Oh, Yeah, the Oscars...

The Oscars were Sunday, weren't they? Weren't the costumes to die for? Wasn't what's-his-name a riot? Didn't you love the songs? And didn't the movies just have so much cultural resonance?

Did you even watch them? The Oscars, I mean. I know no one watched the movies.

As for ourselves, we had forgotten the Oscars were even on that night, till we dropped off one of Boy's friends at his house, after a day at beautiful Charmlee Park.



So we stayed for pizza and wine and, oh yeah, the Academy Awards. And this time I really, really realized why people aren't watching the telecast. Not because it doesn't matter; not because nobody saw the movies; not because people are tired of gay cowboys. People aren't watching the Oscars... because the show is boring. It's as simple as that. Four hours of tedium, cut up into neat segments, none of them connected to any of the others. The Oscars have no structure, no thematic coherence, no reason to stay tuned. You can leave at any point and when you come back, it's not so much that you haven't missed anything worth seeing - though you haven't - but that what you've missed has no relevance to anything you're about to see.

Ironically, there is no story in this celebration of storytelling; and a celebration of an art form that is all about pulling emotional strings... has, ever since I can remember, been hosted by glib comedians, produced by clock-watchers. As if "keeping things moving" were the problem. That the Academy Awards runs too long - it has been ever thus - is a mere accident. If the show were only interesting, no one would care how long it ran. They could run it on consecutive nights, like a miniseries, or the Olympics. They could give it some shape, some context, some insight. Why these films, this year? What the hell does a sound mixer do, anyway? (That would be fodder for a fascinating experimental short film - and they could show it to us. What the hell, we're already bored, how bad could it be?) Why not show one of the short films in its entirety? Why not commission three-minute silent Lumiere-style films by each of the Best Director nominees, instead of subjecting us to interminable montages of meaningless film clips? How about showing a little imagination for a change?

Let me tell you, things would be different if I ran the zoo.