Oscar Blues

I've got the Oscar blues this year. Normally the night of the Academy Awards is a big one at the Keller house, but not this year. There are a couple of reasons for my melancholy feelings this year.

First, I always pride myself in going into the Awards show, not as a "guy in a diner" who has an opinion based on here say, but as a well informed member of the public. We see all the movies that are nominated in the major categories, so we know based on fact who we are rooting for, who we would have voted for. But this year, this year it just didn't happen. There are 19 films nominated in the major categories, 19! And the sorry truth is we have seen only five of them.

We saw Crash, Good Night, and Good Luck, Capote, War of the Worlds, and Syriana. Not a very impressive showing on our part. As for the others...

Well, we tried to see Brokeback Mountain, but twice it was sold out on us. Memoirs of a Geisha had some pretty impressive bad word-of-mouth and it is a film I had little interest in to begin with. Munich just sounded too depressing and I was never really that hot to see Walk the Line. I might try to catch The Constant Gardener on VOD before the show, so that one might be added to my list. King Kong got some really bad word-of-mouth in the crowd I run with (like I run with a crowd), and you couldn't pay me to sit through The Chronicles of Narnia. I had about as much interest in seeing Pride and Prejudice as I did in seeing Geisha. I would love to see A History of Violence, Mrs. Henderson Presents, North Country, and Transamerica, but all of them have been hard to near impossible to see, all being pretty small films in relatively small, short releases.

So, I like to have an opinion but tonight I'm gonna be that "guy in a diner" who can spout off all he wants but has no facts to back up what he says (sort of like Republicans when the bitch and whine about the latest Michael Moore movie they have never seen). I think that is why the ratings will be pretty bad for the show tonight; not enough people in the home audience will have seen enough of the nominated films to have an informed opinion. And who wants that?

The second reason for my Oscar blues is that for the first time in 21 years I will watch the show without my wife beside me to commiserate with. My wife took an interim job up north about 400 miles from here and though she has been down for the weekend, I have to put her on a plane at 5:30 for the trek back. Who am I going to complain to if Philip Seymour Hoffman does not win (as he should in my uninformed opinion)? It just takes all the fun out of it!