The Oscars

I don’t watch awards shows these days, not for any particular reason, but when I was a kid I used to enjoy watching the Academy Awards.  Recently I was wondering why I used to like it so much.  Sure, I liked going to movies, and there were only a handful of stations to watch back then.  (For you younger readers, growing up I lived in an area with a lot of TV stations – we had 7).  I considered that the show hadn’t changed that much over the years, except for the host and production elements and the opening routine and – OK, it’s changed, but the essence remains the same.  So does the length no matter how hard they try to speed things up.

But the question remained, why did I like it before but today I’m just kind of meh about it?  So I thought about it a bit and rather quickly came to a conclusion.

I think I used to like it so much because it was a celebration of creativity. 

Sure it’s an enormous self-congratulatory ego fest, but who cares.  The Oscars are all about every aspect of making movies.  OK, the technical awards always get short shrift; I guess they get almost as much time as one of the production numbers.  But the idea is to award excellence in creativity.

I like that.  Watching the Academy Awards was a common and acceptable way of celebrating Art and creativity.

I may not watch them tonight, but I used to really like them and I’m glad they’re still around and a big deal.