{"id":333,"date":"2008-02-25T16:50:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-25T16:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stallioncornell.wordpress.com\/2008\/02\/25\/missing-the-oscars"},"modified":"2026-07-01T12:35:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T18:35:13","slug":"missing-the-oscars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/missing-the-oscars\/","title":{"rendered":"Missing the Oscars"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I\u2019m in bed next to Mrs. Cornell and I’m flipping channels last night, when I stumble across Daniel Day Lewis winning the Best Actor Academy Award. It was only then that I remembered the Oscars were on. And yet I kept flipping channels and finally settled on watching Chris Noth bust perps in Law and Order: CI.<\/span> I only returned to see the Coen Brothers win Best Director, and I flipped back to Noth before I had to endure an acceptance speech. That was about it \u2013 I missed Best Picture, which didn\u2019t matter, as the only nominated film I had seen was Juno<\/span>, and it had no chance of winning.<\/p>\n

So Oscar night came and went, and I caught about 90 seconds of it.<\/p>\n

How did I come to this point?<\/p>\n

Early in our marriage, my wife was appalled that I insisted on watching the Oscars every year. That first year, Braveheart<\/span> won Best Picture, which made me happy, although it would have been fun to have seen Babe<\/span> win, but that seldom happens, because, as evidenced by the Juno<\/span> shutout, comedies don\u2019t generally get the Oscar love that serious dramas do. I remember as a kid cheering like crazy when Chariots of Fire<\/span> pulled an upset and won out over Warren Beatty\u2019s dreary Reds<\/span>, and I remember the devastation I felt when Star Wars <\/span>lost out to Annie Hall <\/span>for Best Picture of 1977. (I’ve since seen Annie Hall<\/span>, and I still think that was a travesty.)<\/p>\n

My parents went to see the Academy Awards live in 1976, and we kids tried to stay up late to see if we could spot them, but we didn\u2019t. We fell asleep before they got to Best Picture. That was the year Rocky<\/span> won. Long after, I wondered why none of the sequels were nominated until I was old enough to realize they were pretty much crap.<\/p>\n

I remember being bugged that The Fly<\/span> didn\u2019t get anything but technical nominations in 1986. I remember being enraged by Tom Hanks\u2019 win for the mediocre Philadelphia<\/span> when Anthony Hopkins was slighted for the finest screen performance in history in Remains of the Day<\/span>. Then I remember cheering for Hanks when his Forrest Gump<\/span> crushed the execrably overrated Pulp Fiction<\/span> the following year. I dug it when the pseudo-Oxfordian film Shakespeare in Love <\/span>beat out Saving Private Ryan<\/span> for Best Picture, but when I actually saw Saving Private Ryan <\/span>later, I decided that Spielberg and Co. were robbed. I lamented Peter Jackson\u2019s Lord of the Rings<\/span> losses two years in a row \u2013 to the vastly inferior films A Beautiful Mind<\/span> and Chicago<\/span> \u2013 until his Return of the King<\/span> triumphed in the third year with 12 awards and made up for it.<\/p>\n

So how do I get from there to here?<\/p>\n

Well, for one thing, I don\u2019t see many movies anymore. It\u2019s fun to watch the Oscars when you\u2019ve got something to root for, but even my love for Juno<\/span> wasn\u2019t enough to get me interested in watching Hollywood pat themselves on the back for three hours.<\/p>\n

Also, as I\u2019ve become more politically astute, I\u2019ve become sensitized to just how reprehensible Hollywood really is. I was grateful to see Daniel Day-Lewis win, because I was dreading a George Clooney victory, despite the fact that I haven\u2019t seen either actor\u2019s movie. I just think George Clooney is an anti-American turd, and the last thing I wanted was for him to have a good night.<\/p>\n

Much has been written and said about Hollywood\u2019s penchant for self-congratulation, and much of it is accurate. Performers are a bottomless pit of need, and they crave approval and recognition in ways that less narcissistic folks don\u2019t. But so what? Hollywood, at least in my eyes, used to have a veneer of class and grace that made the whole vapid exercise fun to watch.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s pretty much gone now.<\/p>\n

Even growing up, I never watched the Emmys or the Grammys or \u2013 yick \u2013 the Tonys. Award shows were tedious affairs, but somehow the Oscars were different. Maybe it took me this long to realize that they really aren\u2019t different, and that they don\u2019t measure actual achievement so much as elitist fashion, and that the people who make these movies usually have contempt for the people who watch them.<\/p>\n

It was really cool, though, the year Marisa Tomei pulled a stunning upset and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for My Cousin Vinny. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SoI\u2019m in bed next to Mrs. Cornell and I'm flipping channels last night, when I stumble across Daniel Day Lewis winning the Best Actor Academy Award. It was only then that I remembered the Oscars were on. And yet I kept flipping channels and finally settled on watching Chris Noth bust perps in Law and <\/span> ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4912,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions\/4912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}