The Best of the Artform or Just Provincial Preferences?

Notice a pattern in the movie awards-giving groups' choices for best picture this year?
The Boston film critics went for Beantown gangster splattertacular "The Departed."
Groups in New York and D.C., the two cities that were attacked on 9-11, chose "United 93."
San Franciscans dug "Little Children" the most. Those pervs.
And today the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, many of whom don't speak English all that well and who've collectively, over the years, exhibited a marked inability to understand cinema as an artform, gave their highest number of nominations to "Babel," a film about folks who just don't get it, whatever part of the world they're in.
It's enough to make you question whether all of these supposed guides to the best that movies have to offer know what great filmmaking is, or just think that what they relate to the most must be best.
I'm not sure quite how my own Los Angeles Film Critics Association's choice for 2006's best picture, "Letters from Iwo Jima," fits this theory. But let me give it a stab or two.
Though set on a Japanese island an ocean away, most of the picture was actually filmed in Southern California.
Nah, that's not good enough.
How about, Clint Eastwood is such a beloved Hollywood figure that, even when he directs a movie that registers a little shy of his inarguable masterpiece standards, isn't very exciting for a fatalistic anti-war epic and, when it comes to capturing the meltdown mentality of trapped combatants, compares poorly to Kon Ichikawa's "Fires on the Plain" and Andrzej Wajda's "Kanal," we cut him slack for the ambitiousness of his whole project and because, well, he's a Hollywood legend?
Yeah, that sounds pretty much like how this town is supposed to work.