Last night Hollywood’s biggest names and faceless power-brokers gathered in sweaty discomfort for the Academy Awards. The annual snooze-fest in which the studio-sponsored culture of entertainment celebrates itself. Yeah, we didn’t watch the broadcast either.
Far be it from us to make that hackneyed observation, so common to Oscar detractors: that is, how could a ceremony devoted to honoring the entertainment industry be so lacking in entertainment value. (We are not above doing a little back-door lampshade hanging to get that observation into this post, however.) But we have a perfectly legitimate reason for not watching this year’s show: we haven’t seen any of the movies.
We’re always impressed by people who are willing to go to the movies, in spite of the fact that they are playing in movie theaters. It’s a testament to a person’s love of cinema that they are willing to endure the American movie-going experience in order to see a film three or four months before it comes out on DVD.
Let’s face it: the hardest working people in show-biz are not the ones you see on the screen. It’s the poor schmucks who squeeze themselves into uncomfortable theater seats, amongst the stench of sweat, abandoned diapers, and sickly-sweet pools of soft-drinks. It’s the throng of popcorn-chewing, celebrity obsessed audience members who sit in darkness foul, while taking in the second-hand fantasies of those whom they pay to daydream for them. It’s the people who will sit through terrible dreck and not demand their money back. It’s the folks who will justify their viewing of a pile of crap by saying things like, “Well, the movie wasn’t great, but I’ll watch anything with Eddie Murphy in it.”
And it’s not just the long-suffering audience that deserves recognition. Though Hollywood big-shots might refuse to acknowledge them, the local theater operators are also a part of the entertainment industry. They may be on the bottom rung of the ladder, but they’re there. Where’s their award? At the very least, studios should be thanking them for making the movie-going experience so painful that they drive the sale of DVD’s to people who would rather pay $30 for the privilege of watching movies in the comfort of their own homes, rather than paying $13.50 to wallow in filth for an hour and a half, with a huge screen and rattling sound system doing nothing but distracting them from conducting important business and making-out with someone they’d rather not see in good light.
