A Tasteful, Elegant Circle Jerk

Once a year, Hollywood dresses herself up real pretty and
tries to convince everyone that she’s not a skank who’ll do anything
for a couple of bucks. Sometimes her elaborate ruse works, and
sometimes it doesn’t—but regardless, the next morning, movie
nerds the world over wake up feeling tricked and lonely and sad.

Okay, so maybe calling an inanimate awards show slutty isn’t the
classiest thing I’ve ever done, but I’ll stand by it. The 81st Annual
Academy Awards air this weekend, bringing with them a lackluster slate
of Best Picture nominees, Hugh Jackman as a host (is it too much to ask
that he stays in character as Wolverine throughout?), and a
sure-to-be-awkward honorary award for Jerry Lewis, who has raised an
incredible $2 billion for muscular dystrophy research and also likes to
call gay people “faggots.” As befits a ceremony this classy, the
thing’s scheduled to run three and a half goddamn hours (including the obligatory half-hour of leering at celebrities on the
red carpet), and as with any sort of contest, we can probably predict a
few winners: Heath Ledger will posthumously win Best Supporting Actor.
The golem known as Mickey Rourke will win Best Actor. Slumdog
Millionaire, the standout in a not-so-great pack of contenders,
will win Best Picture.

Don’t quote me on any of those predictions—I’m as close to
certain as I can be on that shit, but just because she’s got a nice
dress on doesn’t mean Hollywood will be any smarter or any more
predictable. This is the same Academy that decided Crash was
better than Brokeback Mountain and Good Night, and Good
Luck in 2005, threw 11 Oscars at Titanic in 1997, and
decided Forrest Gump was a better picture than Pulp
Fiction in 1994. Trying to accurately ascertain who’s going to win
an Oscar is like trying to make it all the way through The Curious
Case of Benjamin Button without rolling your eyes: It simply
cannot be done.

That’s not to say that some films and filmmakers shouldn’t win
Oscars, nor that it shouldn’t be cool when they do. Sure, the Oscars’
main purpose is to sell more tickets to (and DVDs of) whatever films
Hollywood is least ashamed of, but they’re also the closest thing to
genuine artistic appreciation that Tinseltown can muster, which counts
for something. I’ll act all grumpy and cantankerous about the whole
ceremony, but I’ll still be upset if Danny Boyle doesn’t win Best
Director for his exhilarating, breathless work on Slumdog, and I
still want AR Rahman and M.I.A. to win Best Original Song for
Slumdog‘s “O Saya,” because that shit just rules, and while
Ledger will win due to rote sentimentality, I’m going to pretend the
recognition is because of his astounding performance, which’ll make it
feel a bit less mercenary.

The two best pictures this year are nominated in categories other
than Best Picture: The fantastic Wall-E has been nominated for
Best Original Screenplay, while Werner Herzog’s beautiful, melancholy
Encounters at the End of the World—a film that,
astoundingly, marks the first time the director has been nominated for
an Oscar in his four-decade-long career—is stuck in the Best
Documentary category. (At least those two were nominated for
something—two of last year’s best foreign films, Sweden’s
tween vampire love story Let the Right One In and Italy’s
mobster epic Gomorrah, found themselves with no love come
nomination time.) And while I’m being all contrary, I’ll even jump into
that controversy about this year’s most debated snub: Would a Best
Picture nomination have been overkill for The Dark Knight?
Probably. But I’ll be damned if out of all the films that came out last
year, that superhero blockbuster didn’t perfectly capture the angry,
nihilistic, terrified tone of the waning days of the Bush
administration.

Despite their usual love of pop epics like Gladiator and
Titanic, in recent years the Oscars have focused more on
smaller, better pictures, like last year’s best picture nominees that
practically nobody saw, No Country for Old Men,
Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, and There
Will Be Blood. Just like last year, there are some good pictures
here, buried among all the overrated other nominees—and if an
overblown night of smug self-congratulation convinces a few more people
to see one or two films they wouldn’t have otherwise? It’s hard to
argue with that.

Plus, who knows? Maybe Jerry Lewis will slip up and call Wolverine
queer or something! Now that’s entertainment.