Growing up I don't recall seeing more than a few minutes of the show in any given year. That and all other award shows were never the chosen fare in our house. Indeed, today, the Oscar show is the only award show I will watch as I find them all to be universally frustrating and self-important. So why do I bother with the Oscars? I watch it with friends and we generally do what we can to have the most fun with the telecast. We bet on all the categories— only a quarter except for the Best Picture category, which rates an entire dollar. In the early years we also mocked large portions of the show. Before the invention of far-too expensive TV's, it was common for us to shoot rubber-tipped darts at the most obnoxious celebrities. ("Take that, Celine Dion!") In other years we shot plastic disk guns or laser pointers at the TV. Now, because there are a couple excitable children present, we refrain from toy use but still bet on the individual awards.
My personal theory why the show itself has generally gotten duller year after year is because the celebrities involved have gotten duller. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the works of your Kate Winsletts and your Cate Blanchetts and your Phillip Seymour Hoffmans and your Adrian Brodys, etc., but these people make absolutely lousy celebrities. All their shine is on screen. In an ideal world where the movies themselves were the only things that mattered that would be enough, but the Oscar ceremony itself is a celebration of the spectacle of Hollywood— and there's just not much spectacle left.
Even the movies themselves reflect this dullness. I know Hollywood has always celebrated the epic movie, but I blame the decline of movies on one movie, The English Patient. Giving the Best Picture Oscar to this movie was an acknowledgement that content no longer mattered, that all you needed to do was make your movie long and fill it with people for whom English is their second language. The English Patient is all veneer wrapped around three hours of yawns. Since then, the movies and the celebrities just seem to go through the motions.
So many scripts are exactly the same. They're not genuine stories with true beginnings, middles, and ends. They're simply contrivances for action sequences or Oscar moments. So few movies have the cajones to stick to their story all the way through to the end. Just look at Hancock. The first half of this movie was a solid comedic character study based on the premise "What if there was one super-hero in the world and he was unreliable?" That's a great premise for a movie, and the central relationship of the movie, that between Will Smith's character and Jason Bateman's character, really carried the first half of the film. But then the movie veers off in horribly new direction and barely manages to be more than a train wreck by the time the credits roll. Someone somewhere decided that a character comedy wasn't a big enough movie for Will Smith and thus the second half of the movie was completely re-written. The story was tossed in favor of an attempt to make more money.
I don't mean to go on a wild diatribe against Hollywood and the movies. I enjoy seeing movies— even bad ones at times— and I wish I could see more of them. No, I mean to keep this diatribe focused on why the Oscar show is so dull. Movie after movie gets cranked out, with every scene adjusted to produce the most revenue. Whole scripts are lifted from one successful movie and dropped into sequels. Hollywood itself barely seems to care about what it pours down our throats. We're so inundated by the bland and the repetitious that we're barely more than sheep in a pen surrounded by screens. Then, once a year, Hollywood dresses up and tries to put it's most glam face forward, tries to make us believe that Hollywood matters. In reaction at home, we sit in front of our millions of TV's and yawn because at some level our brains can't be bothered to remember which one is Kate Winslett and which is Cate Blanchett. Or maybe that one's Gwyneth Paltrow?
OK, stepping off my soapbox, I will admit that this year's show was a smidgen better than last year's. Hugh Jackman was an adequate host; although, I would rather that job be handled by a comedian again in the future. My favorite moment of the night was probably Sean Penn winning his Oscar for Milk. I'm not a Sean Penn fan and I didn't see the movie, but I was glad to hear him 'go poltical' for a few moments in favor of gay and lesbian equality. That moment made me tear up very briefly. My second favorite moment of the show is the quote at the end of this post.
You know, the other telling truth about the Oscar show is that this year after the awards were over, I didn't feel compelled to see any of the movies I'd missed.
Oh, and the obvious joke from the title?: Slumdog Millionaire proves there is absolutely nothing in this country that can't be out-sourced to India.
Until next time.
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