(With a nod to Liz)
I think my tolerance for people in general is dwindling as the year goes on. I had for a duration of several seconds attempted to make an illustrative and humourous graph that showed, in line-graph form, the steady descent of my mood from September of last year through an interpolated April of 2005, including such hilarious values as “Troglodytic,” “Holocaustic,” and “Shut up, or I’ll punch you in the fuck.” For some reason, neither OOo Calc nor M$ Excel recognised those phrases as values on a line graph, and I don’t have the patience to make one by hand, so you’ll just have to imagine how funny it was in my head.
As I said all through February, I hate the Academy Awards. It’s not so much that I think Million Dollar Baby or The Aviator are bad movies, or that it’s necessarily a bad thing that they one a lot of awards. It’s that I cannot respect an organization that fails to even nominate Paul Giamatti for Best Actor in a Lead Role. He as Miles in Sideways was one of the best performances I have seen…. ever. He carried that film (not to dismiss the other actors) on his mouth and eyebrows, and he’s left to stand behind Thomas Hayden Church and Virginia Madsen, feeling like a schmuck, when people should be heaping laud and honour upon him. The Academy Awards are a blatantly political event, no more free of bias and shady influence than Congress.
One more week until Spring Break…
The problem is that the Academy Awards are half-political, half-representative. So some awards go to people for political reasons (Jaime Foxx, even though he was great in Ray; Giamatti was still better), and some go to what the Academy feels should actually win (Eastwood winning for Million Dollar Baby). The end result is that lots of people get shafted, so the Academy tries to make up for it by “awarding awards “after the fact”, as it were (Crowe didn’t deserve an Oscar for Gladiator, but it was a crime that he didn’t win one for The Insider-hence, the Oscar). And this only perpetuates the pattern I mentioned above. But not to worry; the Academy consists mainly of retired gaffers and electricians, technicians, etc. Who really cares what they have to say?
And also, Sideways won several more prominent awards (at least in my eyes). It won Best Adapted Screenplay from the Writers Guild, and it swept the Independent Spirit awards, winning all six categories for which it was nominated. It also won the outstanding ensemble award from the Screen Actor’s Guild.
But I digress. He still deserved a nomination.
Ben,
you’re just so angry. Like a young… well, like a young Ben Gunnink. Nobody with a college education, a job and a girlfriend should be so mad, regardles of his politics or feelings about The Acadumby.
Speaking of Oscars, here’s a brief history lesson that will not quell your rage, but put things in perspective a bit. The Oscars ony started in the 20s when Hollywood needed a bit of positive publicity. Need good press? Make your own by assigning otherwise meaningless awards with questionable criteria! Then as now Hollywood was a place of debauchery. Parties with opium and orgies were common, and after one such party a silent comedian named Fatty Arbuckle was reputed to have killed a young woman. Much of the sordid nature of the then-new Hollywood community came out, and the public was outraged. Arbuckle was essentially sacrificed for the cause of policing Hollywood, but stigma remained. Hence, the Academy Awards, the same crappy awards show that handed out 11 statuettes to Titanic, for puking ina bucket, were born.
The disconnect there wasn’t as apparent as it was supposed to be. Really, it’s not that I’m angry, just that I’m tired of people. In fact, I can’t even remember what it was that prompted me to write that entry, other than the humourously ribald title.
When I grow up, I’m going to live in an isolated cabin and have all my interpersonal communication occur via electronic text. Blah.
[...] opinions as to Sideways the movie are well-documented. It was with some trepidation that I started in upon [...]