“We should try to be more relevant,” we said to ourselves last night.
“How do you mean?,” we replied.
“We ought to write about things that are topical.”
“Like the Oscars?”
“Exactly. Yeah.”
“But we don’t have anything to say about the Oscars.”
“Doesn’t matter. You can say literally anything.”
“But there’s really nothing to say.”
“What about using the Oscars as a flimsy pretext to talk about the higher order problems about life or whatever? You like doing that.”
“But then we’d be participating in the discourse. We’d be suggesting that the Oscars - or any other industrial circle jerk - is worth attending to in some respect.”
“The Oscars are important, though. It’s how everyone learns what people in the movie industry like or feel they ought to like.”
“Meh.”
“What about how the red or, rather, champagne carpet at the Oscars costs $25,000 dollars and will be used only tonight? That’s wasteful in a provocative way.”
“Yeah, but the carpet stuff is the only interesting part of the whole event.”
“Oooo how about that? That’s got to be meaningful. We live in a world in which Cate Blanchet’s outfit will be more interesting than whether her peers judge her to be the best actress of the year.”
“Yeah, but her peers are hardly good judges. Didn’t Forrest Gump win a lot of Oscars? Didn’t the bad Crash and The Artist and Birdman and Driving Miss Daisy and Oliver! win Best Picture?”
“Look, we don’t need to embarass the Oscars.”
“Didn’t Little Miss Sunshine and Ghost and The King’s Speech win screenplay awards?”
“Are you done? What about we talk about how the entire business of awards - whether in the film industry or elsewhere - encourages people to think of aesthetic objects in terms of nebulous, lazy abstractions like ‘best’ rather than adopting more nuanced critical attitudes?”
“That sounds very didactic. We shouldn’t do that.”
“There must be something about the Oscars that merits discussion.”
“Why should we write about something topical at all? We did AI the other day. That’s very topical. We could do something, like, weird instead.”
“Yeah, but - c’mon - you didn’t do topical right and you know it.”
“But even if we do the Oscars right, who’s going to care in a couple days?”
“That’s an angle! How these tentpole cultural events dominate discussion for a set amount of time, but leave no lasting impact and have no substantive meaning beyond themselves. We talk about the Oscars because we talk about the Oscars near the Oscars. It’s a recursive loop like more or less all contemporary discourse. There’s no reason for it or benefit that follows. We do it because it’s what we do.”
“You’re saying we should talk about the Oscars to say that talking about the Oscars isn’t worthwhile? We should join the recursive loop to suggest that it’s a recursive loop? That can’t work. It’s like going to the party to tell people not to go to the party. It’s hypocrisy masquerading as insight.”
“Such a debby downer today. Jeez. We’re definitely not going to go viral with that attitude.”
“Who wants to go viral?”
“Everyone. Isn’t that what it’s all about? It’s an attention economy. More attention is the goal. You gotta have a growth mindset! Get those eyeballs!”
“No, that’s the whole problem. Everyone’s concerned with how much attention rather than the kind and calibre of that attention. Folks are so obsessed with quantities that they entirely forget about qualities. People are going to report that the Oscar had this many viewers and judge whether it was successful or not. They’ll report that a movie won this many awards and judge whether it was deserving or not. No one, though, is going to take a step back and wonder why we’re so caught up in measurable shit.”
“Are you saying that Avatar 2: The Watering’s record-breaking box office is not an indication of some kind of value?”
“It’s an indication that James Cameron makes money change hands, yeah, but who - other than the producers of that movie - could possibly care how many billions a movie makes? Or how many people saw it? The important part is what those blue kitties under the sea made you think and feel.”
“So, you’re just saying that people should review things.”
“Yeah, but even then reviews are subject to the same disastrous structure. They are assigned and edited to drive as many clicks as possible and then, once published, they get yoked into one of those aggregator sites where the words are translated out into a numerical score. Reviews, then, are just as damned to the quantification nonsense as everything else. It’s all measurement all the way down and it’s all terrible. Imagine watching a film, thinking about it, writing the whole thing up, submitting it to an editor, editing the piece, then posting it only to have the merits of one’s work judged in terms of TOMATO PERCENT and/or number of people who did a little click.”
“Numbers bad. Got it. Where do we stand on the Oscars?”
“They have nothing to do with Montreal! We couldn’t even talk about them even if we wanted to. There. Done.”
“What about that film that won Best Animated Short or whatever in 2004? The one about Ryan Larkin, the animator who was nominated for an Oscar himself in late ‘60s, who struggled with addiction and lived unhoused in Montreal for a long while after he received critical acclaim for his work?”
“Oh, right. Yeah, that’s a great film. Like, really beautiful exploration of how accolades and external validation are not panaceas or even much help at all in any deep or full sense. It’s startling how good that movie is. It’s also just very cool to look at.”
“Maybe we should just share it? Nothing fancy. Just, like, as a recommendation?”
“Yeah. A neutral suggestion that sometimes the Oscars celebrate and call attention to interesting films that would slip out of view otherwise. All the short categories are usually full of really cool stuff because no one really pays much attention to them. Or, rather, the people who seem to pay attention pay attention in a particular way. Jérémy Comte’s short Fauve was also nominated for Best Live Action Short a little while ago. That’s great, too, and he’s from Montreal. The movie’s quite dark, though, and upsetting. We should warn folks.”
“We’ll just a note that it’s kind of intense. Not gory or anything. Just, like, hurts the heart a fair bit. So good. Really hope he makes a feature at some point.”
“So, let’s just share a couple movies. No arguments. No fancy claims.”
“Maybe a couple arguments?”
“Ok. But only if they leave everyone kind of uncertain and conflicted about where we stand in the end.”
“No deal!”
i did the little click.
Thought provoking, i wonder it everybody’s favourite film of all time won an Oscar. I know my top three did not and frankly who cares.