Love Them Or Throw Something Metal At Them

The Oscars please me. If ever I've had a "thing" about anything, it is the holiest of holy nights: The Academy Awards. In fact, I once dumped a guy and asked him to leave my apartment because he wouldn't shut up during one of the moving and deep montages about the use of the New York skyline in movies through the ages. Asshole.

It's not that I love them unconditionally. Oscar and I share a volatile, passionate relationship that takes a lot of work and cultivation. Sometimes he disappoints me so scarringly that it takes years to forget; however I find myself unable to forgive him (I'm looking at YOU, Best Actress Gwyneth Paltrow). In fact, some of the honors he's bestowed are so ridiculous and unfounded, that it's hard to stay angry because the gaffes were so grievous. I manage, though. "Shakespeare in Love" overtaking "Saving Private Ryan" was such a jaw-dropping upset in every sense of the word that I still can't look at a list of Best Pictures (and I often do) without spitting on the ground and cursing each time I read that travesty of 1999. I realize the win is attributed to the aggressive Oscar campaign Miramax, at that time run by the juggernaut Weinstein empire, spearheaded to ensure wins across the major awards, and it really isn't a bad movie for what it is, but COME ON. Really? "Shakespeare in Love"? I don't care if even Dilbert-headed demon Karl Rove is running your Oscar campaign--nothing should have beaten "Saving Private Ryan" if the evaluation were actually based on its film merits, historical importance, or ensemble acting.

But it wasn't.

The Best Picture category isn't the only one to be tainted by popularity nonsense. In 2006, the Best Actor was awarded to Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of my all-time favorite actors. It should not have been. Hoffman turned in a stellar performance as Truman Capote, a feat unto itself, as Capote is renowned for often erratic and difficult behavior. Hoffman truly engaged his audience. It was just the wrong year. That year, Heath Ledger brought to life a character, Ennis Del Mar, so powerful and striking he was able to convincingly imply that every emotion he portrayed was genuine. And he did it with a fifth of the dialogue the other four nominated actors were afforded. Three of the five nominees that year, David Strathairn, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Joaquin Phoenix, were nominated for roles of real people with visual source material on which to base their character. All of them turned in Oscar-worthy performances, as did Terrence Howard for "Hustle and Flow", but not one of them inhabited their character more than Heath owned Ennis' outsider persona. He was young. His character was controversial. He had his whole life ahead of him to win his inevitable Best Actor statue. Or so we thought. Many a pooch was screwed that night at the Kodak Theater when a young man (he was only 26 at the time) was passed over for politics. The Academy can talk of all the posthumous Oscars for Heath's Joker performance all they want. It's still politics, and doesn't make up for their embarrassing boner of a judgment call.

I'll continue to adore Oscar Night's pomp and self-congratulatory hoopla with rapt attention, regardless of its occasional blunders. It's just that I love Oscar and he doesn't mean to do it. I have to believe that he won't do it to me again. Though my friends have warned me he will. What do they know? They don't know our love like we do...