The Oscars - How Can Anybody Watch Them?

My God, America. How is it that this country can have the best entertainment industry in the world, yet when a ceremony honoring that industry is held it always manages to be one of the most incredibly painful things to watch? It defies logic.

I’m not going to address whether or not I feel the winners deserved their statuettes, since the movie that should have won every award wasn’t nominated for anything. No, what I take issue with is the fact that for whatever reason the Academy Awards always wind up taking about three and a half hours longer than they should. Am I interested in who did a good job of editing? No. Do I give a God damn about any movie that wasn’t made by an American? Lord no. Does a montage of famous people who died in the last year interest me? Yes, but only for its inherent comedic value. The point is this: It’s time for the Oscars to trim the fat, both literally and figuratively.
Here’s a list of all current awards that Americans spend time listening to thank-you speeches for:

* Best Picture
* Best Director
* Best Actor
* Best Actress
* Best Supporting Actor
* Best Supporting Actress
* Best Original Screenplay
* Best Adapted Screenplay
* Best Animated Feature
* Best Art Direction
* Best Cinematography
* Best Costume Design
* Best Documentary Feature
* Best Documentary Short Subject
* Best Film Editing
* Best Foreign Language Film
* Best Makeup
* Best Original Song
* Best Original Score
* Best Animated Short Film
* Best Live Action Short Film
* Best Sound Mixing
* Best Sound Editing
* Best Visual Effects

As you can see, there are too many awards. I'll concede that some of them are actually important, namely the top four. The rest, however, are just filler trash. Best art direction? What is that, giving an award to the guy who hung pictures on a set? No thanks. Best sound mixing? Does anyone care about some guy who sat around adjusting sliders and nobs on a mixing board? Best sound mixing (along with best original song and best original score) can go the hell back to the Grammys where they belong - and good God don't get me started on the Grammys. Animated movies are for children, and therefore should not win Oscars (we really shouldn’t encourage grown-ups to waste time in such a useless medium). As for best foreign language film, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think we can consider a piece of work that isn’t fit for the English language to contain any real sort of artistic merit. Think about it.
Another problem the Academy Awards suffers from is its disgusting presentation of obesity. You really wouldn’t expect a room full of movie stars and other Accomplished Peoples to include so many fatties, but there they are. Most of the heaviness comes from older, more accomplished stars (like the cue-balled Jack Nicholson, or the always bile-riling George Lucas), but this evening’s best actor (Forest Whitaker), as well as last year’s (Philip Seymour Hoffman) could both stand to lose some pounds. What kind of message are we sending to today’s youth if we show them overweight people who’ve somehow managed to make something of themselves? The wrong kind of message, that’s what. The least these actors could do would be to follow the Welles and Brando honored traditions of starting out at a reasonable weight before ballooning into terrifying human/zeppelin hybrids. Honestly.

Punctuality - What in God's Name Happened to it?

Imagine this: you’re on your way to see a movie (for the purpose of this hypothetical the movie does not have Sean Penn in it, so it might actually be good) and you plan on meeting a couple of your friends at the theater because you’re all coming from different places. They’re on the way to the theater from their designated polling place, and you’re on the way from your residence since you, being a well-informed and probably groomed reader of this fine internet-publication are of the mental capacity to realize that voting is mostly stupid since most of the people who do it are dumb. What, given this situation, can you safely assume? The friends that you plan on meeting will be late, you will miss the previews, and the entire movie-going experience will be ruined. Why is this? Because punctuality is dead.
I don’t know when it happened, I’m not a historian nor am I boring enough a person to follow trends and graphs regarding punctuality, but at least I am capable of adhering to schedules. The simple and terrible fact is that more often than not people are getting places later than when they promise to, and this is the sort of thing that makes me so sick that my Pepto Bismol expenditures have gotten a little out of hand as of late. There is absolutely no excuse for this, since the average person now has with them upwards of 5 devices containing clocks at all times – cell phones, watches, iPods, laptops, more cell phones. Granted, only 4% of the population with these things is capable of successfully setting their devices’ internal clocks.
I’ve been thinking about this whole affair for awhile now, and after much deliberation I feel comfortable putting on my finger-pointing glove so that I may place the blame squarely on the guiltiest culprit: the institution of breakfast. For a little while this country was extremely supportive of keeping breakfast brief, clean, and simple, and our economy flourished as a result of it. Think back to about ten years ago – you couldn’t watch TV for ten minutes without seeing a commercial for a breakfast bar, shake, or injection of some kind, one that promised to keep you on time and on-the-go. But at some point all that changed, and America went back to sitting down to heaping plates of food-that-requires-preparation. This results in a morning meal that takes too long (causing immediate lateness) and contributes to this country’s terrifying fat-kid situation (causing long-term lateness). At this rate things can only get worse.
So here’s the solution folks: put down the forks, spoons, knives, and mugs of scalding Columbian bitterness – you won’t need them for the answer to all your future schedule and nutrition-related prayers. Start your day the way I start mine: a 12 oz can of Coke, and a multivitamin. I call it “The American Breakfast,” since it is extremely good for this country. It’s mercilessly efficient and extremely easy to make, especially if you can get a bottle of multivitamins that don’t have a child-proof lid. This will make your life better, this will make the world better.