Why do all the movies that you want to see open the week between Christmas and New Year’s? And by “you,” I mean people who are older than 13.

During January, February, March and April, when you have plenty of free time on your hands, nothing will come out of Hollywood but movies made for 13-year-olds with severe ADD, who can’t sit through a movie unless there is a body-part joke every 30 seconds. But during the holidays, when adults are so busy cooking, wrapping, traveling and socializing, the studios release one must-see blockbuster after another.

There are many reasons for this, the main one being the age-old tradition of going to the mall the day after Christmas to return unwanted gifts as if they have a shelf life of only one day, then gorging at the Cheesecake Factory and numbing out at a movie, just like they did in the Bible. (Not that Bible, silly, the show-business bible: Variety.)

After all, what says Christmas more than “Sherlock Holmes,” “The Adventures of Tintin,” “Mission: Impossible” or “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”? It’s like a Currier and Ives scene.

But there’s another reason so many films come out in December: To compete for the following year’s Oscars, a film has to be shown in a theater before Jan. 1.

Why aren’t Oscar-worthy movies spread out over the rest of the year so you have a chance to see more than one or two of them before the awards ceremony? Because Hollywood bigwigs know that the people who vote for the Academy Awards are just like the rest of us. They can’t remember the movies they saw in the distant past of last January, or even October. So the closer to the new year a film is released, the better chance it has for winning awards.