Category: When Oscar Shit the Bed

When I was much, much younger and full of the sort of idealism that fostered unending binaries – good vs evil, right vs wrong, stupid goddamn whores vs chicks who might fuck me – I was in love with Gandhi.

To believe the film’s title, this mid-60’s cinematic endeavor is meant to be a foray into the universal; a story so accessible, so unfailingly applicable, that each and every one of us can, within its framework, see a bit of ourselves.

Julianne Moore was nominated for Best Actress, which is, against all logic, an even greater crime than her later win for the Lifetime nonsense of Still Alice.

After nearly a half-century on the silver screen, Meryl Streep has more than earned her status as a living legend. She’s arguably the greatest actress alive, and certainly up there with the all-time greats.

Fuck farmers. More specifically, fuck American farmers. From top to bottom, they are easily, by leaps and bounds, the most overrated, romanticized, and unjustly flattered group of people who ever lived.

In the final analysis, Sweet Dreams isn’t even interested in probing a life; getting into the marrow of a woman who seemed to come out of nowhere and take country music by storm.

If you can imagine plastic and cardboard having a meet-cute, you can imagine Love Story. A movie where holding hands in the park and exchanging cringe-worthy banter constitutes great passion and defiance.

Not so long ago, in the Year of Our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Fifty-Four, Hollywood saw fit to release a major motion picture (MGM! CinemaScope!) that endorsed, sanctioned, and ultimately made light of kidnapping, rape, and deep, unshakable misogyny. Women as property.

The nominations for Sissy Spacek (Best Actress) and Tess Harper (Best Supporting Actress) are inexplicable enough, but to learn that this slapdash, magnolia-scented monstrosity also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1981?

One of these days, hopefully while I still remain above ground, someone will write the definitive tale of why, for what appeared to be a period of several decades from World War II forward, Hollywood was utterly, hopelessly, and reverentially obsessed with Catholicism.