Oscar Wieners

No, that isn't a Brokeback Mountain joke. It's a slam on the 5,800+ members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Oscars are bestowed on the important pictures that Hollywood usually releases during the final month of the year after they've spoon fed us pap for the previous 11 months. "These are the Oscar-worthy films," they say. "This is the good stuff. All that other stuff was just to sell popcorn and pad our accounts so we can make great cinema. Yes, many of you will get a chance to see these movies in your hometown weeks after they have been released in New York and Los Angeles and after the critics in those two cities have told the rest of the country what we already knew: These films are the cream of the crop. Now, we will nominate ourselves for awards to confirm what the critics said about what we already knew."

I watched Million Dollar Baby on HBO recently. You may remember that it won the Oscar for Best Picture last year because everyone in Hollywood thinks that Clint Eastwood can do no wrong. If you recall, this is a man who made his career out of 1. playing gunslingers in Spaghetti Westerns, 2. toting around a hand cannon as a guy named Dirty something-or-other, 3. acting as second banana to a precocious orangutan named Clyde, and 4. singing that they called the wind Mariah. Now, I'm not going to say the movie was terrible, because it wasn't, but man, it was a bummer. I guess the new measure of a movie's worth is if you leave the theater wringing your hands and crying, "Woe is me!" while simultaneously rending your garments and gnashing your teeth.

Sadly, I'm still a sucker for the stuff (stuff=Oscars). When the final act in the Lord of the Rings trilogy swept the Oscars two years ago. It was a reward for a staggering achievement in film that will probably not be duplicated in my lifetime: Three features filmed back to back on location in New Zealand and recreating, down to the finest detail, a completely engrossing fantasy world. A movie I actually loved (although not as much as the previous two installments) had won for being accessible, crowd-pleasing entertainment. To each his own, but give me movies that aspire to be rousing entertainment over movies about cowboy lovers, Truman Capote, racial tensions in Los Angeles, a 50-year old witch hunt, and a 30-year old act of terrorism.

In all honesty, I haven't seen this year's nominated films. Every year, Jamye and I plan to see each one, but we never make it. I think there's something to that. After a long day at work, it makes more sense to go see a big gorilla scale the Empire State Building or a Caped Crusader take down ninjas rather than watch two ranch hands stare at each other longingly across a campfire. Maybe we just resent being told what is good and/or important by the very people who make sequels to movies called Big Momma's House.