy Academy Award presentation?

To keep costs at a minimum, we have no green room, no sound, no lights, no presenters, no recipients, no hosts and no security, be it undercover or underground.

With The Loose Caboose Fantasy Oscars, we simply offer the fantasy awards themselves, both imagined and supposed, said awards being unavailable and unobtainable until Price-Waterhouse goes virtual reality.

The only rule to qualifying to receive our fantasy Academy Award is that the actors, directors and movies considered cannot be eligible for a real Oscar next Sunday. In fact, this year’s Loose Caboose Fantasy Academy Award theme is “Movies that help make us feel better.” Noting that any recipient must have received at least one vote from at least one person, let us open the envelopes now.

Drum roll, please.

In the category of Best Feel Better Western, this year’s winner is “Shane.”

According to one of our “Shane” supporter voters who prefers to remain nameless but did consent to our sharing that he is a retired military policeman with a background in astronomy, the film “Shane” “embodies all that I feel as a short person, no matter how down I am.”

In the category of Best Feel Good Film Involving Plastics, this year’s winner, for the 12th consecutive year, is “The Graduate.”

Garnering three votes, all from the same person, but with three different e-mail addresses, Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft “together in ‘The Graduate’ gave me not only the inspiration, but the perspiration to ask my chemistry teacher out for French fries and a cherry coke.

“Several years later, after becoming familiar with the periodic chart on my chemistry teacher’s bulletin board, we were married in a short ceremony in the smoke- infested teacher’s lounge at our school.”

The winner of this year’s Best Movie Using My Mother’s Maiden Name goes to first-time winner “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

While this 1986 John Hughes-directed film classic of high school anarchy and disobedience is not a fave with principals, our voters likened the Matthew Broderick role as “the best we’ve felt about ourselves since getting our first Slinkys when we were kids.”

Tied for first place in the category of Best Feel Good Film with a Cross-Dressing Saxophone Player goes to “Some Like It Hot” and “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

While many of our readers are aware that Tony Curtis cross-dressed in “Some Like It Hot” while impersonating a female in an all-girls band featuring Marilyn Monroe, few locals may know that the guy who looks like local sax legend Danny Ward jazzing up the stage in “An Officer and a Gentleman” is actually his beautiful and talented sister Charlene Brown standing in and lip-saxing for brother Danny, who had missed the shoot by missing the Keystone ferry earlier that day.

Congratulations to all of this year’s fantasy winners, even though they may never know.

Jim Freeman can be reached at fun@whidbey.com.