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.

The Foreign and the Domestic

This week a friend sparked a bit of a debate when she expressed criticism of the term “domestic violence.” Violence is violence, she said, and should be recognized as such. The word “domestic,” she argued, tends to minimize the awful things that sometimes happen in families or relationships, as if the violence was protected in some way.

It has often been protected by a tradition of silence, and the notion that family affairs should remain in the family and that they are nobody else’s business. There are religious traditions about wives being subservient to husbands, or social notions about a man’s home being his castle.

Making the headlines this week were the video of Baltimore Ravens running back – or should we say ex-Ravens running back Ray Rice -- beating up his girlfriend in an elevator, and South African “blade runner” Oscar Pistorius skating clear of a murder charge in the shooting death of his girlfriend. And today, as it happens, is the 20^th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act.

Personally, I don’t quite understand any man physically abusing a woman, especially in what started out as a love relationship. I just don’t think I was shipped with that software. I tend to swing the other way, more in the direction of worship of women, which has its own set of issues. But does it all make me a good guy, or am I just lucky? Conversely, I don’t understand why some women tolerate an abusive domestic relationship, and even defend a husband or boyfriend when criticism comes from the outside.

My friend is right. There are no special circumstances or settings that make physical abuse OK, and it needs to be punished. But we also have to understand the dynamics of these things on a deeper level. The man who abuses a woman tries to rule by fear, because he is ruled by it himself: the fear of loss of a precious or needed thing. The fear that if absolute control isn’t exercised, a static situation may change – the woman may leave, or simply want to breathe, to have joy in her life that he is not the agent of. Are we allowed to have compassion for a man driven by such feelings or explore where they come from? Compassion in these situations is difficult, because seeking to understand is construed as seeking excuses for awful behavior. There are no excuses for it.

But do we have to at least talk about it? Absolutely. It’s about literacy. We hear often about financial literacy. But there is also relationship literacy. It means being able to discuss things it just isn’t nice or easy to discuss, turning over the rug under which things have been hidden for a long time, challenging the models some of us were raised with or have embedded in us for some other reason.

There is a notion of TMI – sharing unnecessary details about intimate things with others. But I have always had a suspicion that a bigger problem these days is TLI – too LITTLE information, about things we desperately need to talk about.

Oscarization

This is America, and what we do here really well is the award ceremony. There are few greater turn-ons in life than listening to the crackle of the paper as that envelope is opened, and we find out if our opinion has been validated, or in some cases, if we won our money. 

Almost every professional pursuit now has an annual awards ceremony. Some even do it more often. When I was in radio news, I occasionally had to cover local meetings of community service clubs if there were an important speaker. I went to one luncheon that included an awards ceremony, which must have lasted three hours. Every member of the organization received an award. At the end, they made the emcee leave the stage, so that they could give him one.

Even I have received a few awards (for broadcasting), so have attended more than a few ceremonies. At first, the organizations I was part of gave out relatively few awards, but then they started adding categories – in part, of course, so they could collect more contest entry fees. But that made the ceremonies longer, and in some, they allowed the recipients to give acceptance speeches – BIG mistake in a broadcasting awards event. My organizations did not use the Oscar technique of saving the biggies for the end – they did those first so the TV anchors could get back to their stations for the 11 p.m. news. I was getting a “smallie” on one particular night, so my time was close to the end, and I had to give a speech to those few remaining in the banquet hall. It was about 1 a.m., and not having much to say that hadn’t been said, I offered to take those left in the audience out for early breakfast. I had enough cash on me to cover them easily.

The Oscars, of course, are special. Tonight, I have a rather elaborate party to go to. The first thing we have to do is fill out Oscar ballots with our picks for all the categories, and we each chip in a buck to the pot, which the ballot with the most correct answers wins. This year, it’s interesting, as there are more than a few horse races. And some of the partygoers are serious – they do heavy research on this. Americans don’t like to lose—ANYTHING.

Also for this party, the guests are asked to bring a food item related to a nominated movie. In some cases, this is easy (French bread for “Les Mis”). For others, it’s hard (Canadian wine for “Argo”?). But if you need help, there’s apples for “Lincoln,” pie for “Life of Pi,” or Philly cheese steaks or crab dip for “Silver Linings Playbook” – even Raisin Bran for that one if you’re cheap. I have a relative who’s especially excited, as he’s a James Bond fan, and as “Skyfall” is nominated in several categories, he gets to mix shaken-not-stirred martinis in his very own 007 shaker. I think we’re going to be driving him home.

BTW, the food items don’t always have to be completely edible, they can be symbolic. I remember spending an afternoon gluing peas in lines to a paper plate for “The Aviator.” My wife had to construct an elaborate papier-mache chocolate dessert for “The Departed.” We also made substitutions of edible for inedible items: pate for cat food (“District 9”). I can’t remember what we did for one called “Winter’s Bone” – had to come up with something for Tennessee squirrel stew.

But don’t get me wrong. I love the Oscars. I was watching when Sasheen Littlefeather picked up one for the protesting Marlon Brando, and when someone named Bob “streaked” across the stage, and David Niven made a deliciously British remark about that fellow’s “shortcomings.”

In the end, the Oscars represent an increasingly rare phenomenon in the modern world: the true collective experience. We need to hang on to those while we can.