The Oscars are dumb. Let's all not care!

So as I was ranting and raving about how the Academy Award going to "Birdman" (I'm not calling it by the rest of its pretentious, wanna-be ee cummings title) instead of "Boyhood" was "ridiculous" and "garbage" and "another example of how much Hollywood loves itself", while my wife looked on in silence.  Then I (rather annoyingly I'm sure) wondered aloud "Why do I even care so much at all?" to which she responded with a genuine "I don't know", before turning her attention back to her (certainly more interesting than me) glass of wine and post-Oscar show fashion breakdown.

For whatever reason her words hit me...she was right! Why do I care about the ultimate decision reached by an irksome group of primarily old, primarily out-of-touch, often voting-for-reasons-that-are-unrelated-to-the-merits-of-any-given-film folks who would likely be annoying as all hell if I actually met them.  Why indeed?!  And if I, a person who really, really loves movies and wants to see new and unique movies made every year doesn't care, why should anyone care?  How often have they gotten it right anyway?  (hint: not very often)  I assume their lousy voting record just means they are much more focused on doing blow and chasing hookers than picking the best movies.  (Actually, they would be probably be chasing mistresses and not hookers since hookers would come over to you if you had money...let's just move on.)  Granted, fundamentally I get that not everyone will agree on a"best" movie, since films are subjective no matter what general consensus eventually coalesces around a particular flick.  I mean look, there is no chance that 50 Shades of Grey isn't a horrible movie.  There just isn't. There is nothing any of you can say to me that is going to convince me it's not two hours of no chemistry having, poorly written, crappy awfulness wrapped inside a bowl of poop.  Yet it made $80M in its opening week because people are dumb.  Ugh!  The people that think it's awesome are wrong of course, but still...point taken.

Look, I don't really care about listening to folks who think Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey was the best movie of the year...mainly because they might then ask me questions like "Why don't more Adam Sandler movies get nominated?" or say things like "I didn't like The Godfather because there were too many mobsters in it" and I would begin weeping for humanity while backing slowly away for fear of contamination.  There are many, many bad movies released every year, and many of them make a crap-ton of money.  I'm looking at you Transformers...why couldn't you be decent??? For the love of my all-time hero Optimus!

(note: my wife was not as impressed to take this picture as I was to be in it.)

The bottom line is that the Oscars (which are named after Oscar the Grouch of course) have engaged off and on in profound suckage at the task of honoring the "best" movies for many years. Plus, they refuse to even acknowledge that comedies are difficult to pull off and could actually be considered "worthy" of an Oscar.  To which I say, give this man an award for something now Academy!

OSCAR CLIP!

Just because the Oscars say a film is the best movie, time doesn't necessarily always judge the Academy to know what the hell it's doing. All in all, the voters have consistently done a mediocre job at best at picking Best Picture.  I'll cover one example every few days as evidence that we've lived through a lifetime of the Oscar voters sucking it up (all winners ranked on a scale of wrongness from 1 (eh, not a big deal) to 10 (oh holy hell Hollywood!)):

1980 - Ordinary People Over Raging Bull (5).

I rate this a "5" level mistake because I average the general public's 20/20 hindsight view of this as a "9" - level disaster against my rating of "N/A" (not applicable) because (pause for effect) I don't like Raging Bull.  I know, I know.  As someone who loves so  many types of movies and as someone who tries hard to appreciate how a movie is put together, what it's trying to say, etc., I should love Raging Bull.  I really should...I know this.  At the time no movie looked quite like it, or had characters quite like it and it has Scorsese's (more about him below) awesome fingerprints all over it. Yet...it was a slog for me and I have no desire to see it a second time.  My blurb for it would be "Not as good as Rocky IV" which would have been poorly received, since not only did most critics and folks really like Raging Bull, but the unrelenting awesomeness that is Rocky IV hadn't been made yet.  Yes, the world was a hollow place in 1980 without people having experienced lines of dialogue like "If he dies, he dies" and "if i can change, and you can change, everybody can change!"  Rocky IV is the best.

I liked Ordinary People fine, even if at its core it was just a really, really well acted after school special about privileged white people.  But who doesn't enjoy a good after school special?

DANCEFIGHT!!!!