I've been thinking about movies and the awards that come with making movies, and I think it's interesting, whether you're a movie snob or just have awful taste, you're going to be dissatisfied with the Oscars.
I think this is weird.
I don't want to suggest there's a spectrum for this sort of thing, where you start with four year-olds who are just getting used to the idea of focusing on a giant screen and end with some brilliant movie savant, there seems to be a section, somewhere in the middle, where the Oscars completely represent their views.
There's not a shortage of interesting articles written about why Slumdog Millionaire didn't deserve to win best picture (from critiques of the film's failure to address social issues, the uninspired nature of the film, the insulting insinuations of all things, including the blinding of orphans for profit, being fated so this character can thrive, to the crazy chanting that Dark Knight should have won everything ever), and I tend to agree... I wasn't thrilled.
But, as I was writing earlier, there seems a gap, sort of like how if you drop a cat from above a certain height it'll have time to go limp and thus survive the fall, and from below a certain height it'll hit the ground and walk away with minimal damage, but between those heights there is supposedly a few feet in which the cat is too high to survive the impact but does not have enough time to go limp and thus survive thanks to whatever magic allows limp cats to survive devastating falls... I also feel compelled to note there is likely a height from which, limp or otherwise, the cat will explode on the cement.
The dead cat gap in movie taste, as I'm sure it will be referred to from now on, exists between the adolescent hoards who demand more and more of those "Parody of some genre" Movie movies (that have suceded in the impossible task of making the film 300 seem almost decent in comparison to its satire Meet the Spartans), and the more than casual viewer of foreign and independent cinema who feel, in the tradition of Camus, that art is meant not to escape reality but to investigate our existence.
The Oscars has become (and I say has become assuming it was ever anything else, but I have no reason to believe that is the case) an award for the small gap that can appreciate movies that don't depend on farting to further the plot yet can't quite stand an ambiguous or novel ending.
In this sense the Oscars are what America seems to want to be, a diluted combination of the best of us and those of us who have nothing much to contribute, meeting somewhere not exactly in the middle, with lofty, though ultimately hollow ambitions resulting in watered down self-important decisions being made in the spirit of compromise and tolerance.
I can't imagine I'd have it any other way though, as the elitist's claims that they know what makes a good movie would of course be rendered moot by the fact that most of America would tune out, not particularly interested in what a bunch of weirdos think about movies where nothing happens, and the vast majority (who reside in the lower cat-will-land-and-be-injured-but-not-killed portion) already determine which movies to honor by way of spending billions of dollars on utter crap, ensuring the very same crap will be made over and over as things explode and hot chicks take off their tops... unless they're famous, because nudity is apparently something you only do if you're desperate or artistic.
