So, did everybody watch the Oscars on Sunday? That’s what I thought. Well for those of us that did, wasn’t it just great to see that wonderfully talented ingénue, Mo’Nique, accept the Oscar for best performance by an actress in a supporting role? (Wow, that’s a lot of words for one award!) And did you catch how fellow directors and former romantic partners (it’s not PC to say husband and wife anymore) James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow were seated right next to each other! Scandalous! And did you notice how many times they cut away to George Clooney? (I counted 78). And what about Miley’s dress? OMG! Anyway, it goes without saying we’ll all always remember where we were and what we were doing during these precious moments: sitting on the couch watching TV.
Currently, there are some fifty separate annual awards shows involving more or less the same few hundred people. Here is just a partial list:
The Academy Awards (The Oscars)
The Golden Globe Awards
The SAG Awards
The Daytime Emmy Awards
The Primetime Emmy Awards
The Grammys Awards
The Tony Awards
The MTV Movie Awards
The MTV Video Awards
The BET Awards
The ALMA Awards
The AMA Awards
The Bravo A-List Awards
The Critic’s Choice Awards
The People’s Choice Awards
The Teen’s Choice Awards
The Kid’s Choice Awards
And the list goes on. By the time all of these awards shows are finally done with, it’s time to start them back up again! Moreover, just about every participant receives some kind of an award, thus fulfilling the liberal maxim: “everybody gets a trophy.” It has reached the point now where the awards manufacturing industry is the greatest contributor to national GDP!
Clearly, the professional self-admirers (the actors, directors, editors, wardrobe designers, make-up artists, etc.) who attend these countless awards ceremonies, and the media that adores them, are all in desperate need of a little perspective. Their job is to entertain. And yes, some of them do that job well. But they’re not curing cancer, or winning wars, or flying airplanes. They are in the business — the very lucrative business — of entertainment. Whether or not they ever actually understand that is, frankly, not important to me. What is sad, however, is that the culture of modern America has come to be defined by these nattering nabobs of narcissism. Having these self-absorbed glitterati play the role of cultural court jesters in America is one thing, but handing the entire kingdom over to them is quite another. Our culture, when you think about it, is all that we have. It is everything that we are about. It defines us. If we lose our culture, or if it becomes so base and worthless that it is as good as lost, then we are really nothing. It is a troubling thought that another age a thousand years from now may be bound to look back upon our own and describe it thus: “Never throughout mankind’s history have such a self-centered people congratulated themselves so much for so very little.”
And so to put things in their proper perspective, I rank as the greatest moment in Oscar history to be when Marlon Brando, having won the best actor award for his Godfather performance, turned it down by boycotting the ceremony and sending instead American Indian activist Sacheen Littlefeather, in full Apache dress. One might say this was the first of the tedious political statements by another self-righteous actor, but Brando wasn’t like that. Quite obviously he was poking a big fat finger right into the twinkling eye of Hollywood and enjoying every minute of it. Now that’s entertainment!
Culture Crusader 