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2016 Oscars
Feb. 28th, 2016 10:25 amIn 1997 and 1998, People sent me to the Oscars to do live reporting for its nescient website.
These were the days before broadband, so my “coverage” was feverish two-finger typing and bantering with my editor, a very brilliant guy called Ty Burr who now reviews films for The Boston Globe.
(Neither transcript appears to have survived anywhere online even though I searched for them under Ty’s name.)
I don’t actually remember very much about attending the Oscars. Of course, I have it all scribbled down in diaries somewhere, but I never, ever reread my diaries: The exorcism is all in writing the stuff down. Once the stuff is written, I just don’t care about it anymore: I more-or-less forget about it. More than most people, I live in an existential present tense that’s punctuated from time to time by these vivid sense memories, recollections of the way the world smelled on a particular afternoon or the way the light slanted through the trees. One assumes these sense memories were encoded in my brain because something else that happened to me on that day was significant.
But one never knows for sure.
###
What I remember about the 1997 Oscars was that they made us wear evening clothes, and that I wore a hideous black tulle number studded with rhinestones that I’d grabbed off the Loehman’s sale rack the day before. (If it’s on the Loehman’s sale rack, you know it’s awful!)
That the Oscars people were very nasty about providing me with a phone connection – these were the days of 300-baud modems – and that the phone connection kept dropping off throughout the ceremony.
That the Shrine Auditorium where the ceremony took place was much smaller than it looked on TV.
That the tiny finger sandwiches and chocolate-covered strawberries they put out for the press looked good but tasted like Play-Doh.
I wore the same hideous black tulle number in 1998 and remember even less.
###
Before 1997, I was quite the celebrity fan girl. In fact, I used to host annual Oscar parties. I’d ask people to dress up; I’d prepare mountains of gourmet hors-d'oeuvres; I’d print out ballots. One year, I even ordered Oscar statuettes from an upscale San Francisco chocolatier to give out as door prizes.
Those were the days when I eagerly awaited Thursdays so I could buy The National Enquirer, The Star, and The Globe as soon as they hit the supermarket racks! I never read People, even though I ended up working for them. The National Enquirer paid for its stories, which – never having gone to journalism school – I considered a sensible approach. By the time People with its Time Inc namby-pampism, had finished fact-checking these stories, they were already old news. People also didn’t allow certain types of stories to be published. For example: We all knew that Bill Cosby drugged women. We were strictly prohibited from writing about it, though.
Back then, I was all about celebs – though of course from my own peculiarly post-modern perspective that was not so much ironic as Jungian: I saw Elizabeth Taylor, for example, as just the latest image in an array of department store mirrors that reflected backwards through time to Helen of Troy or even beyond that, to some early Cro Magnon beauty called Aphrodite. I'd grown up in a family that never discriminated between movie magazines or Charles Dickens as material that deserved to be read, so I was never quite sure whether my pomo take on celebrity culture was an explanation or an excuse.
After I actually attended the Oscars, though, I lost all interest. So that today, I have no idea whose picture I’m staring at on the cover of the latest Us Magazine as I’m scramble to fish coupons out of my purse while queuing up on the supermarket line.
Once you see the machinery behind the curtains, the illusion is no longer captivating.
Ever thus. Right?
###
All of which is a long preamble to the fact that I’m not going to the Oscar party I was invited to tonight.
Because: Who fucking cares?
My favorite movie in 2015 was The Diary of a Teenage Girl, which was not nominated.
The Big Short was a very, very distant second. And it won’t win.
Turns out that I’ve actually seen a couple of the other Best Pix nominees: Brooklyn, which was a sentimental bore, and Mad Max, which had terrific art direction but absent plot or character development, was also a bore.
I don’t care about the big diversity controversy. I mean, I liked Straight Out of Compton just fine, but great movie? Uh-uh. Yup. They should make more movies about black people. Also about female volunteer tax preparers living in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley.
These were the days before broadband, so my “coverage” was feverish two-finger typing and bantering with my editor, a very brilliant guy called Ty Burr who now reviews films for The Boston Globe.
(Neither transcript appears to have survived anywhere online even though I searched for them under Ty’s name.)
I don’t actually remember very much about attending the Oscars. Of course, I have it all scribbled down in diaries somewhere, but I never, ever reread my diaries: The exorcism is all in writing the stuff down. Once the stuff is written, I just don’t care about it anymore: I more-or-less forget about it. More than most people, I live in an existential present tense that’s punctuated from time to time by these vivid sense memories, recollections of the way the world smelled on a particular afternoon or the way the light slanted through the trees. One assumes these sense memories were encoded in my brain because something else that happened to me on that day was significant.
But one never knows for sure.
###
What I remember about the 1997 Oscars was that they made us wear evening clothes, and that I wore a hideous black tulle number studded with rhinestones that I’d grabbed off the Loehman’s sale rack the day before. (If it’s on the Loehman’s sale rack, you know it’s awful!)
That the Oscars people were very nasty about providing me with a phone connection – these were the days of 300-baud modems – and that the phone connection kept dropping off throughout the ceremony.
That the Shrine Auditorium where the ceremony took place was much smaller than it looked on TV.
That the tiny finger sandwiches and chocolate-covered strawberries they put out for the press looked good but tasted like Play-Doh.
I wore the same hideous black tulle number in 1998 and remember even less.
###
Before 1997, I was quite the celebrity fan girl. In fact, I used to host annual Oscar parties. I’d ask people to dress up; I’d prepare mountains of gourmet hors-d'oeuvres; I’d print out ballots. One year, I even ordered Oscar statuettes from an upscale San Francisco chocolatier to give out as door prizes.
Those were the days when I eagerly awaited Thursdays so I could buy The National Enquirer, The Star, and The Globe as soon as they hit the supermarket racks! I never read People, even though I ended up working for them. The National Enquirer paid for its stories, which – never having gone to journalism school – I considered a sensible approach. By the time People with its Time Inc namby-pampism, had finished fact-checking these stories, they were already old news. People also didn’t allow certain types of stories to be published. For example: We all knew that Bill Cosby drugged women. We were strictly prohibited from writing about it, though.
Back then, I was all about celebs – though of course from my own peculiarly post-modern perspective that was not so much ironic as Jungian: I saw Elizabeth Taylor, for example, as just the latest image in an array of department store mirrors that reflected backwards through time to Helen of Troy or even beyond that, to some early Cro Magnon beauty called Aphrodite. I'd grown up in a family that never discriminated between movie magazines or Charles Dickens as material that deserved to be read, so I was never quite sure whether my pomo take on celebrity culture was an explanation or an excuse.
After I actually attended the Oscars, though, I lost all interest. So that today, I have no idea whose picture I’m staring at on the cover of the latest Us Magazine as I’m scramble to fish coupons out of my purse while queuing up on the supermarket line.
Once you see the machinery behind the curtains, the illusion is no longer captivating.
Ever thus. Right?
###
All of which is a long preamble to the fact that I’m not going to the Oscar party I was invited to tonight.
Because: Who fucking cares?
My favorite movie in 2015 was The Diary of a Teenage Girl, which was not nominated.
The Big Short was a very, very distant second. And it won’t win.
Turns out that I’ve actually seen a couple of the other Best Pix nominees: Brooklyn, which was a sentimental bore, and Mad Max, which had terrific art direction but absent plot or character development, was also a bore.
I don’t care about the big diversity controversy. I mean, I liked Straight Out of Compton just fine, but great movie? Uh-uh. Yup. They should make more movies about black people. Also about female volunteer tax preparers living in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley.
