I Hate Awards Shows

The Oscars Particularly Suck

My gal loves watching the Oscars, which is fine by me, but I can't sit through these things. I think I was a kid when I quickly got over them. I think I sat up late watching to see if Star Wars would get best picture back in 1978. It sure as hell didn't. Kid disappointed. A few years later I sat up to see if 'Blade Runner' would win in its one category: Production Design. It didn't. It got beaten out by 'Gandhi', which was the 'worthy' film that year. For crying out loud, one of the most important pieces of Production Design of ALL TIME got beaten by a movie that essentially just had huts in India in it. No offense to India, but it's a crap choice - and nobody is talking about 'Gandhi' being an important work of cinema today, so we can all say that was an utterly crap moment in the long history of utterly crap moments in what we know as the Oscars.

So it was then that I got it firmly in my head that there's a whole bunch of idiots in The Academy' that line up to hand over Oscars to films not on merit or achievement but a more ethereal, indescribable, intangible worthiness of theme. You could make 'The Dark Knight'  and make $533m at the box office, but hey, the worthy films are big costume dramas based on true stories or important novels. It's great if it has a Holocaust story, because uh, a certain demographic feels compelled to hand out awards to those films that make sure the the NAZIs continue to be portrayed as the ultimate psychopathic evil on the planet. Nobody makes a film about Stalin's gulags, let alone hand out Oscars for those. Where's the love for the other oppressed peoples?

But it's even stupider, dumber, sillier and crazier than that. Spielberg's best films for me are things like 'Jaws', 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', the Indy Jones movies. I think most of the movie watching world of the last 30 years would agree with me whole-heartedly. Did he get an Oscar for those? No. He got to be a billionaire through those, but he gets an Oscar for 'Schindler's List'.Now, I'm happy for Mr. Spielberg, but it's so condescending and patronising you wonder which planet these people inhabit.

Martin Scorsese, who has to be one of the most important directors of ALL TIME didn't get his Oscar for best director for 'Taxi Driver' or 'Raging Bull' or 'Good Fellas' or 'Casino' or 'The Last Temptation of Christ' or for that matter 'Gangs of New York'. No, he got it for his effort in directing a remake of a Hong Kong movie 'Infernal Affairs', as 'The Departed'. How fucking warped is that? Why didn't they just give him the lifetime achievement award instead, and save themselves the embarrassment?

Apart from the bad viewing that it is every year, the way the Academy votes is like a drunken hypocritical sentimentalist with no sense of proportion and context. It's as if they're not seeing and hearing the same films as the rest of the damn world. The truly crazy thing is that this thing is the pinnacle of all Awards ceremonies and Awards shows. How could I ever bring myself to watch this stuff?

Heath Ledger Wins Posthumous Oscar

Good on ya mate! You're missed already.