Oscarred for life...

Everyone's a critic. Not least me; I'm literally sat in front of a monitor right now preparing to launch what I would love describe as a scathing diatribe, rallying against the banality of whatever has offended my highly tuned sensibilities this week. A much more accurate way of describing it would be an ill-advised and poorly conceived rant over something inconsequential and pointless. Gum-flapping and bile-venting. This is how I get my kicks, stop judging me.

Let's analyse things for a moment. We, the cinema-going public, expect to be entertained when we shell out our hard earned cash and as this blog demonstrates we get to rant about things when we aren't. (If you're a streamer or a downloader then I'm afraid your opinion isn't worth the carbon dioxide you exhaled expressing it. Sorry, not sorry. Pay up or hush up). Trouble is, there are precious few ways for us to mitigate our losses before hand. Nowadays we get announcements for teasers for trailers which is a fairly good place to start, but I've seen great trailers for crap movies (and vice versa) and if I take any more pinches of salt I'm liable to have a stroke, heart attack or some beautiful combination of the two. Half the time the trailer is more spoiler than anything else or has a bunch of shots in it that aren't in the finished movie so you just can't trust them. 

You can put your faith in reviews if you wish. Pick up any newspaper or magazine and they'll have a movie reviewer. Some of these are very good; they provide honest and helpful insight into films without ruining them. Some of them however, are nothing but tripe and I'm convinced they were paid for by the production company. I don't care how you slice it, reviews are always subjective. Of course they are; they're pure opinion pieces and that's fine as long as you're on the same page. I'm sure there are as many people who disagree with my bullshit as there are who agree and we're all better off for it. They're wrong, but we're better off. Still, reviews: can't trust 'em. Unfathomable as it may be, there are people out there (maniacs most of them, running around in their underwear throwing fruit at pigeons I assume) who actually decide to watch movies based on what awards it won, particularly if it one of them was an Oscar. 

I can't stand the Oscars. I find most award ceremonies cringe worthy if I'm honest; I'm much more of a "succeed in anonymity, fail in anonymity" type of guy. If I do something good, that's great; quick handshake, a "thanks very much" and we get on with our lives. Similarly, if I screw up, just tell me what I did and how to fix it. No fuss, no muss either way. So the Oscars is just one big self-congratulatory circle jerk as far as I'm concerned, but really I can't stand them because they are so far from my idea of good films that it's laughable.

There have been 89 Academy Award shows, which means 89 Best Pictures or iterations thereof. Out of those, I would count 8 as movies I enjoyed. Now, I'm not saying that the other 90% are all awful movies and anyone who did enjoy them should be taken outside and shown the error of their ways with something pointy; I'm just saying that as a barometer of movies I would enjoy, they're pretty poor. Take Million Dollar Baby, if you will. By all accounts of the Academy, that was the best picture in 2004. I'll be honest, none of the nominees that year were particularly head-turning; The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Sideways, Ray all look entirely uninspiring to me but in comparison to Million Dollar Baby? Joys! Pure wonder! A veritable cinematic cornucopia of delight! Sign me up and feed me popcorn till my gums are sore and bleeding from the kernels.

Million Dollar Baby just sums up the Oscars for me. It's a grim affair at best and is the closest I've ever been to walking out of the cinema. The Academy however, loved it. American Dad's Oskar Gold pastiche hit the nail squarely on the head and whether you think it's funny or not isn't really important; it was accurate. I don't watch movies for a lecture on the morality of euthanasia or how losing everything ultimately make you a better person. I want face-punching and explosions and large calibre weaponry. I want giant robots pasting seven shades out of monsters and cities and, well, everything I guess. I want actual comedy, not witless parodies, horrible cringing and lazy clichés. This probably doesn't make me a very sophisticated audience member, but still. It is what it is.

So a couple of weeks back, Oscar hit the grand old age of 89. You may have seen some of the controversy surrounding the Best Picture because someone tried to stitch Warren Beatty up by giving him the wrong envelope. Props to him for deftly passing the buck so he didn't look completely stupid. Apparently whichever slack-jawed intern they gave the envelope distribution task to has since been relieved of his duties and possibly disembowelled as a warning to the others. That wasn't even the worst bit of news. You may wish to sit down, prepare some sort of restorative (some smelling salts perhaps or a nice cup of pungent herbal tea) and brace yourselves. As if purposefully contrived to prove in my mind the complete invalidity of the Oscars as a celebration of achievement or a benchmark of excellence...

Suicide Squad won an Oscar.

I'll let that settle for a moment, like the rehydrated flakes of dried vegetation stewing in that Ginseng and Peppermint monstrosity you've conjured up to revitalise yourself. That half-arsed, nonsensical, dragged-from-the-brain-meats-of-a-simpleton, sack of fried garbage now has the right to put an Oscar on the DVD cover. What's worse is that it won for Best Make-Up, meaning whoever voted for it genuinely thought that all those facial tattoos, all that greasepaint and the giant, walking Herpes scab that was Killer Croc represented the best make up effects in any movie in the year 2016. Maybe it's a case of slim pickings; it beat Star Trek and a Swedish film I've never even heard of. If there's a better way to illustrate quite how useless the Oscars are to me then I haven't seen it. Not until next year at least...