Oscar rant redux

I'm fairly certain I will skip the Oscars next month, something that would have amounted to heresy in my younger days.

I love movies: love movie trivia. Still do: It's the self-congratulatory, tedious and lately virtual awards shows I can do without.

It wasn't always so. For years, my mom, dad, sisters and I would all watch the Oscars separately, then call each other about something egregious we had just seen. Like a bad outfit. (But not Cher's; she's in her own category.)

Then you have the corny and windy acceptance speeches, where the winner thanks everyone but the studio caterer and their child's babysitter.

It all makes for a great pastime I like to call "Count the cliches":

"It's an honor just to be nominated." (Right, just ask Glenn Close.)

"Who are you wearing? ("Me," says the actress dressed in her pajamas. "I made it myself from T-shirt scraps and old tires.")

"I felt like I was one with the dress." (Actually said by actress Amy Adams in 2014. Again, only Cher should get away with that.)


bing.com

But the Oscar parade just won't do it for me this year. And it turns out the story was the same in 2015, when I wrote about watching the telecast with my mom. Since my objections are similar to what I wrote seven years ago, it bears repeating. Here goes:

As TV goes, I'd rank the 2015 Oscars right up there with, well, the recent 40th anniversary special on "Saturday Night Live": occasionally good, mostly awful. The Oscar telecast never works as a whole, the way a good movie should. It is more draining than a spinning class, without the reward.

Unless you're watching it with my mom.
At nearly 80, she has firm ideas about what constitutes entertainment. She thinks that Gaga girl is fabulous, but the sight of Neil Patrick Harris in his underwear was a no-go.

"For Christ's sakes, put your clothes on!"

The show's opening number hasn't impressed her since Johnny Carson hosted. To wit: "I don't go for all this."
She was rooting for that "nice fellow who played the guy with LSD." Translation: Best actor winner Eddie Redmayne as ALS victim Stephen Hawking in "The Theory of Everything."

We hung in long enough for the best foreign film shorts. "Why can't we ever see them?" mom asked.

"You have to be in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences," I said. To which my pajama-clad companion replied, "Oh big deal!"

I think she felt like she was one with that outfit.

 

 

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