Well, thank heavens that's over.
Although I'm writing this on Friday, I can safely say that the Academy Awards was long, boring and an awful lot of people who watched it wished they hadn't.
On Friday, the detailed schedule for the Sunday broadcast was leaked. Steven Spielberg giving best picture; Hilary Swank and Kathryn Bigelow handing out best director; a tribute to Lena Horne presented by Halle Berry; virtual reality "transitions" to Oscar nights and movies of the past; Oprah Winfrey presenting best documentary feature; Anne Hathaway undergoing five - count 'em five - wardrobe changes. Even if the academy makes changes to the schedule, on Friday it was a good wager that it was all hideous.
Excuse my rant, but the day after the Oscars is the perfect time for a reality-check about the movie racket. And to note, once again, that the Academy Awards is both an institution and a TV show reeking of insufferable inanity. The tone of the Academy Awards is always unashamedly smug, the humour is lame and the only fun element is enjoyed on the couch at home, as we sneer and giggle at the pomposity and tedium of it all. The Academy Awards on TV aren't about great movies, they're about laughing at a bad TV show. The Oscars have become the Hollywood Squares variety show.
We all know that. With the Oscars, the fabulosity ends before the show starts. The real point these days is the fashion parade and the inane remarks by the stars on the red carpet. That's what is fabulous. And it's camp. In every home where the epic is watched, a festival of catty remarks is enjoyed. That's why people read the commentary days afterward in newspapers and magazines - to wallow in snarky remarks about who wore what and who said what. The movie-awards show itself has become secondary. What's compelling is exactly everything that movie-making snobs dismiss about television. And yet, put in charge of a TV event, the same moviemakers can no longer make it interesting or classy.
Young people, serious people and people who are serious about the relevance of popular culture no longer watch the darn thing - largely because the movies are awful and standards in the awards racket are ludicrous. The King's Speech is a very slight, ludicrously overblown movie, notable mainly for its strange and reactionary deference to the English monarchy and authority in general. It fits a category of surefire award-winner these days because it deals with two things that are recognized in Hollywood alone as being vitally important - therapy and submission to power.
Look at the list of winning movies and performances and you'll see one big monument to mediocrity. (An exception, possibly, is The Social Network, although the translation to film of Aaron Sorkin's excellent, biting screenplay still feels flimsy.) It is a truth universally acknowledged now that few movies match the depth and cogency of the best television. That superiority isn't even worth pitching as an idea. It's simply, glaringly true.
In the end, the Academy Awards is an incredibly boring end to the phenomenon called "awards season" these days. But the Oscars do serve to remind us that awards season is simply the movie-marketing machine at work for a few months. It works to put bums in seats at theatres, sell DVDs and compel people to pay for watching movies on-demand. But, a short time after today, it's not the movies that most will remember. It's the frocks.
A few years ago, when doing the red-carpet thing, Joan Rivers barked, "Who wins, who loses? Who gives a damn!" And every year it becomes more clear that she was correct. By the time the first award is handed out, it's an anticlimax. The Academy Awards are over. So totally over.
AIRING TONIGHT
The Berlusconi Scandals (CBC NN, 10 p.m., on The Passionate Eye) is an enthralling look at Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi and his current troubles. Made for the BBC, it chronicles Italian-born reporter Mark Franchetti's visit to Italy in an attempt to understand Berlusconi's grip on the country. As Franchetti points out, Berlusconi made a vast fortune from bad television and is a joke figure outside of Italy, but he is enormously popular at home. We hear all about the alleged mafia links, the corruption, the prostitutes and all the things that, in truth, don't shock or annoy his supporters.
One of the first people Franchetti interviews is a reporter who works for one of Berlusconi's channels. Franchetti says he knows the man to be a serious journalist. He asks the man about Berlusconi's grip on Italy and the reply is, "Italians like him. They have the leader they like. It's as simple as that." Others say that Berlusconi is a figure who represents, "Energy, a man of action." And someone who loathes him says, "In five years, when we look back at who governed Italy, we will ask how was it possible to believe in people like this." We the viewers are left perplexed but still enthralled not by Berlusconi, but by this strange, dark aspect of Italy that gives him such power.
Check local listings.