OSCAR WEEK

Does Oscar hate his own smell?

The academy shows American-style self-loathing by handing its biggest trophies to foreigners and drowning itself in montages. Save us, George Clooney!

By Cintra Wilson

Read more: Cintra Wilson, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Academy Awards, Oscar Week 2008

Matt Petit / © AMPAS

From left, best actor Daniel Day-Lewis, best supporting actress Tilda Swinton, best actress Marion Cotillard and best supporting actor Javier Bardem backstage at the 80th Annual Academy Awards in Hollywood, Calif., Feb. 24, 2008.

Feb. 25, 2008 | The writers' strike was resolved, but not soon enough, apparently. The wounds were deep. Much blood was lost. Oscar was deprived of oxygen, and sustained a great deal of brain damage.

It must have been grim at that academy meeting, just a few weeks ago. No writers, just a bunch of liminal Hollywood power brokers in $6,000 Brioni suits sitting glumly around a large obsidian table in one of the Carrara-marble, earthquake-proof bunker-vaults deep in the ground under CAA, too depressed even to eat their grilled seafood salads.

"Editors," someone finally said, the idea light bulb suddenly reflecting off his hairless scalp.

"Huh?"

"Fuck the writers. They'll all eventually eat each other like the Donner party. We have editors. This Oscars? We break new territory."

Eyes peer up hopefully through $3,000 Japanese glasses frames made of hammered titanium and hand-carved wood.

"This year? All new: all old. We just montage the living shit out of it. Wall-to-wall montages of Oscar footage recycled from the last 80 years."

"Great."

"Thank God."

"Let's go home."

Five minutes later, a symphony of bloot-bloots and black Mercedes doors automatically popping open, then the roar of fresh German engines as the identical cars began their climate-controlled trips through the poisoned brown air, back to their home garages in Glendale and Brentwood.

The montages, it must be said, were so numerous and so mind-blowingly stupid as to border on sadism.

Jon Stewart, who hosted, presented it as a joke, but they actually did show a montage completely devoted to the uses of binoculars and periscopes in movies over the years.

The unlovable animated Seinfeld Bee character from the vastly disappointing "Bee Movie" introduced some technical award with -- no joke -- a bee montage.

There was a montage devoted to production design. A montage devoted to How the Oscar Ballots Get Cast.

For nearly every major award, there was a montage of all 79 other winners from the past.

In short: This year, Oscar honored the heart-touching magic of the film industry's celebration of life by sucking every possible ounce of spontaneous life, marrow and energy out of the event by waterboarding it to the point of gag-reflex failure with canned montages.

Hollywood executives were firmly convinced for the past several months that writers were worthless. So, all in all, the evening was sort of like "Romeo and Juliet," but without a script: a frictionless battle between the Montage-Yous and the Crapulets. They both lost. Actually, we all did.

Even though the event was way more lame than lamé, it feels wrong even taking potshots at the Oscars now. It's like picking on Britney Spears, at this point -- it's so easy, it's not even sporting. Oscar is elderly, and in dire need of hipness-replacement surgery. In his dotage he is tiresome, dull and earnest, and employs a lot of doddering repetition about how movies "touch the soul" and "inspire others to dream."

Even Jack Nicholson, perhaps because of his symbiotic link to Oscar, looked frail when talking about the "common link that touches the (heh heh heh) 'humanity' in all of us." You know when Jack is having a hard time looking convincingly inhumane at the Oscars that some power grid in hell is in the grips of a rolling blackout.

Hollywood is always a lopsided reflection of the political situation we're in.

In this sense, performing artists, classically a fairly high-strung, hypersensitive lot, have always been pretty effective canaries in the cultural coal mine. What they've been telling us, lately, is that we have a very, very sick culture on our hands.

It was a terrible, tooth-gnashing year of hideous self-reflection, for America: the ugly flipside of cultural narcissism. Our country, on the back end of a rapacious tear of sophomoric jerkbag behavior, is moving into the slightly more mature adolescent phase of starting to hate its own smell.

After shaving its head and driving drunk around the globe with no panties, calling itself the Antichrist, and finally abandoning its children, totaling its SUV and getting its ass kicked in the parking lot of the Persian Gulf, America is realizing that it is internationally loathed, broke, soulless, tasteless, fat, drunk, malicious, greedy and stupid, and has been generally behaving like a lousy excuse for a world superpower for long enough to lose all its friends and position.

So, since America hates itself this year, Oscar gave the biggest trophies to foreigners:

Best supporting actress: Tilda Swinton -- British.
Best supporting actor: Javier Bardem -- Spanish.
Best actress: Marion Cotillard -- French.
Best actor: Daniel Day-Lewis -- British.

Conspicuously missing from this Oscars was any loose talk of politics or the war, until the designated time block for dissent during the presentation of the documentary film awards. This was especially weird: Why, if they didn't want to acknowledge the outside world, did they get a truth teller like Jon Stewart to host the thing?

But it isn't totally shocking when you consider that ABC, which owned the Oscars this year, is owned by Disney. The whole night seemed conspicuously laundered through Robert Iger's Great Disney Sanitizer -- as if the academy came down with heavy threats and successfully imposed a gag order on the evening (a moratorium on natural speech so suppressive and creepy that I took to calling it the "Iger Sanction").

This Oscars was noteworthy, though, if only because it featured the worst musical interludes since the Great Debbie Allen Interpretive Dance Meltdown of 1999.

The Disney movie "Enchanted" somehow had three completely unsingable, perversely idiotic, overproduced, melody-free songs nominated.

Amy Adams sang the first of these: a frantically upbeat anthem about being vermin and doing menial labor -- kind of a "Whistle While You Work" number that had suspiciously happy housewife/sweatshop/totalitarian overtones.

Kristin Chenoweth sang the second "Enchanted" mess: a musically schizophrenic orchestral pseudo-calypso duet with a Rastafarian who was virtually invisible onstage because nobody bothered to light him. This big song 'n' dance number was somehow supposed to convey the "cultural diversity of New York's Central Park" via a kick line of white senior citizens, brides and grooms, a gymnastic troupe of dancing boys in hard hats and Con Edison drag, a flock of tuba players and, most offensively, a mariachi band wearing sombreros ... the likes of which I have never, ever, ever seen in Central Park. In short, it was the kind of illegal gathering that, in the Rudy Giuliani era, would have gotten you shot.

Next page: Where was Bjork when we needed her?

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