It may seem self-evident that most awards shows are stupid, overwrought affairs designed to get you to stare at advertisements for four hours. Not to mention the fact that these things are hardly ever actual barometers of what any sort of majority of people consider to be the "best" entertainment in any given category. (Unless throngs of people really thought the Dixie Chicks really deserved that "Album of the Year" Grammy, in which case I may be mistaken. At least the Red Hot Chili Peppers didn't win it.)
And yet every year, we all wait in excited anticipation for the Academy Awards to come around, and tell us all what the best movies and performances of the last year were.
Why? What's the point of watching something when every single one of the major awards is all but a foregone conclusion? Watch me look into my crystal ball and divine the winners of the six major categories this year: Whitaker, Mirren, Murphy, Hudson, The Departed, Martin Scorsese.
Wasn't that amazing? No, because we've been told for over a month that those are going to be the winners, and yet we'll all tune in anyway to pretend that there's some kind of suspense amidst the tedious montages and salutes to those who have left us and an honorary Oscar for Ennio Morricone.
And besides that, there are problems with the awards they give anyway. Anybody who portrays a real person in a movie in a reasonably convincing manner is virtually assured of an Oscar, and sure enough, this year we've got Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, Helen Mirrin as Queen Elizabeth, and Eddie Murphy as a thinly veiled James Brown. This is why I think that roles based on real people should be a separate category. Other quick roads to Oscar-winning, of course, include playing a mentally challenged person, a drug addict (or alcoholic), or somebody with a terminal disease. If you can combine a couple of those, even better.
As for the best picture, the prevailing trend lately is to give the Oscar to middlebrow, faux-art films that like to congratulate the viewer on their own good taste. How else to explain how Crash won last year? (And let's take a look back at some other winners over the last decade or so: The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, American Beauty, A Beautiful Mind, Million Dollar Baby.) With this in mind, the smart money would be on Little Miss Sunshine, but supposedly Martin Scorsese's got all the momentum, and this year he'll finally get his Oscar for Goodfellas, and Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull, and Casino, and... ok, The Departed was actually pretty good, despite all the annoying Boston accents. It finally sold me on Leonardo DiCaprio, after his roles in two Scorsese-directed bloated messes failed to do so. And it was fun seeing Jack Nicholson cast in the role of Satan.
Anyway, if there's any reason at all to watch the Academy Awards tonight, it's to see Scorsese's acceptance speech when he finally gets his damned "Best Director" Oscar (unless Clint Eastwood takes it out from under his nose again). Will he point out that Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman, Ingmar Bergman, Terence Malick, and Sergio Leone never won an Oscar (except for Kubrick's "Best Visual Effects" for 2001: A Space Odyssey)? Or will he be ecstatic to join the elite ranks of Ron Howard, Mel Gibson, and Kevin Costner?
Whatever he says, I'll just look it up on YouTube tomorrow and skip the rest.
1 comment:
well, i once knew this guy in a band called forgone conclusion. but yes, we should hold a "Championship House Awards" and call the award "The Drunken Boxer" and every year we could make a big deal about it and give out awards like "Earliest Sleeper," for which i'm sure i'd be a shoe in.
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