MADness—the Blog

This is the last day of February, which gives my son great joy.  He got to mark off another day on the calendar and turn the page to the next month.  March has a cool picture of a Mustang.  He doesn’t know what a Mustang is—he’s four—but he’s excited about it anyway.

Expect the excitement to pick up in Hollywood this week.  Next Sunday we’ll know who the winners are, finally.  Which means a week of hype and predictions and office pools and rumors and gossip and loss of all perspective about what it all means.  I’ll try to be careful what I watch and what I read.  It’s the silly season.

Awards, in a way, are silly to begin with, and awards for making movies are even sillier.  I understand the need for champions in sports; there you have competitors whose sole focus is to win.  Movies operate in a very different realm.  A movie isn’t made to beat anything else but to engage and entertain its audience.  Yes, some movies do that well and some don’t, and I appreciate the need to recognize excellence.  Some effort goes into making the Oscars about quality, but there are so many other factors at play, and the nature of determining what’s best is so inexact anyway, that the awards are often, if not usually, about something else. 

The Oscars started as a p.r. campaign for the industry, and it’s been a very effective one at that.  The Oscars are the best promotion that the film industry has ever dreamed up.  The Oscars get people’s attention, even people who don’t go to movies often.  I’m glad for that.  I’m glad the movie business gets three or four hours of prime-time TV to promote itself.  Even when the show stinks, it’s still a great advertisement for the movies. 

I wish somehow the awards didn’t mean so much.  But since they do, I wish they’d pick better winners.  I’d like to say I take it all with a sense of detachment, that I don’t take it too seriously.  I should know better.  How often have I been disappointed.  But this is what happens.  I start reading stuff.  I start thinking:  this year they’re gonna get it right.  This year—yes, this year, at last!—they’re going to do the right thing and agree with me! 

You’ll have to excuse me.  If I didn’t get excited, it wouldn’t be the Oscars.