Oscar Über Alles
Well, I have to thank the Academy.
They've finally realized that Dream of the Schuberts and the Theatrical moguls of New York:
The writer is no more.
When the "author" of the best original screenplay (who "had to quit his job as Matthew Broderick's personal assistant," according to the Oscar trivia voice-over) thanks his family for "the funnest" time he ever had, we know that the primacy of the word has ended.
You see, the theater people of Broadway always hated the influence and power over productions that playwrights had on the stage, and when Hollywood was aborning, it was resolved that the writer would never be better than a second class citizen.
And, as a writer, I watch in rapt awe as they insulted us in every way, letting us know that movies had almost achieved the grand coup of the publishers: writing without authors; the word without the scrivener. Just celebrity. Just sad little monkeys having the "funnest" time imaginable.
I tried to ignore the many multiple named screenplay nominations (hint: there are virtually NO screenplays written collaboratively). I tried not to think of the endless parade of serial hacks brought in to gang-rape each script. And no, what was written isn't what ended up on the screen, so it's really not germane here.
What was sad was the poor "best adaptation" screenwriter (from a Japanese flick, BTW, not a literary source of any sort) made some long bullshit toadying speech about how no writer works alone, and it's a collaborative gig, etc.
Fuck that. You write alone, baby. You are born alone and you die alone, and you WRITE alone, and that takes as much courage as either of the aforementioned. Try it sometime, if you don't believe me.
I will cheerfully admit that writing in Hollywood requires endless abilities to schmooze, take lunches and submit cheerfully to the intellectual equivalent of forced sodomy ("My girlfriend read your script, and she's got this GREAT idea...."). But he WROTE alone.
In the beginning was the word, inconvenient as that truth may be. One day, I had hoped, we would remember that. But no: aside from a creepy little "reading the screenplay" device, we were assured that the vain monkeys who speak our words are MUCH more important, and much smarter than we who toil in this unseen mine, quarrying the human heart, slaving long and lonely hours for a few paragraphs of truth.
It ain't the funnest profession around, granted.
But we aren't chopped liver. And we deserve some shred of dignity. Certainly moreso than I saw tonight. Now, I only bring this up because the catamite press will flood the world with their turgid prose tommorrow, and what will be important in all of this will be why Beyonce wore THAT designer and not THAT designer. And who had the best and worst dresses.
In the beginning was the word, but in the end there's just shit.
I watched the "montage" of a bunch of phony actors pretending to be writers in the movies, the movies' idea of what a writer is: the final erasure of the playwright from cinema. All that is left is actors pretending to be writers. I was reminded of when Johnnie Carson had enough mojo with NBC to cut the Tonight Show from 90 minutes to an hour, so that he wouldn't have to have any more "boring" writer interviews.
And I thought of the "Daily Show" and the "Colbert Report" whose interviews are almost exclusively with "authors" who are almost exclusively personalities and actors who are, at best, the alleged writers of the books in question.
And I thought of how pleased the Broadway types of an earlier era would be, knowing that the place of the writer, of literacy, of letters in our society had finally been relegated to that spot usually reserved for trained monkeys.
Except that I realized that trained monkeys are inherently more entertaining, and in a visual medium, writers would only be trotted out as substitutes for the chimps as a matter of scheduling or budget.
Dumbasses über alles.
It is appropriate, perhaps, that Martin Scorcese won his 'best director' Oscar at last, considering that Scorcese has been on a one-man crusade (he's in EVERY documentary ever made on film, you might note) to plant the notion that literacy in having watched a lot of movies is THE SAME THING as literacy in having read a lot of books.
[Hint: I've done BOTH, and there is no comparison. A mediocre book is as good as a great movie, and always more challenging intellectually.]
So, all hail the pretenders, the phonies and the dumbasses. All hail the Illiterati, of Hollywood and New York.
Oscar über alles.
I had the funnest time watching my profession laid out as an object for ridicule.
Courage.*
[*And yeah, this is a first draft, like most of my stuff. Forgive the typos, but the Oscar spectacle ain't worth a "polish."]
.
They've finally realized that Dream of the Schuberts and the Theatrical moguls of New York:
The writer is no more.
When the "author" of the best original screenplay (who "had to quit his job as Matthew Broderick's personal assistant," according to the Oscar trivia voice-over) thanks his family for "the funnest" time he ever had, we know that the primacy of the word has ended.
You see, the theater people of Broadway always hated the influence and power over productions that playwrights had on the stage, and when Hollywood was aborning, it was resolved that the writer would never be better than a second class citizen.
And, as a writer, I watch in rapt awe as they insulted us in every way, letting us know that movies had almost achieved the grand coup of the publishers: writing without authors; the word without the scrivener. Just celebrity. Just sad little monkeys having the "funnest" time imaginable.
I tried to ignore the many multiple named screenplay nominations (hint: there are virtually NO screenplays written collaboratively). I tried not to think of the endless parade of serial hacks brought in to gang-rape each script. And no, what was written isn't what ended up on the screen, so it's really not germane here.
What was sad was the poor "best adaptation" screenwriter (from a Japanese flick, BTW, not a literary source of any sort) made some long bullshit toadying speech about how no writer works alone, and it's a collaborative gig, etc.
Fuck that. You write alone, baby. You are born alone and you die alone, and you WRITE alone, and that takes as much courage as either of the aforementioned. Try it sometime, if you don't believe me.
I will cheerfully admit that writing in Hollywood requires endless abilities to schmooze, take lunches and submit cheerfully to the intellectual equivalent of forced sodomy ("My girlfriend read your script, and she's got this GREAT idea...."). But he WROTE alone.
In the beginning was the word, inconvenient as that truth may be. One day, I had hoped, we would remember that. But no: aside from a creepy little "reading the screenplay" device, we were assured that the vain monkeys who speak our words are MUCH more important, and much smarter than we who toil in this unseen mine, quarrying the human heart, slaving long and lonely hours for a few paragraphs of truth.
It ain't the funnest profession around, granted.
But we aren't chopped liver. And we deserve some shred of dignity. Certainly moreso than I saw tonight. Now, I only bring this up because the catamite press will flood the world with their turgid prose tommorrow, and what will be important in all of this will be why Beyonce wore THAT designer and not THAT designer. And who had the best and worst dresses.
In the beginning was the word, but in the end there's just shit.
I watched the "montage" of a bunch of phony actors pretending to be writers in the movies, the movies' idea of what a writer is: the final erasure of the playwright from cinema. All that is left is actors pretending to be writers. I was reminded of when Johnnie Carson had enough mojo with NBC to cut the Tonight Show from 90 minutes to an hour, so that he wouldn't have to have any more "boring" writer interviews.
And I thought of the "Daily Show" and the "Colbert Report" whose interviews are almost exclusively with "authors" who are almost exclusively personalities and actors who are, at best, the alleged writers of the books in question.
And I thought of how pleased the Broadway types of an earlier era would be, knowing that the place of the writer, of literacy, of letters in our society had finally been relegated to that spot usually reserved for trained monkeys.
Except that I realized that trained monkeys are inherently more entertaining, and in a visual medium, writers would only be trotted out as substitutes for the chimps as a matter of scheduling or budget.
Dumbasses über alles.
It is appropriate, perhaps, that Martin Scorcese won his 'best director' Oscar at last, considering that Scorcese has been on a one-man crusade (he's in EVERY documentary ever made on film, you might note) to plant the notion that literacy in having watched a lot of movies is THE SAME THING as literacy in having read a lot of books.
[Hint: I've done BOTH, and there is no comparison. A mediocre book is as good as a great movie, and always more challenging intellectually.]
So, all hail the pretenders, the phonies and the dumbasses. All hail the Illiterati, of Hollywood and New York.
Oscar über alles.
I had the funnest time watching my profession laid out as an object for ridicule.
Courage.*
[*And yeah, this is a first draft, like most of my stuff. Forgive the typos, but the Oscar spectacle ain't worth a "polish."]
.
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