Oscars

Oscars and Pizza

/ bperica / Leave a comment

Twenty-one years ago Kate and I were driving back to the University of Wyoming from Longmont, Colorado. We made it as far as Cheyenne before the interstates iced over, visibility dropped to almost nothing, and the road to Laramie closed.

Stranded in Cheyenne on Oscar Sunday, we made the most of it by staying at a Quality Inn, ordering Domino’s, and watching the three hour broadcast of the 2004 Oscars.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King reigned over most of the night. Peter Jackson won best director, paving the way for a promising, yet ultimately, horrible adaptation of The Hobbit into three massive films.

But there was no denying Jackson’s touch on Oscar night in 2004. The LotR trilogy are three of the best movies made in my lifetime, but it wasn’t until the third movie that the Academy anointed Jackson and his flawless epic of a movie.

Tonight there will be no pizza and no wine shared during the Oscars. I am in Steamboat with Camden and Kate and London are in Omaha. It might be the first Oscars that Kate and I have spent apart since that Wyoming blizzard in 2004. We will make up for it tomorrow in the best way we can by queuing up the recording of the broadcast, opening a bottle of wine, and digging into some pizza. Although in the last 21 years, the pizza is greatly improved over Domino’s. And I don’t exactly miss the Quality Inn in Cheyenne either.

The Selma Snub

/ bperica / Leave a comment

Going into the awkwardly long, movie award season, I remember Birdman had most Screen Shot 2015-08-19 at 4.23.34 PMof the momentum. Having seen it, I was not that surprised. The movie is shot in such an innovative way. The story was interesting. The acting superb. But the ending, the ending left something to be desired. Most people I have spoken with about Birdman mention that they walked out of the theater angry, confused, and generally wondering, what the hell just happened there? It seemed like the three positives I mentioned already, the cinematography, story, and acting overshadowed the overall effect, which was meh.

Come Oscar night, one could see the award for best picture coming a mile away, the meeting of it and Birdman was inevitable. At that point in time I had not seen all the Oscar favorites, Selma among them. I was extraordinarily late to Selma, having just watched it a few nights ago, but now I know just how badly that movie was robbed when it came to the award for best picture.

Selma is a movie that instantly grabs ahold of you and shakes you, it makes sure you are watching, it pleads with you to remember what you are seeing, and it begs you to not look away. It is powerful, important, and artistic. As a whole, it works in ways that Birdman and other movies from last year did not.

As I watched, I kept asking, how was this movie so drastically overlooked? Why is Oprah not in more movies? Because in this movie she instantly conveyed powerful emotion without even speaking in most scenes. What did Birdman have that this one did not besides Michael Keaton stomping through Times Square in his whitey tighties?

I can think of a number of things Selma has which Birdman did not. To borrow from MLK Jr., it has the “fierce urgency of now,” a story, unfortunately, quite relevant to today’s ongoing racial tensions and institutionalized racism. It evoked an important sense of disgust for a big slice of this country’s past. I think as Americans we occasionally have to be reminded of how blacks were treated then and how they are still victims today because of the color of their skin. To learn the latter, all that is required of us is to turn on the news or read a newspaper. For the former, sometimes it takes a talented director like Ava DuVernay to bring the events of Selma to the big screen in such a way that haunts us for hours and days to come. And, hopefully, longer.

Hollywood is selective about what trends it chooses to buck. The trend of the white, male director seems to be a lasting one. The trend of making the majority of movies for a male target audience ages 16-25 is here to stay. These trends should be bucked in favor of bringing back a more important trend, that of awarding the Oscar to the best picture of the year, not just the trendiest.

Wage Equality

/ bperica / 2 Comments

Every year someone at the Oscars uses their acceptance speech as an opportunity to get up on their soapbox. And every year people in the media, politicians, and sometimes people in your own living room get slightly irritated to irate about these moments when someone “supposedly” strays off topic, like the actor should not have the freedom to do anything but praise the cast and crew of the movie they starred in and, of course, thank their parents, wife, husband, and/or kids.

This year, as you may recall, Patricia Arquette used some of her time at the mic, while accepting the award for best supporting actress, to give a little speech on how important she thinks wage equality is. Here’s a little excerpt:

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

I was surprised this year at the uproar over Arquette’s speech and her backstage comments as well. It’s like every year people forget that some celebrity is going to stand up and fight for what they believe in or what they want others to believe in. And then when it happens again. Outrage. Shouts of, “Get on with the show.” Etc.

What I did not expect is for people to get all pissy about a call for wage equality. As a husband to an amazing woman who is the primary breadwinner in this family (always has been, likely will be for years and years to come) and as a father to the most precious girl I will ever know, wage equality is extremely important to me.

Someone promoting wage equality at the Oscars isn’t going to bother me.

I’m not going to be bothered if a pastor ends his or her sermon with a call for wage equality.

I would be delighted if I was woken up in the middle of the night by someone outside calling for wage equality.

A call for wage equality is just never going to bother me and I will never understand why this year it irritated so many.