The people behind the Oscars are fretting:
The people who put on the Academy Awards are in a flopsweat panic as the hours tick away before this year’s big broadcast, which is having its major rehearsal and technical run-through today. For weeks now, they’ve been begging me and the other journalists who cover the Oscars not to trash the planning and performances for this year’s telecast like we have in years past. Because their frustration and fear is that, if Sunday’s top-to-bottom reworked show can’t bring back viewers after 2008′s sunk to its lowest ratings ever, then nothing will. And the worst part is that not even Hollywood wants to participate in the Oscars anymore.
It goes on, mostly ignoring some simple facts.
First, most people don’t feel a connection to Hollywood. A bunch of rich actor pukes who earn more in six months than most of us make in ten years, and writers who strike and delay production of our favorite TV shows. Who wants to see a show hosted by people we don’t like giving awards to other people we don’t like for making movies we don’t watch? Slumdog Millionaire? The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? Are you kidding me? If they want to congratulate each other, there’s no reason why they have to do it on television. Just let them go to Lutece, open up some bottles of Cristal and vials of cocaine, and have a blast. It’s no longer our business.
Not only that, but most of Hollywood holds a very large percentage of us in contempt (that is, the 46% who didn’t vote for Barack “I Won” Obama). In fact, some of them outright hate us. That’s fine, because we don’t like you either, and you’ve showed us that having money and acting talent doesn’t at all mean that you’ve got brains or class. Most of you don’t.
So you’ll have to forgive us for not watching you lick each other on national television.
When I had a television and when I lived in America I used to like watching the Oscars. I’d watch the whole thing, head to tail. That’s also when I had time to see all the movies and develop “rooting interests” (as opposed to rooting instincts). I was rooting for Milk this time. It’s one of the only movies I saw in the past year (I saw the Dark Knight and think Josh Brolin from Milk should have won Best Supporting Actor. Heath Ledger was good but Brolin was better). This has nothing to do with political interests because I was watching the Oscars well before I developed my political rooting interests.
I like the Oscars. I think they’re fun.
You and every homosexual man in America.