On Feb. 27, Jamie Foxx will rise from his seat in the Kodak Theater to accept the Academy’s Best Actor award for Ray, the latest in that much hyped, most honored and overly budgeted genre, the Hollywood biopic. Biopics (part biography, part motion picture – cute) spring up in droves during the annual holiday award season. The last few months alone have given us Ray (with Foxx as Ray Charles), The Aviator (Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes), Kinsey (Liam Neeson in the title role), De-Lovely (Kevin Kline as Cole Porter) and Beyond the Sea (Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin).

I hate biopics. While their postcard-glossy production creates a veneer of substance, most biopics are unambitious history lessons. These films, which never fail to cram decades of a phenomenal life into two-and-a-half hours, are research posing as storytelling.

Publicists and critics celebrate how accurately the latest Hollywood megastar has learned to mimic every peculiarity of their subject’s physical demeanor. I say this is impersonation masquerading as acting. It may be good impersonation, but it’s not the same thing.

It’s so easy to be so awed by the historical imitation (“That’s just how Jackson Pollock painted!” “That’s exactly like Mohammed Ali’s footwork!”), that you don’t realize the film has nothing else to offer. Greatness is not, in itself, an interesting story. Ray didn’t even teach me anything about Ray Charles beyond what I’d read in obituaries. When a film about a subject I am ignorant of fails to surprise me once, it’s an empty film.

The plot of the biopic is so familiar, that whenever you watch one, I recommend you play the Hollywood Biopic Hater’s Drinking Game™. When the protagonist is revealed to have a heavily debilitating disorder, drink. When the protagonist’s long-suffering wife delivers an angry tirade against his infidelity/his addiction/his workaholism, drink. When the protagonist ages more than ten years in one scene, drink. When the protagonist’s disbelieving dean/producer/advisor warns him against his next unconventional endeavor, drink. When the character appears before court, drink. If he appears before a Senate hearing, drink twice.

There are some good biopics out there. A Beautiful Mind had the good sense, for a while at least, to abandon historical realism and imagine what hallucinations its schizophrenic protagonist might have endured. Finding Neverland is not a great movie, but at least it’s driven by deep curiosity: J.M. Barrie and Peter Pan seem so unaccountably mismatched, that it’s fascinating to consider how this man ever wrote this work. I’m not sure the film finds any satisfying answers, but it asks a worthwhile question. Malcolm X is a great biopic, which uses wildly differing styles of filmmaking to reflect the wildly differing phases of its subject’s life.

Judging by commercial success, many moviegoers may be on my side; of all biopics since 2000, only A Beautiful Mind was an unconditional hit. I can only hope that someday studios will fall out of love with these empty vessels of prestige. Until then, I’ll just drink my biopic blues away.