Does long Oscar race help films?

As long as this winter might feel, it’s a mere blip compared with the ongoing movie awards season.

The Movie City News website runs a column called “20 Weeks to Oscar,” which translates to about 38 percent of the year — yet if you count back 20 weeks from the March 2 Academy Awards telecast, you reach only mid-October. The Oscar buzz actually has been at full volume since at least early September, when Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, won the festival’s audience award and was widely anointed as the front-runner for best picture.

Or you might have started the clock even earlier, in mid-August, when “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” generated a strong box office and much Oscar talk, even if all of that momentum had faded two weeks ago, when the movie got shut out of Oscar nominations.

So it’s no wonder you may be feeling awards fatigue by now, what with so many group prizes and top 10 lists announced at year’s end — the Golden Globes having been handed out Jan. 12, the Screen Actors Guild Awards taking place Jan. 18, the Producers Guild of America Awards following Jan. 19 and the main event, the Oscars, still more than a month’s worth of hype and speculation away.

Awards season, we thus conclude, is lengthy.

But is it good for movies?

The naysayers might start with the reduction of art to a series of horse races. So much of the “12 Years a Slave” tweeting and commentary out of Toronto viewed the film through the prism of an Oscar ceremony then six months down the line, rather than digesting it as a work of, you know, cinema.

“Suspend the betting, close the books, and notify the engraver: I’ve just seen what will surely be this year’s best picture winner, and it’s ‘12 Years a Slave,’” Kyle Buchanan declared on New York magazine’s Vulture site Sept. 7.

In Chicago late last year to promote “August: Osage County,” actresses Julianne Nicholson and Margo Martindale expressed concern that viewing every movie in the context of its Oscar prospects sets a sort of false standard. In contrast to “those little quiet movies that sneak up on you,” Martindale said “August” was “coming out of the gate with such expectation that, you know, it makes it a little daunting.”

As it happened, “August” bagged Oscar nominations for actress (Meryl Streep) and supporting actress (Julia Roberts) but nothing else — a disappointment in light of the film’s cast and pedigree as the adaptation of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer- and Tony-winning darkly comic family drama. Then again, given the tough material and so-so reviews (its 65 percent favorable rating on RottenTomatoes.com is more than 10 points lower than that of every best picture nominee, all of which are above 90 percent except for “The Wolf of Wall Street” at 77 percent), you can’t assume that “August” would have fared better in an awards-free world.

The larger point is this: People are still talking and arguing about the relative merits of artistically ambitious films such as “12 Years a Slave” and Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity,” both released in October, as well as more recent party-joiners such as David O. Russell’s “American Hustle” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Given that the year’s first few months tend to be a new-releases wasteland, with months of high-concept/franchise films to follow, such a focus on quality is welcome.

“Award season is what movie lovers live for,” Hollywood Elsewhere blogger Jeffrey Wells said in an email. “Without award season the market for adult-appealing, review-dependent films would be much less vibrant. Award season, or the celebration of any and all films that aspire to do more than resort to CG-driven comic-book/superhero plots, is the only thing keeping good movies alive.”