From: INVALID_SEE_SIG@example.com.invalid   
      
   In the previous article, Adam H. Kerman  wrote:   
   > That was crap. All I could find was the segment from ABC's   
   > broadcast, which I am not going to cite. The camera was in the   
   > audience in which the reel was shown to the audience on massive   
   > video screens but not in a way that the television audience could   
   > make anything out. It was behind the orchestra, singers, and   
   > dancers.   
      
   I hate to take a fashionably snobby position on anything, especially   
   art and cinema, but I have really come to loathe the Oscars and the   
   Academy that puts them on.   
      
   I used to watch this show every year, actually caring about what   
   happened.  It just got to be so much about self-promotion and so   
   little about actual art -- yes, I know it was never an artistically   
   "pure" enterprise, thank you in advance for pointing it out -- that it   
   became unwatchable.   
      
   Maybe the beginning of the end for me was Letterman hosting the   
   ceremony.  Not because he was bad.  He wasn't great, and he had his   
   awkward moments, but the sheer magnitude of the backlash against him   
   was obviously orchestrated.  He had the temerity to *actually*   
   satirize Hollywood.  Hollywood loves to pretend to satirize itself --   
   gently, bloodlessly, never with any real bit.  (See, e.g., Robert   
   Altman's "The Player.")  Letterman transgressed and Holylywood lost   
   its collective mind.   
      
   So I started recording it and watching a few highlights.  By around   
   2005, this had turned into just watching the In Memoriam.  And every   
   year -- every. single. year. -- it was so grossly inferior to the   
   class act that TCM did every December that it was just embarrassing.   
   And soon enough, I stopped even recording the ceremony to find and   
   watch that.  I maybe watched it a couple of years on YouTube or   
   something, then I just read the summaries here.   
      
   This year, I glanced at the list and hit "next."  I didn't even care   
   to spend 30 seconds reading the list.   
      
   I am honestly confused as to why *anyone* still watches this farrago   
   of crapola in a given year.  Nevermind the obvious travesties in   
   nominees and award winners, if they can't even do a simple thing like   
   honor their own dead with a straightforward and minimally classy   
   sendoff, why do they continue to exist at all?  Let the Critics   
   Circles handle recognition of excellence, and let TCM honor the dead   
   and let that be it.   
   --   
     _+_ From the catapult of |If anyone objects to any statement I make, I am   
   _|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |quite prepared not only to retract it, but also   
   \      /  baldwin@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it.-T. Lehrer   
   ***~~~~----------------------------------------------------------------------   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)