Sunday, February 25, 2007
The Oscars
Fast talking Ellen DeGeneres and the Oscars didn't seem like a good fit but they were. DeGeneres was very funny. I hadn't realized how much her act channeled Woody Allen — a funny morph itself. DeGeneres was great.
Most movies are real stinkers, including some of the winners no doubt. As to why that is true, David Mamet was quoted as saying:
“The very vacuousness of these films is reassuring” … [movies make you feel that] “you are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting $200 million on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody.”
Every society has its rewards — the rewards the media invokes are fame and wealth. In the US that is an expression of one force field, like electricity and magnetism. At the Oscars you see what the gold-plated brass ring proffered by society might be like if carried to absurdity. The Oscars are a shop window of fantasy approval, acceptance and security, where the audience can't buy anything. The Oscars imply that with acting talent, which most people need just to get through the day, and a personality honed into a superb or eccentrically interesting public presence, you too can have that brass ring.
The ambivalence we feel about the value system expressed by pop culture is displayed in the pre-Oscar “red carpet” interviews. The ingratiating praise of the interviewers is lavished on the stars with a mind-numbing treacly adoration. But at the same time that the interviewers will be speaking to a target icon, a more famous icon will appear in the background, and you hear, “Oh, there is Clint, come on over and talk to us…”. This sometimes occurs with the celebrity answering a question in mid-sentence, a rude, jarring subtext indicating the anger, envy, and doubts underlying such submissive status behavior.
Some notes:
- Ryan Gosling looks like David Argquette's younger brother.
- Mark Wahlberg has to be the most poised celebrity on the planet.
- Whoever chose Errol Morris to make the intro short of the nominees doesn't know what they are doing. Morris is an excellent, edgy interviewer in his documentaries, but he is incapable of generating warmth for this subjects.
- James Taylor and Randy Newman were a great combination. Taylor's performances have the simplicity of deep feeling.