Television last month was a wasteland… at least in my apartment… and I mean more than it normally is. My roommates ate up the Olympics, and then of course there were the Oscars… Normally I am really excited for the Olympics. I mean, especially the winter Olympics, when there are people wearing outrageous sequined costumes skating around and jumping through the air while the most clichéd music is pumped into a frost arena full of enthusiastic spectators. But all of the acrimony over scoring, coupled with those ridiculous faux-denim baggy pants the American snowboarding team was wearing, really turned me off from the whole thing. And it just went on for weeks. So I instead headed out of doors mostly to enjoy the cool, cloudy weather we were having, and went for a lot of bike rides.
But all of this was destroyed as the city of Los Angeles tightened its grip on my neighborhood, choking off all the streets and sidewalks until that dreadful Sunday afternoon when it seemed as if I had woken up in a police state. Last year after the Oscars I was riding my bicycle home, and turned a corner to find myself confronted with a row of police officers in riot gear behind those shields, parting to allow limousines past them, which would race off past the street. I had to circle and circle and circle around trying to find a street that I could cross to get to my apartment. So this year I decided to just stay indoors. Trapped. While my roommates watched the Oscars in the other room, I camped out in my bedroom eating trailmix I had made and listening to the recording Pierre Boulez made on occasion of Olivier Messiaen’s 80th birthday. What you won’t see celebrated at the Oscars:
The only good thing I can say about the Oscars is all of the money it brings in for the Academy. You can read a better explanation of what the money earned by the Oscars goes to here… and for fun, check out a list of films the Academy Film Archive has preserved here. It’s a real shame that the important work the Academy does is overshadowed by all of this nonsense, and that when Nicole Kidman stood up and with tears in her eyes proclaimed that “art is important” both she and everyone watching understood this statement in relation to the ridiculous and trivial nonsense that the Oscars celebrates and promotes, rather than the real works of art that the Academy preserves by people like Gary Beydler, Stan Brakhage, Thom Andersen and Morgan Fisher.
Hi Morgan!