Why the Oscars Suck.
District 9 was an amazing film. I don't need the Oscars to confirm that for me.
The Oscar’s are outdated. No one cares about them anymore. This is the truth that we refuse to tell each other.
It’s like this. Not everything deserves a damn award. We don’t always have to pit two or three things against each other and watch them fight for the winner. This does not have to happen. And, yet, we continue to do so because that is how we view our reality. There are winners and there are losers. Things have good endings and things have happy endings. That is the way of things. However, the artificiality of that very concept, that things win and things lose and that it all fits into a story book, is completely blown apart this year by having multiple movies up for the same award even though every one of the movies are unrelated to each other and even though they have different ideas of what is considered art. What we are facing is the Academy attempting to make itself relevant, even thought it isn’t, and it knows it. The fact that the Academy Awards is laying on its deathbed is very, extremely obvious. Miley Cyrus is giving an award. Miley Cyrus. I have scars older than this girl.
Example. Avatar is in the same category, up for the same award, as District 9 and as District 9 was a movie about a barely sympathetic character struggling to find the mildest bit of courage to do a simple, basic thing for another living creature. It was gross, bold, emotional, powerful and beautiful. Avatar was a smoldering piece of shit. Yet, these two movies have been compared to each other and are up for the same award? It would be like my blog being up for the Pulitzer.
We understand this. The Academy has crammed movies together at some horrible attempt to create drama. It is boring. The Oscars are self-approving garbage that gives the cubicle-bound workforce something to fuss about for a week before and a week after the event. You’d think the whole mess would have the good taste to dig its grave and actively jump in it. Sadly, I’ll probably write another post just like this next year.
I find Avatar to be a visual art piece, but the story is a piece of shitty recycled cardboard. It has been recycles hundreds if not thousands of time just to be regretfully recycled again. I saw it two times. Ounce in a regular theatre, and the second in 3D. Not sure I’ll ever see it again, but District 9 was a much more compelling, natural story with some complexity to make it interesting. I will see that one again.
As far as the Academy Awards I could give a shit less. The ten movies that they have up for best picture of the year are varied in genre, and the thought that they can be compared is almost obscene. A few of the movies have action while others may be more of a compelling tear jerking story. Why waste our time trying to get us to compare movies that hardly have any thing in common. That just doesn’t seem right. I think a great way to hand out awards would be as follows.
Best action movie
Best tear jerking mess with your head and other parts movie (chick flick/ drama)
Best sci-fi
Best steroids movie (sports)
Best war movie (war dose note necessarily mean action)
Best animation
Best CGI
Best waste of money (This would have to be a must to keep me interested)
I sure I or any one else could come up with some more interesting best movie categories, and honestly some more negative categories would be really cool.
Some of the movies that I did like in the ten selected for best picture are District 9 (did I say that already?), An Education (funny this one rang a bell in my head that made me wonder if I had seen one very much like it before a long time ago), The Hurt Locker, Inglorious Bastards (ingenious!), Precious (talk about a unique tear jerking knock you off your ass movie this one takes the cake), A Serious Man (what can I saw but the Cohen Brothers do it again), Up (full of laughs, and great character animation).
The one movie that doesn’t belong at all is the Blind Side. I’m not saying that it totally sucks, but its not that great. Avatar has great visuals, but a drawing a piece of card board will not stand the test of time.
“Avatar” was a soporific for me, but then again, I’m older…frankly, my preference is TCM and today watched “All The Presidents Men,” though not a classic, as I was a reporter in DC at the time (with no part of the story, unfortunately), found it better than most I’ve seen. Also watched “To Have and Have Not,” the screenplay by Faulkner.
With regard to the Oscars, give everyone an award…I’ll be watching “A Thousand Clowns.” And, by the way, I was in that business for a while with Paramount where I doctored “Grease” and “Fever.”
Problems with contemporary film are often brought to the fore in an analysis of the Acadamy Awards (see Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris), and while it is hard to disagree that the Oscars have been low points in the history of television entertainment, The Oscars will continue to serve as an interesting indicator of mass cultural values (see Adorno’s The Culture Industry). With this edition of the Acadamy Awards, we bear witness to an attempt at the democratization of Best Picture honors (10 nominees instead of 5) and the elimination of of the obligatory “Thank-you’s” that say more about a film’s money trail than the personal impact people can have in contemporary film. With the addition of the 5 Best Picture nominees comes a new voting system – judges must rank the films 1 to 10 and the winner is based on points- and when nominees accept an award they must give a speech about film eschewing Hollywood values. The case of Avatar will go to show just how much money can buy. The Hurt Locker is fighting back by sending flyers encouraging judges to rank Hurt Locker #1 and Avatar #10 resulting in one of the film’s producers to get banned from the ceremony. In my opinion, this is important stuff. It is too easy to sit in a bubble and appreciate District 9 and trash Avatar and not consider the impact the sales and aesthetic triumphs and pitfalls of these films have on our culture. The Acadamy Awards tell us about ourselves, past and future, and the ways that they change indicate some of the ways we attempt to accommodate for changes in mass culture.
That being said, I saw Avatar in 3-D with my family on December 27, 2009, two days after Christmas, theater was packed, biggest movie time of the year. About an hour in I fell asleep, waking up just in time for the big finale. Because I didn’t see the whole film, I’m not sure if I’m the best person to be on a panel, so all I’ll say is, “I Don’t See You, James Cameron. I Don’t See You.” Each year it seems fewer and fewer films manage to reconcile the popular desires for B-movie fairy tales and the need for important works of art.
Anyway, this year The Oscars will be more interesting than most.
Aw, come on Jarvis, Oscar parties are fun.
T. A. Kallman: “The Oscars will continue to serve as an interesting indicator of mass cultural values:” How unfortunate a statement. On the other hand, given your response to Avatar (the same as mine), movies may serve, in some small way, to mitigate the increasing use of illegal pharmaceutals inducing sleep.
My confession is this: I’ve always considered movies to be simply entertainment — I don’t want to walk away thinking, “how great that was,” or “how dreadful;” just that I enjoyed myself, had a laugh or two and didn’t have to seek “meaning.”
I suppose that all mitigates toward the great times I had a movies when I was a kid and for a quarter or a half a buck one saw several cartoons, at least two serials and a double feature.
But then again, I am at an age when “I wear my trousers rolled.”
I love that you guys have written so much about this. It makes my day brighter.
While I appreciate films of all sorts – from the layers on the pond that show me the trees to strips of celluloid or bundles of data that do lots of things- I also mainly watch movies to be entertained. Instead of watching all the powerful movies I think I might end up loving, I more often fall asleep to Live Free or Die Hard or Tropic Thunder. But then again, A Thousand Clowns is a bit more than just entertaining, and we can throw in all the other films mentioned previously for that matter. But even if I only appreciated the films of Brakhage or only watched Skinemax, or if I’ve seen every Oscar-Nominated Film, I feel like a beef with the Oscar’s is misdirected. Yes, the Oscars phenomenon is a part of the process by which the culture industry erects monuments of its products and attempts to bind us to mass culture with partisan fervor, and The Cullture Industry is a system of oppression that commodifies our imagination and reality, and it has huge barriers of entry, costs us our wages, and organizes our free time, all in order to reinforce traditional cultural values and make a few people ever rich and all powerful. But with The Oscars and the Academy’s annual assessment of contemporary film there is a reflexive tendency – there is some sort of self-analysis that challenges the unconscious acceptance of mass cultural values. (I know Avatar made more than 2 billion dollars but how does it hold up against 9 other leading $ makers?… Do aliens have to look so different? … How come Foreign Language Film nominees are always so different than American Nominees?… Questions like these are asked with the Oscars.)
Refugee, I too find it unfortunate that the Oscars will continue to be an interesting indicator of mass cultural values, rather than say the Constitution or end of year editorials, but to me that’s the lesser problem. The film studios and producers that determine which films are to be made, the governments that issue filming permits, the marketing firms that represent films on the market, the distributors that disseminate films in the public sphere, the bureaucrats, the consumers, are all, in my opinion, a bigger part of the problem, for they shape the content that so influences our lives.
BTW I might have to borrow that “trousers rolled” bit at some point – truly inspired.
And Jarvis, if your blog got nominated for Best Picture or if District 9 had a chance I bet the Oscars wouldn’t suck so bad.
Peace in the Middle East.
“…trousers rolled…” You’ll have to borrow it as I did, from T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock.” A great poem, incidentally.
Refugee- I hope you get to hear those mermaids drawing you in. If I felt I had the prospect my trousers would’ve been done rolled. For now, with a muse like Falconetti maybe I’ll decide a song should be sung instead; I’ll sag my slacks and hope for the best. Good poem, indeed.
P.S. You right, J. You right. The Oscars suck.
I must say, i guess that the oscars are great to look at, and i really think that the hurt locker is a impressive movie to watch!