Oscar yawn

[ZoWie]

You couldn't pay me to watch that ridiculous horror flick that got the record for most nominations in a single year.

Only F1 kept me from the first year of my life when I had no desire to see any of the Best Picture nominees.

Interesting the amount of money Apple's oligarchy-industrial complex is spending on Formula One racing in general. They must know something.

[Number6]

Sinners is one of those movies that's worth watching only once. It's a decent movie but not one I'd say worth of an Oscar.

[ZoWie]

I think the Academy is between a rock and a hard place. It actually does a lot of very good things that otherwise no one would bother to do to help the biz function at a high level of creativity and production value.

However, the whole notion of getting famous and winning an Oscar isn't what it used to be. Today's version of artistic accomplishment seems to be holding up the rest of the planet for enough of its money to buy your way to political power and get all the laws changed to let you keep even more of your booty. Artistic merit was always secondary to marketing, but now it's even less of a priority than that. It's way down near the bottom somewhere.

[ZoWie]

Now the Academy has stopped screening new movies at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater. I'm sure you've never seen the inside of the place, since only an Academy card gets you in (but no ID required). This actually helped a lot of obscure movies, especially foreign language ones and documentaries, win well deserved Oscars despite their only other theatrical run being a week in some obscure arthouse in a part of LA where you didn't park nice cars. It's a fantastic theater, with a projection booth that would rate a documentary film in itself. They can screen everything from old 16 fps silents to Super Panavision to IMAX. The screen has the right number of foot-lamberts (an Academy standard, after all). The sound system has 8 speakers behind the screen, not to mention full surround in all formats. Etc..

Presumably, Academy voters will still get sent DVDs in the mail. They will loan them out to family members, who already get to see a lot of movies this way. Imagine spending half a billion dollars on some 70mm IMAX epic, and the people who vote for your Oscar watching your investment on a laptop. Not especially likely, since these guys mostly pop for decent home theaters, but it could happen.

This town sure isn't what it used to be, in those good old days 15 years ago.