We've had a jaundiced view of the Academy Awards since The Sting beat out Killdozer for Best Picture of 1974. Yet the movies possess a unique ability to fascinate, transport, enrapture and, when we realized Dalton Trumbo got more work under an assumed name than we get with our actual ones, depress.
However, the movies and gala ceremonies are very different things. If Oscars went to paintings, most years the Picasso and the Van Gogh aren't nominated and the Edward Hopper ends up losing to the Bob Ross. And don't get us wrong we love Bob Ross, but anyone who can watch Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation and claim there were five better performances should be forced to spend eternity watching Telly Savalas, Pat Morita and Dom Deluise do this.
And of course, the actual ceremony seems to last longer than the shooting schedule for Eric von Stroheim's Greed. It's always annoying when the dashing Dak Rackman and the radiant Mimsy Gizzard traipse onstage with boundless self-appreciation and subject us to:
DAK
Much like a blender whirring ingredients to a perfect consistency, sound Mixing allows the sound of a movie to be mixed in a way that allows the audience to fully appreciate the sounds that they hear.MIMSY
I wish my blender contained any of these wonderful nominees. Along with the fixings for jalapeño margaritas.DAK
Oh you scamp you.
This numbing babble can go on for roughly the length of the Middle Pleistocene epoch. But let the poor bastards who bled and obsessed to get the sound right on their film have the temerity to talk for longer than 14 seconds and watch them struggle then drown against the rising current of play-off music.
And speaking of music, while this year's "In Memoriam" tribute will have many people saying things like "Shit did you know Dick Van Patten died?", maybe forego the cloying dirges for just one year and play something like James Brown's "Sex Machine". These were, after all, Hollywood people.
Also, Oscar loves affliction. If anybody wants to take two minutes, here is a sketch we did 20 years ago. Not much has changed. Apparently the buzz this year centers around the fact that Leo was cold. Meaning no disrespect, the ability of W. C. Fields to portray his actual personality onscreen was a slightly greater accomplishment than to convey freezing your ass off when you are freezing your ass off.
Anyway, it is just an awards show and if you believe it matters in the grand scheme of life, try naming the Best Picture of two years ago. But we think our friend Adam McKay has made an amazing, infuriating and kind of transformational film on the systemic rot that passes for the world financial structure. The irony is that even as you read this, that world financial structure has almost certainly greenlit a sequel.
Whatever happens, The Big Short will be relevant long after The Revenant because bankers may yet have 90 percent of us living in the carcass of a frozen horse.
And Killdozer got hosed.