Opening the Envelope

We can’t help ourselves. There is something that compels many of us to rip apart the Oscars, the annual ritual of Hollywood congratulating itself, or bashing itself, take your pick. The gags that didn’t work, the dresses, the award-winners thanking not only their colleagues but their ancestors, their spouses, their offspring, and this year, even the family dog, some of them using the occasion to lecture us about what’s wrong with our culture.

But we’re all there. It’s one of those prized collective experiences that seem lacking these days. Like many, I attended a party featuring a competition for guessing the most Oscar category winners correctly. I got 20 out of 24. “You’re good,” someone said. But my group is tough. I was only a co-winner of our event, and there were others that were only one or two guesses off. But we do research ahead of time. We have to.

Playing the guessing game is one way to spice up an occasion that has become a little too predictable. The average football game or beauty pageant offers more surprises. The Oscars have turned into just another election, and the winners are often determined by who puts on the best campaign, not the best performances or artistic work. Patricia Arquette did a creditable job in “Boyhood,” but was her performance really better than Emma’s, or Keira’s, or Laura’s, or Meryl’s? And then, Ms. A used the occasion to lecture us about gender equality. It would not have upset me to see Michael Keaton win Best Actor, but he was up against a degenerative disease – almost no contest there, Eddie Redmayne’s moving interpretation of the Hawking story notwithstanding.

Reese Witherspooon used the occasion to lecture us, too. “It’s not about the dresses,” she said in a red carpet interview. Really? Annually, at one of the greatest concentrations of female beauty on this planet, are the designers going to let the occasion go by without showcasing their work?

Then there was the whole guilt trip about the lack of diversity. The jokes about “whitest” and the standing ovation for “Glory” were part of the penance. Personally, I don’t think an implied quota system is a good thing in an artistic awards competition, but that’s another discussion. There have been some pretty good years in this department; 2014 just wasn’t one of them (This being such a sensitive issue, did we really need Sean Penn’s crack about green cards at the end?).

But my thirst for surprises didn’t go entirely unquenched. Thank you, Lady Gaga!

Let’s step back a bit, though. Whether we like this annual Hollywood Kabuki or not, movies represent one of the artistic linchpins of human culture. We forget that this technology is less than a century and a half old, and films have been “talking” for way less than that. But no other art form, IMHO, has taught us as much about ourselves, which is, in the end, what art is for, and has reached as many people. I don’t quite know what my life would be like without the movies – and I’m sure I have lots of company.