The Academy Awards Reminds Me Again Why I Don’t Watch Movies

When was the last time I watched the Oscars? Probably never. I don’t know any of the movies, and the actors’ clothing is uninteresting to me. Do men watch the Oscars? Apparently some do, but I have better ways to waste my life. I’ve heard though that the commentary is about more than prom dresses, so maybe there’s a good justification to tune in.

I Hate Movies

Some seven or eight years ago, a movie about gay people won an award or was nominated. It was either Milk or Brokeback Mountain. I can’t remember which. Probably both. I knew literally no one that saw them except my secular-liberal Catholic aunt, who went with her suburban housewife friends from the parish.

I figured out early on as a teenager that the Academy Awards was all politics, so I lost all interest in it. If they were going to support movies based on social consciousness and not artistic merit, then the whole system had no credibility in my eyes. Same thing the first time I opened Rolling Stone magazine. People get pissy about their listing of the 500 greatest albums or the UVA hoax, but I wasn’t aware anyone read Rolling Stone anymore.

I’ve also noticed over time that the more rave reviews a movie receives, the worse of a movie it is. Everybody and their kid brother told me The Avengers was amazing. I’m not much of one for superheroes or special effects, but I decided to see it anyway because of all I heard.

Turns out the whole thing was two battle scenes with no real plot or character development. I kept waiting it to turn good, for the plot to pick up or for a character to learn an important lesson I can apply in my own life, but aside from a few lines from Captain America, the whole thing was boring and sterile.

Remember that scene from season 15 of South Park where Stan is watching previews to the movies and all he sees is shit? That whole two-part episode is the story of my life.

If I want to see a movie, I’ll wait until it’s in the cheapo theater or just buy it on DVD for $15. I haven’t paid to see a just-released movie since The Dark Knight Rises, and I probably won’t again until Love And Mercy comes out this summer.  If I’m going to piss away $11.50, I can make a bottle of bourbon last far longer than a two-hour movie.

Patricia Arquette’s Political Pandering And The Left’s Cannibalism

So this year a wealthy actress named Patricia Arquette won an award and said something about equal pay for women in her acceptance speech that ideally is supposed to be about film-making. This obviously was immediately praised by feminists and celebrities. The best part is that she implied people have fought too much for blacks’ and gays’ rights, so by the next day the rest of the internet liberals were attacking her with their micro-activisms (which a friend of mine predicted as soon as she said it).

Then you had the feminists coming out again to defend Arquette. It’s quite beautiful how historically liberals have always had a tendency to devour each other. Divided they stand, united they brawl.

“To every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights,” Arquette said in her speech. “It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.”

The only reason she won an award is because she’s a white cishet. What a shitlord. Check your privilege, Arquette.

Also, does anyone find it weird how much feminism focuses on material gain? It takes a special kind of loser to bitch about low pay on camera when all of her employees and viewers at home are making less than her. That kind of loser no amount of money or social validation can turn into a winner. No wonder celebrity marriages always fall apart. I guess now that rape culture has been debunked, the pay gap myth is all they have left.

What kind of idiot gets their beliefs from a celebrity? In all the talk about Arquette, I don’t recall anyone writing about her credibility as a social critic. But she’s all out of good looks, so parroting pop-liberalism is the only way to keep herself in the gossip column. First the Oscars is considered sexist because they focus on the dresses, and three hours later they are on the cutting-edge of gender equality.

Arquette’s Award-Winner

I hadn’t heard of Patricia Arquette, so I had to look up the movie. it’s something called Boyhood. I have no idea what it’s about and couldn’t give enough of a shit to look up the Wikipedia page until I decided to write this article. I’m going to guess it’s smug coming-of-age white guilt onanism like To Kill A Mockingbird. Let’s find out together.

So based on the above, we can fill in our white-guilt checklist.

• We have it taking place not just in the south but in Texas, which for some reason is generally considered the most southern—and hence the most backwards—of the southern states even though many southerners don’t consider Texas to be part of the south. [Cue comments section fighting.]
• There is a Bible and shotgun as a gift from elderly people. Old people, as we all know, are behind the times with their outdated morality. Jesus and assault rifles were great in the 1400s, but this is 2015, and our new world demands a new set of absolutes.
• The movie features alcoholic abusive men but probably not any women, even though you don’t need many years of life experience to know that women are far more batshit insane on alcohol than men are. You know that “Isolate, Intoxicate, Initiate” piece ROK had a few months ago? One of the best summaries of game I’ve ever read, but be careful how much booze you give her. A man can drink hard liquor for hours before he’s sloppy stupid all over Facebook, but a woman goes from giggly buzzed to violent wasted at Mach speed. To quote The Break-Up, “Apple martinis. That normally does the trick. But just two. Three, she’ll get sloppy and you’ll become a baby-sitter.”

I’m surprised there wasn’t any rape or racial tension. They should at least have had the old grandpa sitting in his front porch rocking chair snuffing tobacco and making a stray line about all the coloreds that have moved onto the block. He should have a leather KJV Bible flapping in the wind and an old Ford truck in the distance.

The main character also needed a closeted homosexual brother. But at least the mother chose to major in psychology, the bullshit major of choice for middle age female college students.

Based on the rest of the Wikipedia page, it seems like there’s no climax or clear ending, but I can’t really tell that without seeing the movie. Maybe I’ll watch it in three years when it’s on Netflix Instant.

The Elephant That Should Have Been In The Room

Finally, there was no mention at the awards ceremony of the century-anniversary of The Birth of a Nation, the innovative 1915 landmark film that popularized the movie industry (now available in its three-hour entirety on Youtube). They could have said, “Well, while we certainly disagree with the message and many of the consequences of The Birth of a Nation, we are at least grateful for the opportunities in cinematic art that it opened up. It’s important to remember history, no matter how dark.”

But instead they’ve decided to pretend the Jim Crow south never happened. I’m not sure what the rationalization for this is, because if someone tried to bury the Nazi holocaust in the annals of history, these same people would raise a fuss. I mean, sure, most people have forgotten that the Nazis killed five million gypsies, but at least we still remember the six million Jews.

And so in honor of our warts-and-all American heritage, I’d like to quote Roger Ebert from 2003,

All serious moviegoers must sooner or later arrive at a point where they see a film for what it is, and not simply for what they feel about it. “The Birth of a Nation” is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will,” it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil.

Well said. Here’s a teaser:

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