(Almost) everything is awesome

I wrote about the Oscars one time, on my old blog.  Maybe 2008 or so. I've been at this for a long time. It occurs to me now that I should have taken notes last night, or that perhaps I should have live-blogged, but I didn't feel inspired, because the show was mostly uninspiring.  I'm so bored with tedious identity politics and delusions of truth-to-power.  Believe it or not, it doesn't take that much courage to speak out on race, LGBT rights, or gender equality, especially in a room full of movie stars.

I'm bored with unnatural physical perfection, because I can't separate a preternaturally youthful middle-aged body from what I imagine must go into achieving and maintaining it.  I'm bored with the tyranny of the red carpet.  But I love movies, and I always hold out the secret hope that someone will do something really crazy and daring, and so I always watch the Oscars.

Highlights:

• Everything is Awesome!  I'm NOT a fan of animated movies, and I have a particular dislike for Disney movies.  From Sleeping Beauty to Frozen, I hate almost all of them.  I went with my then 9-year-old son, his friend, and his friend's mother to see The Lego Movie last year, and I approached the whole enterprise with near-dread.  I expected a hybrid between a Lego commercial and the worst excesses of the Disney/Dreamworks animated movie cartel: dead mothers, wisecracking anthropomorphized animals, and knowing pop-culture references.  The Lego Movie is not only not crap; it's actually (wait for it) AWESOME, and the song is perfect.  My son and I are still outraged at the Academy's failure to recognize the movie as the best animated movie ever, but at least the song was nominated.  The performance by Tegan and Sara and The Lonely Island and who knows who else was delightfully frenetic, silly, and happy.  
• J.K. Simmons.  I haven't seen the movie, and I probably won't, but I love J.K. Simmons and his speech was charming because it reminded people that caring about distant causes and oppressed strangers is worthless if you neglect the people who are right in front of you. 
• LADY GAGA OMG!  Not one single thing that I didn't LOVE about this performance: her dress, her hair, her outspread tattooed arms, and that beautiful face and voice without a hint of irony, without a trace of condescension, with nothing but beauty and love for one of my favorite-ever movies and its music.  She put her heart and soul into that performance and I'm so happy to have seen it. And then JULIE ANDREWS!   Just ten minutes earlier, I'd been so bored with the whole show that I'd nearly chucked it and gone to bed, and thank God I didn't.  That was hands-down the best thing I've ever seen on any Oscar telecast, and I don't think I've missed one since 1983 or so. 

Not highlights: 

• Patricia Arquette.  I'm very happy she won; I was rooting for her.  I just cannot muster any outrage about underpaid movie actresses.  Speak out about the real suffering endured by real women in the world outside of Hollywood: young girls kidnapped by ISIS and Boko Haram, and Chinese women forced to abort their babies, and Honduran women who spend 24 hours a day fearing for the lives of their children.  Then I'll cheer like Meryl Streep.  
• NPH in his underwear.  I didn't understand it. 
• John Travolta. I hate to feel embarrassed on someone else's behalf. 

I'd have liked to see Michael Keaton win, although Eddie Redmayne was hard not to like.  As usual, I haven't seen any of the movies yet, but I hope to remedy that this weekend with either Boyhood or Birdman.  It will probably be another year before I write about pop culture again. 

Note to self:

"...the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.  It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides.  If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why?

"Rub your eyes and purify your heart--and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well.  Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be the last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!"

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago