Oscars Ennui

We are finally at the tail end of Hollywood’s awards season. Every year, from January until early March, we are bombarded by Globes, Choices, Grammys, SAGs, and, at long last, Oscars. 

I don’t know precisely when giving and receiving awards became so dull; awards shows used to spice up winter, but now they merely add to its tedium. 

This Sunday's climax of the annual orgy of self-congratulation, The Academy Awards, has so lost its luster that I’d rather start training for an Ironman competition or learn to make cheese than sit through three hours of that boredom.

It was not always so. In the ’70s, my mother let me stay up late on a late winter Sunday night to catch a glimpse of the stars. Dad occupied himself otherwise while she and I took in the ordinarily inaccessible glamour of a Hollywood that hadn’t yet come to the palms of our hands.

Sasheen Littlefeather declines Brando's
Godfather Oscar on his behalf

When, at 11 p.m., vintage films like The Sting, Rocky, and Annie Hall bagged Best Picture, I had skin in the game. From Cher in Bob Mackie gowns to Brando’s ahead-of-his-time 1972 refusal of his Godfather trophy because of Hollywood’s treatment of “American Indians,” I was exposed to snippets of a world so exotic that returning to school the next day felt unbearably prosaic.

I still remember the intense scandal surrounding Brando’s rejection: Who did he think he was? Marlon Brando? How dare he subvert a hallowed institution like the Academy Awards? 

How naïve we were to live in a world where a movie star taking a progressive position was all we had to worry about.

Then there was the infamous streaker at the 1974 Oscars. (Robert Opel, the streaker, went on to run for president and settle into the gay leather scene, a contemporary of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. You can't make this stuff up.)

Toxic Masculinity:
Will Smith attacks Chris Rock

If the ‘70s were the golden age of Oscar scandals, Hollywood took fifty years to produce a new one worthy of the name. I refer to the 2022 slap heard around the world when Will Smith attacked an unsuspecting Chris Rock for making a bald joke about Smith's wife.

Inside Hollywood, awards season is, I’m sure, still a potent and viable phenomenon. They put on these shows almost entirely for themselves, oblivious to how they play outside Los Angeles.

Here in the Midwest, my awards show ennui runs counter to more significant concerns: for our country, planet, and social causes.

If Marlon Brando were still around, he’d have dozens of new reasons to reject his Oscar.

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