Sunday, February 27, 2011

I'D RATHER WATCH OSCAR MADISON

The Super Bowl of Hollywood is tomorrow night. I refer, of course, to the 82nd Academy Awards. Perhaps you'll be watching as over-egoed drama queens and kings step to the dais and thank everybody they have ever known for the statue, but the long suffering fan will not. I might be persuaded to watch if Natalie Portman wears a completely see-through dress or if one of the acting divas thanks a producer for allowing her to do her screen test on the casting couch, but since neither will happen, I'll watch something else.

I understand that some of you will take one for the team because of a wife or girlfriend who has been waiting for this show since last year's - which I also missed. Sorry if you have to watch it, but do what you have to do to both keep the peace and maybe get a piece. Any straight man forced to watch this godawful drivel should get something out of it.

I lost interest in it when I discovered that I hadn't heard of the majority of nominees or had seen any of the nominated films. Another reason for me to watch it would be if I thought Charlie Sheen was going to OD on national TV but he probably won't so, again, I won't watch. I could care less what designers have created which ugly dress for some actress who couldn't carry Katherine Hepburn's sanitary napkin belt, or what the next country Brad and Angelina will adopt a kid from might be.

I AM interested in who gets the lifetime achievement award so that I can add the lucky recepient to my dead pool list, but I can read who it is in the paper.

Because I won't watch the show does not mean that I don't like movies. I have been a movie buff ever since I was a kid when I would beg to be allowed to watch The Million Dollar Movie which was shown every night after the 11pm news on channel 6. If my parents said no, which they always did, I would wait until I thought they were asleep and then sneak downstairs to watch some of my favorite movies. They were usually in black and white, and I could count on at least 2 WWII movies every week. John Wayne was a regular on the Million Dollar Movie, and it wasn't until I grew up that I learned that the closest he ever came to a shot fired in anger was on a Warner lot.

This past month has been a bonanza for watching great movies on the tube since TCM and others have been running Oscar-winning films. They do it every year and I look forward to it every year. It is Robert Osborne's time to shine. The other night I was watching Jaws for the umpteenth time and got to hear one of the greatest lines of all time, "You're gonna need a bigger boat." In fact, that got me to thinking about all of the great lines from films that we never forget and in some cases become part of the language we use everyday. The long suffering fan loves to make lists, so I started making a list of my favorite all time lines from the movies I love, which I won't bore you with. My list may not jive 100% with yours, especially since my list fizzles out in the 21st century. Some of my favorite films are those made in the 30's and 40's thus my list is filled with tasty tidbits from that era. You younger people can feast on the newer techno-filled special effects films like Avatar, but the long suffering fan prefers a good story line with a great script. I'll take great dialogue over great special effects any time. That's another good reason to skip this year's Hollywood circle jerk... unless, of course, you actually LIKE the ouvre of Michael Bay...

By the way, there are no lines from John Wayne on my list. Please keep his lines to yourself if he is one of your favorites. As the great director John Ford once said of the Duke after seeing one of his rarely passable performances, "I never knew the sonofabitch could act."

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