What a yawn, huh, Bush? The Oscars. Did you watch? After weeks of hype and bated breath about what our supposedly volatile host, Chris Rock, might say to shock the country and the world, what a let-down! His insistently ethnocentric humor came across as faintly scolding, somewhat irritating, but surprisingly mild. Far from shocking, anyway.
The most interesting moment came when Rock showed us clips of quick, man-in-the-street interviews of real movie-goers at the Magic Johnson theaters, where the patent irrelevance of Hollywood and its self-congratulatory glamor was astoundingly—and subversively—revealed. Rock’s interviewees seemed virtually unaware of the main contenders for the Academy Awards, and certainly had not spent their movie dollars seeing them. Their picks for “Best Movies”—“White Chicks”, for example, and “The Chronicles of Riddick”—were a startling antidote to the much-touted Oscar nominations, and a healthy reminder that our society has powerful undercurrents of which the cultural orthodoxy is scarcely even aware.
Don’t get me wrong. I liked a lot of the nominated movies just fine. I liked a handful of them very much indeed. But I was reminded by Rock’s interview clips—as by the gala event itself—of the different, and sadly isolated realities in which the various segments of our society live. Hollywood, it’s clear—as if we needed the reminder—is a long, long way from South Central Los Angeles.
Oh, and Bush: please don't miss yesterday's entry, below. Much more important... to me at least.
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