Tuesday 26 February 2008

Oscar the grouch

I wonder if anyone could complete this sentence for me:

The Oscars are important because ...

I've never quite understood their importance, myself.  For the most part they involve movies of little value and actors with little to offer.  Can anyone explain why I or anyone should care?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Without those actors, actresses, directors, and producers you would have nothing, no good movies no bad movies, nothing

Maria

Anonymous said...

And you wouldn't have

1. The Prince After Oscar Fete
2. The Elton John AIDS Foundation Oscar Party
3. The Children Uniting Nations Oscar Party

Read blogblog about the karma points. You're not moving the right circles, obviously ;-)

Anonymous said...

Why do we need those, we don't even get invited

Maria

Dave Mann said...

Maria, without all the idiots and no-hopers you refer to we would have all of British film making, French and other Europeans as well as Australian and Canadian and also some Kiwi work (I exclude Peter jackson here as Peter Jackson's work is in the main mindless drivel made for brain dead lemmings).

Added to that, China and Japan have vibrant cinema arts, a does India, whose film industry is actually far larger and more prolific than Hollywood.

I can't think of one film that has won a major award in the last 10 years at the Oscars Onanism fest which is worth paying the price of a cinema ticket for. The whole industry seems to me to be meaningless garbage spewed out by self-promoting morons.

Peter Cresswell said...

INteresting perspective at the New York Times:
"ARE OSCARS WORTH ALL THE FUSS? A.O. Scott

I am not against the Oscars, any more than I’m dismissive of the Salesman of the Year or the Employee of the Month, or opposed to lavish annual trade association conventions for actuaries or ophthalmologists. But I am nonetheless bothered by the disproportionate importance that the Academy Awards have taken on, and by the distorting influence they exercise over the way we make, market and see movies in this country. The Oscars themselves may be harmless fun, but the idea that they matter is as dangerous as it is ridiculous...

The good judgment not only of critics but, more important, of independent-minded, adventurous moviegoers has traditionally been measured by its distance from the consensus of the movie industry.

And that, it should not be forgotten, is what the Academy Awards represent: the self-assessment of a self-interested, self-involved professional clique...

The commercial fate of serious movies is now, to a disturbing extent, dependent on the Academy Awards.

In the old days it was more often the opposite: the academy would belatedly gild the lily of commercial success with a shiny finish of ersatz class. This vulgarity was the saving grace of the Oscars. It was not necessary for film lovers to take them seriously or for media outlets to cover them like presidential campaigns, with horse-race reporting, sober analysis and war room spin doctoring. A bit of perspective is needed. The wonderful thing about the Academy Awards is that they are fundamentally trivial. To pretend otherwise is to trivialize movies.
"