Mar 12 2010
I watched the Oscars last Sunday night…
I was bored out of my mind last Sunday. Somewhere in the midst of that it occurred to me, why not watch the Oscars? Which was problematic, since I don’t have cable television. I figured I could find a feed on the web, hook the laptop up to Shelli’s power-sucking plasma, open up a nice big econo Box O Wine, and voila: problem solved.
2010 Academy Awards poster
Except I couldn’t find any online feeds. Which made me feel bad about the people in New York who were being denied Oscar access too, but for entirely different reasons having to do with media monopolies and corporate greed. My boycott of cable television is self imposed; theirs wasn’t. I don’t have cable anymore because the idea of paying a hundred bucks a month for three hundred channels, three of which I actually watch, makes me surly.
Eventually, I found a live feed of same from Europe, hosted by four uber-clever people with bad hair babbling on a set that tried too hard to be retro. I’m not sure which was worse:
Not finding it online and available (big surprise there), or,
The pretentious Euro peeps hosting the web feed I was watching, or,
The presentation itself.
Which I have to tell you, lacked hugely. For a lot of reasons, not the least of which has to do with the fact that in spite of twitter and tmz, I basically don’t know who anybody is anymore. Probably because my interest in same, marginal to begin with– well, let’s just say that constant and continual media exposure isn’t necessarily a career kickstarter. We know too much about these people already, and there are simply too many of them.
I get that there’s a focus on keeping the air time down to three or four hours. That said, if you’re going to force these people to get to the stage and stumble through their acceptance speech in twenty seconds— has it occurred to anybody how much that devalues the award? Crowning lifetime or career achievement and all you’re gonna give me is twenty seconds? Really?