Full disclosure, I'm not a big movie guy. Always been more of a reader to tell the truth, and when I do choose to veg out, it will be sports over a movie 9 times out of 10. Frankly I'd rather watch a well-done documentary than most of the films I see advertised from week to week, in my experience the truth is typically more entertaining than fiction. Well at least the cookie-cutter, appeal-to-all-demographics and keep-it-PG13-so-the-grosses-don't-suffer type of fiction that can be churned out in 2-hour increments for the short attention span crowd.
I'll avoid going too far down that rabbit hole, as a referendum on the current state of moviegoing wasn't the intent here. Certainly there have been plenty of movies I've loved in my life, and for those that I don't care for, avoiding the theatre or changing the station is easy enough. But what I have never understood, and become more perplexed by with each passing year, is the popularity of the Academy Awards.
Now award shows, by their very nature, are collective, self-congratulatory, circle jerks that barely register on my radar. Half the time they don't even select the consensus "best of" whatever it is their honoring. As mentioned earlier, the comeback to this is "just don't watch", and normally that's quite effective. But the Oscars have joined the Summer Olympics and the LeBron James free agency saga, among other things, in that rare realm of total ubiquity. They've infected every form of media for the last 48 hours, popping up in seemingly unconnected venues so frequently that the only escape was the sensory deprivation tank of my DVR.
I have to say, the appeal of this event is COMPLETELY lost on me. You might love movies, but this ain't movies. This is the subjective awarding of meaningless awards with no basis in anything other that self-promotion. With apologies to all the people who worked hard to win, the whole endeavor is basically a 3-hour infomercial for Hollywood. As if they needed another. What I'd love to see is a guy walk up there and say "I made a great movie, it was a great movie yesterday and it would still be a great movie tomorrow even if I wasn't standing here. While I appreciate the respect of some of you, many of your opinions don't make a damn bit of difference, as you're hacks. Thanks you and good night." Now that would be worth watching. Problem is I could just catch it on YouTube the next day and spare myself the other 179 minutes.
One thing about all this bother me more than anything: How come nobody ever gets mad at Hollywood? Athletes get the business all the time, slump a few games and all the sudden the boos start raining down. Corporate CEOs get absolutely skewered for their rewards, to the point where they could've been accosted in the streets at times over the last couple of years. Yet actors and movies execs seem to get off scott-free, no matter how much they make per film or how fast the ticket prices at the local cineplex rise from one year to the next. I think we'd all agree acting is a skill, anyone who's watched painfully bad acting would find that hard to deny, but it's also a skill in which you have scripted lines and unlimited takes to get it right. Any athlete or businessman out there would kill to have a second and third shot at a situation they just royally screwed up. Even schmucks like me could probably pick up chicks in decent numbers if we had a team of writers and multiple takes.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, this is reason #3,546 why sports are better than movies, authenticity.
So did I flip past a few times? Of course, but before you call me a fraud, hear me out. As I've said, was catching up on the DVR programming and sneaking the occasional glance at Knicks-Heat (still too conflicted to watch all of it), while at the same time DVRing the Oscars. Why DVRing you ask? Well that was because the hashtags on Twitter last night could be used as alerts for the appearance of female starlets in revealing dresses. Upon spotting one of these tags, I'd flip to the broadcast, immediately mute to avoid the mindless blather of James Franco, turn on the MLB app on my phone to catch a few moments of the dulcet tones of John Gordon calling the Twins spring training opener, then troll back for the racked-out lady in question. And if you failed to understand any of that, you do not have what it takes to participate in the full spectrum of today's media experience. Best go out and get a black and white TV with rabbit ears, you dinosaur.
Final thought for the Academy, good call on the hosts, why use comedians with improv and comedy skills, when you can have two actors used to scripted lines in a non-live setting. In an age where no one gets uniform agreement on anything, everyone seems to agree you screwed that up.
But I wouldn't know, because I never saw them...well except that last dress Hathaway was wearing, yowza.
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