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Page 1 of 3 The Oscars. Ugh. Every year they piss me off. Of course, that’s only possible because every year I give a shit. I shouldn’t. I know better. Every year they’re ridiculous. Every year they’re overwhelmingly ostentatious. Every year it’s yet another collection of “the beautiful people” glad handing and glamming it up, telling each other how absolutely gorgeous they all are. It’s disgusting. Most of us don’t know anybody who looks that way, talks that way or dresses like that, yet the whole premise of the Academy Awards is that the rest of us want to be that. The sad part of it is that if US magazine, Entertainment Weekly, People and the National Enquirer are any indication, they’re right. Even people who hate the Oscars are usually reacting – violently – to the Oscars. One way or another, they touch a nerve and for a lot of us, that’s annoying. Not that Oscar cares.
Shit, the night the Academy Awards are handed out is the second biggest pop culture holiday in America after the Super Bowl. People have Oscar parties, change their schedules, enter in gambling pools of who’s going to win and even enter in contests in the newspapers. The Internet goes nuts on Oscar night what with blogs and different sites all weighing with their two cents about the films, the nominations, the winners and of course, the fashion on the red carpet, who looks fat in what, how could she wear that in public, etc. Oscar night is not the boon to the economy that the Super Bowl is but it’s big. And what other award show comes close? There are the Grammys for music, the Emmys for TV and the Tonys for the theatre – oh yeah, and now the Espys, puh-leeze—for sports! As though sports don’t already have a way of deciding who’s best. All these awards shows take their aesthetic cue from the Academy Awards. They’re all Oscar-lite, Oscar wanna-bes. How many people, whatever their take on the Academy Awards in public, do you think have practiced their Academy Award acceptance speech in the shower? There are people who won’t admit it but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Don’t argue with me, you know who you are.
|  The public face of Oscar |
It makes sense on one hand. If movies are our preeminent art form, the golden child of our popular culture, it makes sense that we pay the most attention to these awards and lavish on them our love and affection. And let’s face it, grand and gaudy is the American way. If one is good a thousand would be better. If big is good, gi-normous is better. If a slinky red dress on Beyonce looks good, a slinky red dress with sequins and finished off with a top hat is better. It doesn’t matter how small something starts, if it achieves any measure of success or prominence it’s going to get bigger and bigger until it finally reaches the grotesque. And that’s how we generally like it. Our games, our concerts, our movies, if it ain’t over the top, it ain’t really American. 
The private face of Oscar | What makes it worse, much worse, is that the Academy Awards don’t even pretend to have any kind of artistic integrity. There is an “Oscar season” just as there is a Summer Blockbuster Season. At least with summer blockbuster season it’s a bit more honest. A whole slew of big budget, stimulation saturation, special effects extravaganzas are released with the primary purpose of making shitloads of money. If they just so happen to be a good movie, say an Iron Man or The Dark Knight for instance, that’s just so much gravy. But Oscar season is a lie. This is in the fall and winter generally when all the so-called “serious” pictures are released. These movies are going to have serious scripts about serious topics with serious acting. They’re going to be “art” and they’re going to make that word a bad name. Men are going to cry, music is going to swell, household appliances are going to get broken, you know the drill. This would bother me a lot less if it didn’t exclude other types of films from getting their own recognition as dynamic and artistically daring endeavors of talent, passion and sweat. The Dark Knight is going to be a favorite example for years to come, I can tell you that now. How does this movie not even get nominated as the Best Picture of the Year? Are you kidding? I mean, sometimes I just want to be in the room when these decisions are made so I can start knocking heads. What, we had to make sure Frost/Nixon got a nod? Or The fucking Reader? And don’t get me wrong. I liked both those movies. But The Dark Knight sent people out of the theatre in a fever. You don’t often see the kind of themes and ideas mapped out in The Dark Knight also fueled by the energy of a grade-A Hollywood action flick. It was heady stuff.
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| Heath Ledger getting nominated – and winning – the Best Supporting Actor Oscar was seen as a victory by some. Perhaps it was. It was, after all, the first acting award of any kind given to a movie about a super-hero. But the fact of the matter is, Ledger’s Joker was the most daring and electrifying performance of the year and he had way more screen time than say, Michael Douglas had as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street or Marlon Brando in The Godfather. So how does this masterwork get knocked down to best “supporting”? Shit, he was on half the film posters! Why, because the Oscars don’t give comic book movies respect. They don’t give horror movies respect. They don’t give science fiction or fantasy or animation they’re respect. A movie from one of these genres has to be world altering to even get nominated. When they do, like Beauty and the Beast, almost twenty years ago, just the fact that the movie got nominated in that category is supposed to be honor enough. I mean, think about it. How many movies that come out are automatically excluded from filmdom’s “highest honor” because they’re not of a genre that is considered “serious” art? Ever heard of -- let alone seen -- a movie called Cavalcade? No? It was the Best Picture of 1933. I know, I know that was seventy-six years ago. I’ll bet you’ve heard of King Kong though, which came out the same year. It was dynamite and rife with the magic of movies. Oh yeah, that Oscar pretentiousness goes all the way back. How about Cimarron? A family favorite, perhaps? No? Best picture 1931. But I’ll you’ve heard of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein even if you’ve never seen it. | 
Die, Art, die! |
God forbid something should be groundbreaking or actually advance the art of cinema. Not good enough for Oscar. In fact, the very notion is repellant to the little gold asshole. So even though Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski literally changed the face of movie acting forever, the award goes to Humphrey Bogart for The African Queen. Bogart’s was a marvelous performance without a doubt but was hardly revolutionary. Even recently you take a performance like Andy Serkis as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I would argue that that marriage of human performer and computer technology was the most groundbreaking advance made in movie acting since Brando. It blew my mind how that zenith could not even be acknowledged by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! Your art form just underwent a tectonic shift and you can’t even nod in its general direction? Idiots. Likewise, Toy Story for example. Like it or not that movie sparked a movement! Sure it got an Academy Special Achievement Award "for the development and inspired application of techniques that have made possible the first feature-length computer-animated film." but why can’t it be considered a best movie? Why can’t they give a best picture Oscar to a film that changes everything and was wildly entertaining to boot? Why is this a crazy notion? Art is supposed to push the envelope. One might argue that this is its primary purpose. So why, why, why is our most august award giving body in our darling art form so terrified of change and why is that okay with us? 
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