An unsurprisingly disappointing Academy Awards evening….

The Oscars were last night and those of you who know me (I say that a lot) know how huge of a fan of the cinema I am. So it might surprise you to hear that I barely watched the Academy Award telecast last night. Maybe 15 minutes. Naturally, I checked the MSN liveblog after the thing was over and I read a few reviews. As you might imagine, it was nearly-universally agreed that the entire show was an awful bore. It’s a frustrating paradox that so many fantastic films can be released every year just for the industry’s annual award show to be little more than smarmy, self-interested pats on the back between soulless and bored millionaires.

Even still, I almost always watch the Oscars, but this year I just couldn’t be bothered. Leora and I turned it on an hour after it started, watched a couple of the weird documentary awards or whatever, and then moved into the bedroom to unwind after a long day. Our weird “backup” TV in our room wouldn’t tune in the channel the Oscars were playing on. Leora asked me if I wanted to go back into the living room to continue watching, and I said “nah”. That might be due to this year’s award winners nearly all being slam dunks. No drama, no upsets, no point in watching.

The very first blog post I made on the Schadendude (if I recall) was a short little blurb about how the Academy increased the Best Picture nominations from 5 to 10 for this year’s program. If they thought that doing so would also increase the chances of the winner being a mystery, they were way off. As it was in the days of 5 nominations, this year there were only two movies with a real chance of winning – Avatar and The Hurt Locker. Thanks to being the movie with the latest buzz or Oscar “push”, The Hurt Locker won Best Picture last night. I haven’t seen the movie and I’m really not interested. I’ll tell you who HAS seen it, though – a lot of Iraq War veterans who, almost down to the last man, say that the so-called “hyper-realistic” war movie is laughably unrealistic in several vital spots. But it won Best Picture anyway. Huh.

Not to say that I necessarily thought Avatar deserved Best Picture either. Yes, the visual effects were the best I’ve ever seen, and it won that category, as it deserved to. But a film isn’t supposed to be all about eye candy. You can gussy up a movie with pretty landscapes and thrilling fight scenes all you want, but if the story isn’t up to par, there’s no way it should be considered for Best Picture (*ahem* Transformers 2 *ahem*). To be clear, Avatar is a billion times better than anything Michael Bay has ever touched, but when I’m watching a movie and can see plot points directly lifted from Ferngully, The Secret of NIMH, Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and The Last Samurai, and I’m not even TRYING to notice the DIRECT similarities, that’s a problem. Great movie, but not Best Picture.

So who should have won? Well as far as I’m concerned, I was all for a couple of the nominees who didn’t have a prayer. Most glaringly, District 9, which was spectacular, (especially considering that both the lead actor and director were working on their very first feature film) had zero chance of winning. I don’t get as much chance to get out and watch movies as I used to, but I saw most of the big ones last year – Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Star Trek, Avatar – and I probably enjoyed District 9 more than any of them. But let’s be honest – if the Academy hadn’t increased the nominations from 5 to 10, District 9 would clearly have been shut out. It’s almost more insulting that it WAS nominated because it’s pretty obvious that the Academy put it up as a pity nomination to try to change their image of only nominating dour and depressing dramas. That’s also why Up was nominated, another great movie that had no chance of winning.

My other favorite of the year was Up in the Air, which had early buzz pushing it to the top. Unfortunately, that fizzled out a couple months ago, to the point where it was completely shut out of its nominated categories. I would have been hard pressed to decide between District 9 and Up in the Air if I had a vote, but I think I would have ultimately gone with Up in the Air. I think its story was phenomenal and one for our present reality – an independent contractor who travels all over the country and fires people for a living, hired by managers hit hard by the recession who don’t have the guts to do it themselves. Who can’t relate to that these days? In what was literally the ONLY real surprise of the evening, Up in the Air lost Best Adapted Screenplay to Precious (another movie I have no interest in seeing). So it won nothing, evidently due to rich, white Academy voters experiencing pangs of white guilt and voting for the movie with the big, fat black girl who regularly gets the sh*t kicked out of her by her crazy mom. Yeah, that sounds like a GREAT time at the movies. And the only Oscar that Up in the Air had a realistic chance of winning goes…well…up in the air.

I was pleased that Jeff Bridges won Best Actor for Crazy Heart, which means Flynn from Tron and The Dude is now an Academy Award winner. Way overdue there. And Sandra Bullock won Best Actress, which makes her the first person ever to win a Razzie for WORST Actress (All About Steve) and the Oscar for BEST Actress (The Blind Side) in the same year. Weird!

But when it all comes down to it, I can’t get too annoyed by it all. To be honest, the Oscars are more about politics and Hollywood execs scratching the backs of the voters than they are about what movies really deserve to win the awards. When a movie portrays itself as showing a realistic view of the War in Iraq and veterans of said war say that it contains a myriad of glaring mistakes, should it still win Best Picture? Well, it did, so what does that tell you? When the obvious runner-up has a copycat plot that contains elements of at LEAST a half-dozen prominent feature films and barely has an ounce of originality, should it still win Best Picture? Well, it almost did, so what does THAT tell you?

I read a piece online yesterday by a guy who was a Corporal and served a 2-year stint in Iraq up until a couple years ago. He specifically listed 4 or 5 different instances in The Hurt Locker where a military character or group of characters did something that would NEVER happen in a real combat situation, either because it was monstrously stupid, expressly forbidden by regulations, or both. The interesting thing about the piece (besides outing The Hurt Locker for being unrealistic, counter to its claims of being “hyper-realistic”) was its tone. The author wasn’t being funny or smarmy or sarcastic. He was angry, angry at Hollywood for badly botching a real situation and misrepresenting contemporary war. Don’t get me wrong. I’m really happy for Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman ever to win a Best Director Oscar for her work in The Hurt Locker. Talk about an overdue achievement. But the fact that she won for what has been outed as a wildly imperfect film is a little oft-putting.

The troubling thing about all of this is that this either shows the declining quality of cinema or the declining relevance of the Oscars. When the Best Picture is a war movie that gets the “war” part wrong and the runner-up borrows nearly its entire plot from other movies, does that mean that movies are getting worse? Or is the Academy now so overrun by company hacks and self-involved executives that they wouldn’t know a good movie from a bad batch of caviar? Considering the fantastic movies that just didn’t have the political clout to come out winners last night, I’ll go with the latter.

Jay Leno won the “Late Night Wars” how, exactly???

Those who know me personally know my stand on the earthshaking “Late Night Wars” of the past few months, but for those of you who don’t, the title of this blog should pretty well give you an idea.

Last night, after a 7-month “hiatus”, Jay Leno returned as host of the Tonight Show. And lovers of good comedy everywhere attempted to stab themselves with hilarious foldaway plastic knives or shoot themselves with guns that unfolded a “BANG!” sign upon pulling the trigger. Pretending to slip on a banana peel, falling down, getting up, and yelling “Taa-DAAA!!!” is funnier than Jay Leno has been in the last forever, and yet there he stood last night with that homey, common-man smirk and his huge chin and the head wiggle and the disingenuous, beady-eyed grin. And those at home who wouldn’t know a good joke if it kicked them in the throat smiled widely, settled into their plastic-covered couches, patted their new Reader’s Digest reassuringly, and checked the TV Guide to make sure that the 700 Club was on next just like always. Thank you, Jesus. Everything is back to “normal” again. And by normal, I mean nauseatingly stupid.

While Conan O’Brien, that of the competent writing staff, a clever wit, and jokes that actually cause people to laugh is barred, per his buy-out agreement with NBC, from doing so much as a 2-minute interview on TV until September, there’s Leno back to work, laughing at his own jokes, riffing feebly with Kevin “I’m trapped on this show and can’t find the exit” Eubanks, and filling the television with his patented version of awful.

So how did the “Late Night King of Comedy” (his marketing staff’s words) fill the time on his celebrated and triumphant return to the late night stage?

By opening with a skit that satirized (term used loosely) the scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy wakes up at the end of the movie and realizes that the whole thing had just been a weird dream. Except in this case, it’s Jay opening his eyes to find that the last 7 months had just been “a dream”, parts of it “wonderful” and parts of it “not so nice”. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to use some chat parlance here, namely “WTF?” Oh yes, Jay. Having a show in prime time instead of late night is a real hardship. I’m sure Toothless Joe on the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Life is Nothing but Pain and Misery Road can really relate to your trials and tribulations of the past 7 months when he’s light on handouts and starting to get the ol’ crack withdrawal itch. You’re such a trooper, Jay Leno. What a brave man. What happened to you “retiring”, Jay? When was that no longer a thing? I could have sworn that you were graciously stepping aside to allow new blood on the Tonight Show after hosting it for 27,000 years. And now you open your show by joking (term used loosely) that you’re awakening from a dream, parts of which were “not so nice”. You literally couldn’t wait 15 seconds after getting your show back before taking a ham-handed shot at your employers WHO GAVE YOU BACK EVERYTHING THAT YOU WANTED and Conan O’Brien, who got screwed out of the show that he was promised and that he earned. Oh screw you, Jay Leno.

After basking in a self-congratulatory glow vis-a-vis Leno’s sheeple audience giving him a standing ovation for (being a cutthroat back-room double-crossing a**hole) his triumphant return, he launched into a typical lackluster monologue. It didn’t help that Leno seems to have returned to the Tonight Show with a mild case of Alzeimer’s. Jokes about Dick Cheney and George W. Bush? You do realize that this is no longer 2005, don’t ya, Jay?

Let’s see – we next got a skit called “The World’s Tightest Pants” about a guy with *wait for it* really tight pants. Go get the duct tape, Ma. Imma have to tape up mah belly before mah sides split. No explanation from the Tonight Show “writers” besides “we only had 5 seconds to come up with an idea and we were all already hungover” would be good enough to explain such an unfunny idea. It’s not even unfunny. It’s ANTIfunny. Instead of a signal traveling across my brain telling me that I should laugh, a signal travels across my brain that I need to break something. THIS is what cost Conan his job? The World’s Tightest f*cking Pants???

Then followed an interview with Jamie Foxx, which kinda falls in line with Jay’s overall view on comedy. If all of your jokes are, instead of actually being funny, nothing but easily-understood clunkers that appeal to them middle Americans who don’t wanna hafta think much when they’s a-listenin’ to Mr. Jokey Man, why not interview Jamie Foxx, who isn’t very funny either and has such a high personal opinion of himself that he doesn’t really need an interviewer? The man practically interviews himself. (Seriously, Mr. Foxx, your biggest movie being an impersonation of somebody far more talented than yourself and your biggest collaboration being one with Kanye West does not an otherworldly resume make. You are far more of a superstar in your own mind than you are in reality.)

But it works. He loves himself almost as much as Jay Leno does, so he was an ideal choice as second-first Jay Leno guest. I particularly enjoyed the part where Jamie led the audience in a rendition of “Welcome Back”. “When I say ‘welcome’, you say ‘back’! Welcome!” “Back!” “Welcome!” “Back!” It was at this point where I actively noticed myself forgetting faces, dates, and memories, as several thousand of my brain cells began committing seppuku en masse.

What else, what else? Oh, Alan Greenspan is old and appears boring. Oh HO! You certainly have a finger on the pulse of America, Mr. Leno. Tiger Woods jokes? Yep, we got those, too. You notice how those new chocolate Cheerios are like regular Cheerios, but they’re chocolate? Zing. I’d normally be the first to ask where they hid the million monkeys on the million typewriters that typed up these “jokes”, but there’s nobody available to answer me. They’re all busy digging a million monkey graves for all the monkeys that died of soul-crushing boredom from trying so hard to make Jay Leno appear like an actual comedian last night.

Gold medal skier Lindsey Vonn was also on last night, so Jay could crack some “titillating” (stupid) jokes (about how her husband is also her trainer; *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*) that went over about as well as jokes about overeating at an Oprah Winfrey Fan Club meeting. It’s as if he’s knows that he is just SO unfunny and SO intellectually lazy. And he knows that he will be sitting at that desk, grinning inanely, until he drops dead one day, 25 years from now, while joking about forgetting to turn his blinker off in his hover car.

And yes, there’s the return of “Jaywalking”, as you might imagine. You know, that bit where he walks around the streets of L.A. and asks people something like “what country is Canberra the capital of?” and then they say “Austria” instead of “Australia” and Jay leads millions of viewers in a good laugh at the expense of the poor idiot who doesn’t know the capital of Australia. “Ha ha, you’re a little rusty on your southern hemisphere geography. Boy are you a f*cking moron! Ha ha!” Humor, ladies and gentleman! Comedy gold! Meanwhile, let’s all try to ignore the fact that 80% of the audience doesn’t know the goddamn answer either. Then there’s “Headlines” where a poor, overworked copywriter’s misspelling or the wedding announcement of Joe Blow and Lisa Job is mocked for all the world to see. I guess that if you can’t come up with a decent joke, you just outright embarrass somebody. Jay Leno, man of the people.

But it makes sense. It makes perfect sense that Jay Leno got his way and “won” the “Late Night Wars”, while Conan O’Brien, a man who is funnier than Jay Leno when he’s asleep, was paid off and banned from television for the next 6 months. After all, Jay is the epitome of mediocrity in mediocre times. He is the King of Meh, the Sultan of *shrug*. In an age where intelligent people and graduates of prestigious schools are reviled by those lesser than them, where “elitist” and “intellectual” are not compliments but insults, why shouldn’t Jay be back in his mediocre chair at his mediocre desk, blathering his mediocre jokes on his mediocre show?

You asked for it, America, and you got it. You don’t want to have to think too hard to get your laughs? You got it. Is witty doubletalk, silly skits, and a comedian who can actually think on the fly too much for your wittle brain to handle? You got it. Do you enjoy swallowing hook, line and sinker the whopper that Jay Leno is a down-home “common man” while he has 3 million corvettes sitting in the football-field-sized parking garage next to his shopping-mall-sized mansion? Whatever. Believe what you will. There’s no talking sense into you. By the way, tonight’s featured guest is Sarah Palin. Yeah. Sarah Palin. Of course she is. I await the hilarity.

Jay Leno is the Once and Future King of late night comedy. Whether any of you like it or not. Stupidity wins. “Good enough” tops “good”. Who said being a conniving half-ass never pays off? Witness today’s American Dream in action. And it sure as hell ain’t very funny.

Fox News – HOPING for a terrorist attack? How patriotic.

Ok, I PROMISE that this will be my last politically-associated post for a while. I didn’t intend to write this, but I came across a video clip and just had to touch upon it.

Now, I can’t actually insert the clip on this blog, as I haven’t sprung for WordPress’s video upgrade. But let me give you the gist of it. Two men are talking on the Glenn Beck show on Fox “News”. One of them is, as you might assume, Glenn Beck. Mr. Beck is one of the newer Fox News commentators to get his own show, but he’s much like the others. He’s a hypocritical conservative windbag of the worst order, the kind that flaunts his supposed patriotism while actually displaying none. He’s a loudmouth jerk, who gets red as a fire truck when angry and has actually broken down like a little girl on numerous broadcasts. He’s a chest-beating, Bible thumping, global warming-denying, jingoistic halfwit. So that’s Glenn Beck.

The man he’s speaking with is Michael Scheuer. You most probably have not heard of this guy. In fact, nobody did until a few years ago, as he was an undercover CIA analyst for many years and part of the operation to capture Osama bin Laden. He is now an analyst for CBS News. He’s also batsh*t insane. I mean, he was a guest on Glenn Beck’s show. Did you expect otherwise?

READ what this nut has to say and what he hopes happens to the United States. SEE Glenn Beck, the supposed patriot, say next to nothing in his response. SHUDDER at the stupidity. WONDER why these two aren’t arrested for violating Dubya’s beloved Patriot Act that Republicans love so much. TRY to suppress the vomit. Now, you can’t really tell what this exchange is in reference to, but read it and see if you can figure it out. Good luck…

Scheuer: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it’s going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It’s an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.

Beck: Which is why, I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.

And what was this “absurd situation” that Michael Scheuer hates so much that he’s eagerly anticipating a nuclear strike? Illegal immigration.

Yep, you heard right.To whip this country back into shape, vis a vis illegal immigrants, Michael Scheuer (unhinged psychopath) wants bin Laden to set off a nuke and vaporize a few hundred thousand innocent people. That sounds totally reasonable. Uh huh. And Glenn Beck, who has stood on his set in front of a video screen full of American flags and sobbed like a little baby about how much he loves his country, doesn’t bat an eye.

To show that this wasn’t an isolated incident of this lunatic giving an interview while hypoglycemic or perhaps in the early stages of Tourette’s, here’s an excerpt from a quaint little article that Mr. Scheuer wrote in The Washington Post (a.k.a. conservative rag) —

The Republicans do not have the votes to stop Obama, and the world will not be safer for America because the president abandons interrogations to please his party’s left wing and the European pacifists it so admires. Both are incorrigibly anti-American, oppose the use of force in America’s defense and — like Obama — naively believe that the West’s Islamist foes can be sweet-talked into a future alive with the sound of kumbaya.

Some people really fall for this crap. Some people seriously think this way. A man can get a video interview on a national cable news channel and say that he’s eagerly anticipating a major terrorist attack, as it is our country’s “only chance” to pull itself together. Meanwhile, the host, who has sent himself into apoplexies of sorrow while live on the air regarding the subject of SEPTEMBER 11TH, does nothing! No outrage. No insistence that Mr. Scheuer take back what he said and apologize. He just sits there and basically says “yeah, pretty much”. What a joke. What a pity. As far as I’m concerned, this Scheuer character should be locked up for treason and Beck should be locked up for aiding treasonous activities. Of course, I know that won’t happen, but you can bet that Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly would be whipping themselves into a frenzy right now if this had happened anywhere besides a Fox News show. Sigh.