Dan Mancini

It’s time once again for Hollywood’s annual night of masturbatory exhibitionism, The Academy Awards. I never watch the ceremony. Ever. I don’t care who wears what (I’m a dude), how good or bad the host was, or whether Bruce Vilanch managed to write even a single funny one-liner (the ceremony is a few hours away and I can confidently assert that he didn’t).

It’s difficult to take seriously any awards handed out by an Academy that believes:

• Kramer vs. Kramer was better than Apocalypse Now
• Ordinary People was better than Raging Bull
• Raiders of the Lost Ark didn’t hold a candle to Chariots of Fire
• Goodfellas wasn’t nearly as genius a piece of filmmaking as Dances With Wolves
• Forrest Gump was more awesome than Pulp Fiction
• The English Patient, Titanic, and Shakespeare in Love a) were good movies, and b) were better than Fargo, L.A. Confidential, and The Thin Red Line, respectively
• Crash — also known as the most expensive ABC Afterschool Special ever made — was the best movie made in 2005 (I mean, I could’ve dug through my home movies and come up with a better picture for that year).

Also:

I think I’ve made my point.

That’s only going back 30 years. Nearly every year since its inception, the Oscars has been a trainwreck of bad taste and lowest common denominatorism — and that’s not even counting the Debbie Allen dance numbers (Zing! Vilanch wrote that one for me). This year will be no exception, I guarantee. Let’s look at but one example: In 2009, the Academy had two movies featuring blue-skinned people (what are the chances?) that they could have nominated for Best Picture and they somehow managed to select the wrong one.

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is an imperfect but ballsy and fascinating adaptation of a source (Alan Moore’s graphic novel of the same name) that many people believed was impossible to translate to the silver screen. It was ignored by the Academy because, well, the idea of recognizing a movie in which a left-wing douchebag in a latex suit and domino mask attempts to build a utopia on the corpses of hundreds of millions of innocent murder victims would send the wrong message (audiences might get the crazy idea that killing people is more morally repugnant than killing trees). Also, the movie didn’t come with Cliff’s Notes, so most Academy members probably couldn’t figure out what the hell it was about anyway. The official slogan of Oscar pandering is: Keep it (painfully) simple, stupid. There’s nothing much simple about Watchmen.

Luckily, Avatar was there to fill the “movies about blue-skinned people” void. And what better picture at which to hurl accolades than the best Michael Bay movie that James Cameron has ever made? It’s 45 minutes too long, stupid as hell, loud, full of explosions, vaguely racist, and features a villain slightly less nuanced than Snidely Whiplash. Somebody give it a gold statue!

It would be fitting if Avatar won Best Picture because the fact that I got duped into sitting through a small eternity of Stephen Lang enjoying a cup of Sanka while napalming blue cat people in 3D is the Academy’s fault in the first place. Once upon a time, James Cameron made awesome movies like Terminator 2 and Aliens. They were taut, vicious, eminently quotable, and so full of testosterone-fueled action that I actually grew a beard while watching them (and I was only a teenager at the time). Then the Academy awarded Cameron Best Picture and Best Director statues for Titanic, a 36-hour-long romantic drama filled with lame dialogue, Irish clog dancing, and the most annoying Celine Dion song ever (and, yes, I’m aware that picking the most annoying Celine Dion song is akin to picking the most evil concentration camp: it can be done, but it requires splitting hairs so finely that the exercise is pretty much pointless). Because of Titanic’s success, Cameron strictly adhered to its formula when making Avatar: simplistic moralizing, one dimensional characters, two hours of nothing happening as pretentiously as possible, and enough technical wizardry to fool dudes into thinking they’re watching an action movie and not something so chick flicky that it’s unfathomable that Meg Ryan didn’t get above-title billing.

So, the long and short of it is that as long as the Academy continues to reward Cameron for making terrible movies just because they earn more than the gross domestic product of most small countries (not to mention denying Scorsese an award until he finally buckled under and agreed to make a flick starring Marky Mark), there will be no Oscars ceremony for me. The entire farce is meaningless and best ignored.

And, in closing, The Hurt Locker better win Best Picture, and Kathryn Bigelow Best Director or I’ll be terribly disappointed.

What?