it's all about perspective, folks

If someone told me last week that Selznick's Invention of Hugo Cabret won the Caldecott, in what seems to me (and plenty of other people) to be a violation of the Caldecott criteria, I would have been annoyed. I would have questioned how one could possibly say that "The committee is to make its decision primarily on the illustration", when the book is equally reliant on text and illustrations.
So - last week, in the land of hypotheticals, that would have bugged me. But today, I barely care at all, because Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! won the Newbery. Pardon my language, but - WTF? That's crazy. It's the kind of decision I'd expect from a group of school librarians or teachers with more enthusiasm for curriculum tie-ins than genuine ability to choose "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children published in English in the United States during the preceding year". But - that wasn't the composition of the Newbery committee.
So how in the world did this happen? This makes my dismay about Crispin look small. At least I could see how it was a Newbery-ish book. This one, though, is just - no.
Ugh.