The Oscars are Fucking Terrible

I am an "average" movie fan. I do not see every movie that is nominated for an Academy Award, but I do usually see all of the best picture nominees, and occasionally a handful more (even if I do not get around to seeing them all until after the Academy Awards, as this year).

This weekend, Mrs. Side Bar and I saw Slumdog Millionaire on Saturday and Doubt on Sunday. Both were excellent (side note: I have a bit of a, er, reputation, for bringing less than the most critical eye to movies. But whatever. Both of these were legitimately good movies). Slumdog was a funny and uplifting story (with very harsh realities mixed in throughout), and Doubt was simply phenomenal stage acting captured on camera (it was a play before it was a movie, which makes total sense). If you wonder why Viola Davis was nominated for an Oscar after only appearing on the screen for 12 minutes, then you haven't seen the movie yet. And Phillip Seymour Hoffman's scenes with Meryl Streep were incredibly engaging. The movie felt like it was 20 minutes long.

So having seen two of the more well-known movies of the year, and committed to seeing Milk, The Reader, and Revolutionary Road at some point in the next few months (side note: I have no interest in Frost/Nixon. Absolutely none. It is 2009. Stop it. Just get the fuck over it and move on. He was an asshole, he had some guys break into a hotel like 180 years ago, and he got caught. No more movies, no more books, no more awards. Please just stop), I sat down with some measure of interest to watch the Oscars (I am using "Oscars" and "Academy Awards" interchangeably. Ok?).

What a fucking nightmare.

I do not even know where to start. First of all, they load the show up with so many fucking montages and musical numbers that it is impossible to keep track of the six things anyone cares about: best supporting actor, best supporting actress, best director, best actor, best actress, and best picture. That is it. No one cares about cinematography, let alone best animated short. But at 9:08 p.m. eastern on a Sunday night - right smack in the middle of prime time - I am listenting to the producer of La Maison en Petits Cubes (loosely translated: "I am a French d-bag and I have little cubes in my stupid French house") talk about how much this 8-minute cartoon can change your life.

Where the fuck do you even go to watch an animated short?

I will give $50 to every reader of this blog who can prove to me that they saw La Maison en Petits Cubes before last night. And I am sure you were all relieved to see that Smile Pinki beat out The Conscience of Nhem En for Documentary Short Subject. We were actually going to go see that one, but it has been sold out for the past few weeks. Je. Sus. Christ.

But the stupid awards are not even the worst part. The show just drags on and on and on. Finally, at like five minutes to eleven, when I am sure they will get to the stuff I care about, the announcer says, very dramatically, "coming up . . . a tribute to Jerry Lewis!" Are you fucking kidding me? That was enough for me, so I shut it off and went to bed, catching the last hour this morning on DVR.

After Queen Latifah (who can freaking sing, by the way) did a five-minute montage to all the dead people, they finally got to the actual awards. But by then they were more than 30 minutes behind schedule, and they have to rush through everything. So the stuff you have been waiting hours to see is compressed and hurried, all because the guy who won for best costume design hogged the mic for fifteen minutes.

Even the length of the show pales in comparison to how impressed all of the Hollywood people are with each other. I mean, I am sure there are some actors and movie-types who do a lot of good, but for the most part these are pretty people living in a fantasy world. I vascillate between laughing my ass off and screaming my head off when one of these people starts talking about the "gifts" that they bring to our world, and how "transcendant" their art can be. Shut up. Let's keep our eye on the ball here, ok folks? Teachers, nurses and guys who work three jobs to keep their kids in a good school are worthy of a bit more praise than Anne Fucking Hathaway.

And I am not even going to bring up the fact that they all spent kajillions of dollars on dresses, and jewelry and parties and limos, etc., all while we are in the midst of a depression (yep, that's right). I do think there should have been a more candid acknowledgment of the financial crisis, and the canyon of difference between the haves and have-nots in our country, but I am not one of these people who thinks that you have to just cancel every public event because of the economy. So I will not talk about the fact there were probably tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars spent last night in connection with the Academy Awards. Money that no doubt could have been put to better use. Nope, not bringing it up.

I guess I should have learned my lesson by now, but I can't get over it. Because they should have learned their lesson by now, too. The Oscars should start at 9 and end at 11. Ten-minute intro by the host (the musical number that Hugh Jackman did was kind of funny), 30 minutes of miscellaneous stupid awards and other bs (with commercials, that gets you to the halfway point). And then spend an hour on the shit people care about. And then be done with it.

I can't be the only one who feels this way.