Oscars Awarded a Lifetime's Worth of Suck

It's official: the 80^th Academy Awards show sucked the most it has ever sucked, ever.

The last time it has ratings this low, I was a newborn baby boy! That means this is not only the lowest-rated Academy Awards show in my lifetime, it is the lowest-rated Oscars ever. That was redundant, wasn't it? Like repetitive; I said it at the first, I mean.

While it would be easy to blame Jon Stewart, let us not forget that there are no movie stars anymore, movies are not the big outing they once were, and Hollow-wood is perhaps at the zenith of its debauched history insofar as the way it treats talent, what makes it to the screen, and... just in general. Whether because of the Web, or because the behind-the-scenes "magic" is more accessible and understood now (largely because it's all done with CGI these days), or because of the new media and distribution methods, movies and Hollywood in general have simple lost their allure. And the Oscars never mattered much outside of Hollow-wood, anyway.

This is one of the reasons I found the whole writers' strike so... striking. There is so little quality entertainment on any screen - aside from the one you're reading this on right now - that the writers' demands seemed so miniscule, compared to what the entire entertainment industry faced losing. Until these fat-cat executives let go of the Old School ways and realize that they control the business side of the industry, but have absolutely no control over the creative side (to the extent with which we are concerned with it here - obviously, they decide which movies get made and so on), things are not going to get any better. Like certain people in my life, these jackasses simply refuse to learn their lesson - they think if they just ignore the facts and reality, it will all go away - and they are going to pay for that, time and time again, until the bottom completely falls out from under them.

But I think it has everything to do with the saturation of the celebrity-culture: where once the Academy Awards was the kind of event where the stars turned up, decked-out to the nines, to hopefully be rewarded for their work and talent, and the rich and famous lifestyle was on full-display, it's now about who is wearing whom and who is sleeping with whom and... just everything except the movies! And we can get all that simply by watching Girls Next Door or Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The magic is simply gone and general interest went with it.

But Jon Stewart has set a double record for suck, and let's not forget that.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008