Writer-director Kevin Smith writes crisp, believable dialogue better than any screenwriter in Hollywood, but the stuffy Academy is not about to award a Best Screenplay trophy to a script that uses the F-word as judiciously as most scripts include commas. The Academy, like any other large group, tends to be divided into two classes of people: traditional, business oriented, high-brow types who still think that Casablanca was the best movie ever made and contemporary, artsy, risk-takers who will swear that Stanley Kubrick was a God. Sure, there are plenty of those liberal Kubrickians in the group who likely applauded Smith’s boldly irreverential ideas — who didn’t get a kick out of fallen angel Matt Damon talking a nun out of her calling? But there are also many more in the group who thought Dogma’s Golgothian Poop Monster was the stupidest thing they saw on screen last year. They’d be right. What amazes me is that Smith and Dogma distributor Lion’s Gate Films actually spent big bucks on full-page “For Your Consideration” ads in the trades knowing good and well that there are too many members of the Academy who wouldn’t take to Smith’s hip sensibilities and slacker friendly interpretation of religious doctrine. Heck, they already ignored his Chasing Amy screenplay two years ago, and it really was the Best Screenplay of 1997.