Shots Across The Bow

Hollywood's Big Night Falls Flat: Apparently We Can Quit Them.

And that's the last Brokeback Mountain joke I'll make.

Was it just me or did the entire three hour plus extravaganza simply reek of self importance? I mean, all those montages of movies that were "important," that caused us to deeply question ourselves and our image of our nation, the bloviating of Academy President Whatsisname, about how movies were more than entertainment, and the preachiness of Terrence Howard in his intro for the award for best documentary short, "We must pay attention." Hollywood came off as an angry adolescent, screaming to the world "Pay attention to me! I'm important!"

While the directors, actors, and writers try desperately to convince themselves that they are relevant to the world at large, far beyond being mere entertainers, ticket sales suggest otherwise, my friends. Not only aren't they relevant, for the most part they aren't even entertaining anymore.

A witty, bright, and pretty lady invited me to watch the Oscars along with her witty, bright friends, and the one comment I heard more than any other all night long was "I didn't see that movie." Now for me, not seeing most of these movies is understandable; I'm worse than a middle american, I'm a southern redneck. Nobody expects me to go see a movie about gay sheep herders, but I was surprised by how few nominated movies those folks had seen. After all, they were Hollywood's ideal demographic; young, urban, well educated, and liberal. Yet even they had little to no interest in seeing many of the movies nominated, although I heard a lot of good things about The Constant Gardener, enough to convince me to watch it on PPV.

I think Jon Stewart accidentally summed up the problem with the Oscars when he joked after the award for best song, "I just want to point this out; Martin Scorsese, zero Oscars. Three 6 Mafia one." It's no longer about merit; it's about popularity.

The theme of the Oscars this year appears to be "Let's stick it to the Man," and has been embraced so thoroughly that it seems possible that Three 6 Mafia won not because of the song's merits, but because of the group's name, a play on the Biblical number of the beast.

But putting all that aside, ignoring all the underlying politics and messages, in a parallel to much of what comes out of Hollywood today, the show was boring. As my hostess pointed out, the set looked like a 50s era diner, all chrome and no glamour. The acceptance speeches were bland and boring, as usual, and the only suspense came when it appeared that Keanu Reeves was actually going to have to read on stage, but the excitement was short-lived as he just opened the envelope, parroted the one line he could remember, "And the Oscar goes to..." and handed the paper to Sandra Bullock.

Speaking of Keanu and Sandra, one theme of the night was to link Hollywood's past glories to it's current status, as if to say, "We're still making classics!" Isn't it sad that when Hollywood tries to play up it's new classics, the best they can do is Speed? I know when I think of the great Hollywood movies, I think of Ben Hur, Gone with the Wind, On the Waterfront, Citizen Kane, and Speed.

Yeah, sure I do.

Usually you can count on somebody to wear something wildly inappropriate, wildly revealing, or both, to spice things up, but not this year. Oh, for the days of Cher and 6 foot tall headdresses. Instead, this year we get Charlize Theron wearing a dress that looked like it got into an accident at a cake decorating shop. What was with that shapeless blob of fabric on her shoulder? Was she trying to hide a zit?

A key moment of the evening came when the bright, witty, young lady next to me had to stifle a yawn. The best and brightest Hollywood had to offer was putting her to sleep and it wasn't even 10PM yet. As she said, if anything exciting were going on, she'd be wide awake at that time, but there was nothing on the tube to hold her interest. It appears that there's nobody left in Hollywood who knows how to perform live anymore.

It says something when the only live moment that had any zing was Ben Stiller humiliating himself in a green suit. The bit wasn't that funny, but he sold it with everything he had.

If I had to sum the whole thing up in a few words (and don't you wish I had before you read through all this?), they would be:

Pretentious.
Self Important.
Dull.

Posted by Rich at March 6, 2006 12:00 AM | TrackBack