Den er ganske vist ikke helt ny længere; men jeg synes, at den er
hylende morsom, da den på trods af at være ekstremt ondskabsfuld også
indeholder en del sandheder:
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2002/03/25/oscars_2002/index.html?x
Oscars 2002: Somebody make it stop!
It's the Oscars of Defensiveness (TM): Four-plus hours in which
Hollywood tries to pretend it's not racist -- and Tom Cruise is
revealed as that Scary Flaming Eye from "Lord of the Rings."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Cintra Wilson
March 25, 2002 | After the reality check of Sept. 11 and its
sobering aftermath, many people looked at the glitterati of Hollywood
and said, "Can you explain why the fuck any of us ever thought YOU
were so important?"
Well, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seems to have
mulled this question over, and this year it gave us the We're
Justifying Our Existence Oscars.
I never questioned the Oscars before, but this year just the fact of
them made me uneasy. Year round, we as a nation are already supposed
to live vicariously through this rather rank stable of prefab actors,
who live lives of ridiculous luxury and ease. We are exposed to their
nightly hobnobbing, their sex lives, their hobbies, their alcoholism;
we cannot escape.
"OK, that was entertaining," I thought, after seeing many of the
nominated films. There were some good, solid movies, but nothing that
I saw made me change my wicked ways. There were some fine, solid
performances, but exactly how much are we supposed to adore good
actors? Last night, these capable but already tremendously
overcelebrated, over-rewarded people had their annual Imelda Marcos
shoe-orgy of gratuitous overcelebration, gilding the gilded lily made
of gold, again. We watched as people already morbidly overstuffed with
congratulations vomited up all previous congratulations to make room
for these, the best and biggest congratulations of all.
It is the gargantuan, ass-licking brainwash of the year, and We, the
People With Televisions, are supposed to watch and enjoy it.
The Academy sensed this attitude was lurking like a murky cloud of
spiritual unease over Middle Earth, and it is my (admittedly hostile)
perception that they said to themselves, "Well, the Oscars are already
fucked this year, so let's honor our Negroes! It's been a while. Call
Whoopi."
I used to call it the "Noble Cripple and Spade Year" -- it comes
around every five years or so. When the Oscar Winner's alumni circle
starts to look like the meeting table in "Judgment at Nuremberg," the
Academy devotes a year to not looking like racist,
Aryan-celebrity-eugenics-worshipping, cracker peckerwoods, and either
gives an Oscar for the best dribbling retard performance, or jerks us
off with a big, obvious, Slather the African-Americans With Trophies
orgy to make up for the previous insulting, five-to-seven-year stretch
when barely anybody of color was recognized at all, for anything.
Look, I'm very glad when we finally honor our African-American
artists. I just wish it happened a little more regularly, instead of
in one big token Big Gulp: "See? We do too give them awards. Lots of
them. See?" Let's stop treating our citizens of color like they are a
separate people from us. If Sept. 11 showed us anything, it's that
we're all Americans together, and our black friends are just as
excellent at being overprivileged celebrity fuckwads as anybody else.
Let's just bump up with this consciousness and be done with it.
I must warn the world about Tom Cruise. I feel he is an utterly
terrifying Superior Life Form, with the power to melt heads and braid
spines. His eyes are as hard, shiny and brutally penetrating as
diamond drill-bits. The new braces on his teeth suggest that he is
erasing all that remained of his tiny imperfections, and he is now
metamorphosing into Ultra Super Perfection Man 3000. I fear his
intense, mind-beating politeness, his titanium imperviousness to human
weakness, his barking power-laugh.
"Movies make a little bit of magic touch our lives," he commanded us
to acknowledge, with steely resolve and Mach-5 mega-humorlessness.
People in the audience started laughing, until they realized that Tom
was Not Being Funny At All. He was chosen to frankly address the
post-Sept. 11 whither-the-Oscars conundrum head-on. "Should we
celebrate the magic the movies bring? Now?" Tom asked, his eyes boring
into the eyes of the TV multitudes and implanting rays of total
domination. "Dare I say it?" He flashed a smirk with his robotically
flawless teeth. "More than EVER," he hissed, laying on his most
Extreme Scientological Unction. He had been commanded by the Elders to
Obi-Wan-Kenobi-ize the audience into rebelieving in the importance of
the obscenely superfluous Oscars. Tom Cruise is becoming the Scary
Flaming Eye from "The Lord of the Rings," and I fear that nobody can
stop him.
The red carpet outside the theater looked a bit like the depths of
Mordor. Today's actresses are so thin their shoulders look like
arthritic knuckles. Jon Voight's face-lift looked like it had a Ziploc
seam for easy reopening. Ryan O'Neal looks like he's spent the last
couple of decades packing rich, chocolatey nougat into his neck. And
J-Lo's time is up. The Anita Bryant hairdo only confirms that her
primary support and advice is coming from the most snark-infested
homosexuals in the showbiz style-world. J-Lo is J-L'Over. You can't
have a big ass and sarcastic hair, not in that town.
Whoopi's hosting unfortunately sucked real hard. She phoned in her
performance, like, from a cellphone from a parking garage in Guam. Her
material was just awful, which was mainly surprising because the lines
written for the presenters were, for the first time ever, actually
pretty clever. Whoopi seemed to be resorting to Refreshing
African-American Earthiness as opposed to actual humor, which I
suppose the Academy thought was fitting for these, the Oscars of
Defensiveness (aka Operation Hide Behind the Darkies).
Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller were funny in their shtick together,
presenting the award for Best Costume Design. I do not want to love
Owen Wilson but I am enslaved. He's a fuckin' badass genius. I read
the "Royal Tenenbaums" script, and I have to say, it ruled so hard it
made my stomach hurt from spleen and jealousy. It was better than the
film. I want to be Owen Wilson, either that or eat Owen Wilson, with
fava beans and a nice Chianti. He was robbed, he and Wes Anderson
shoulda gotten the best original screenplay Oscar, instead of "Gosford
Park." "Tenenbaums" was daringly original; "Gosford" was a highbrow
formulaic retread. Boo.
Halle Berry made history last night, not so much for being the first
African-American woman to win an Oscar in the best actress category,
but for freaking horribly, uncontrollably out and making the worst,
most hysterically rambling, discomfiting and liquefied acceptance
speech in Oscar's 74-year history, and I thought Julia Roberts was
going to hold that title for a long time. I know it was a big deal for
Halle, who claimed her award for All Black Women Everywhere Ever, but
her acceptance tantrum had such an alarming cringe factor, I had to
leave the room. When they tried to pry her off the stage, she made
that screeching Bilbo Baggins monster addiction-face when he Wants the
Ring. It was a heavy, strange, grand-mal meltdown. America squirmed.
Even though I felt like it was a self-conscious gesture on the part of
the Academy ("We'll top off the Overdue Apotheosis of Sidney Poitier
by throwing Denzel the Best Actor award we didn't give him when we
totally ignored 'Malcolm X,' eh? Whaddaya say?"), still, I am always
glad to see Denzel accepting awards. What's not to love about Denzel?
Not much: The man could not peel Julia Roberts off of himself,
backstage. She was practically climbing into his tux. His wife better
kick Julia's skinny, home-wreckin' heinie.
The drafting of Cirque du Soleil as halftime entertainment was a good
call. The refined lowbrow stunts of the Cirque healed a lot of the
trauma we are still feeling from Debbie Allen's interpretive
dance-pain fiasco. Actually, the Cirque was the best thing the Oscars
has done in years. The only problem was, those bungee-trapeze
Frenchies injected LIFE into the Kodak Theater, which brilliantly
exposed the fact that, despite the presence of all the most
slobbered-over luminati living, there was little or no vibrancy
anywhere in the building before or after.
There were no surprises in the best supporting actress category;
Jennifer Connelly proved once again that that statuette always goes to
the new babe. It must have to do with Hollywood's need to manufacture
a new face to do magazine covers or endorse Japanese soap or
something. Something smells collusion-esque and Sony-riffic to me,
about the supporting actress ruse -- it's just so predictable.
Connelly's speech was cute, the way she read it with her face lowered
the whole time, reading off a bunch of papers. It was evocative of a
shy fourth-grader doing an oral presentation on the solar system.
Maybe she was ashamed because she sold her soul.
I was glad Randy Newman finally got the award for best song; with his
16 nominations and zero wins, he was the Susan Lucci of the Oscars.
But he had to win: Enya is the music I imagine when I am standing in a
meadow in a white dress, closing my eyes and rapturously rubbing soft,
quilted, two-ply toilet tissue against my cheeks. Sting, that
perfectly unblemished and sincerely perfectly superior and
theologically self-actualized übermensch, is essentially becoming the
musical Tom Cruise. And Diane Warren is the SWORN ENEMY OF ALL MUSIC.
Little Ronnie Howard took best director and best film for "A Beautiful
Mind." Sigh.
Ron Howard is a completely adequate and, I feel, aggressively
nongenius director. His choices are deeply, unapologetically
pedestrian. He possesses lots of clunky homegrown skill and absolutely
no lightning bolts of wild inspiration, which is why that script was a
brilliant choice for him; John Nash (and, by extension, Russell Crowe)
makes up for all the primal soul-fire Ron Howard, kindly proto-honky,
utterly lacks. "A Beautiful Mind" was a Good Film. Not a brilliant
film. If Peter Jackson had directed it, it might have been a
revelation.
But Ronnie is nothing if not the original Company Boy. He has been
tenured into the marrow of the system; he is Hollywood's dearest, most
faithful mediocre son, and last night they gave him the party they've
been tacitly promising him since 1978.
So that was it. The Hobbits and the Africans were simultaneously
lauded and robbed, and the Academy tried to hypnotize us into passive
acceptance by acting earthy. They seemed to be saying: See? We're just
regular folks.
Yeah, they're regular all right, those famous multimillionaires who
never go to the post office or the DMV or sort receipts for taxes or
fly coach or pay to see movies or get older or worry about the rent or
medical insurance or college tuitions. They're just like you and me,
only with fucking everything, and they don't want us around while
they're having it, but we're allowed to watch them have it, once a
year, on TV. So we'd better enjoy it. Or they'll sic Tom Cruise on us
again, and, God, we don't want that.