The Poet's Eye – 03/01/2005

	The Poet's Eye commentary by Lightning Rod The Poet's Eye is skeptical without being cynical, innocent without being naive and critical without being judgemental.
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	High Mass for release 03-01-05 Washington D.C. "I'd like to thank The Academy and my lawyers, my agents, my mother, my father, my make-up people, jesus....." The Academy Awards are without a doubt the most boring of award shows. Watching paint dry or grass grow is exciting by comparison. Even with the glitz and the red carpet routine and all the women with their phony boobies hanging out of tacky overpriced designer dresses and festooned with pounds of rented jewelry, it is a bore. It's a church service. At least at the Grammies you get to hear some good music. And it's a show. You would think that since these movie people are in the entertainment business, they would know how to put on a show. Oh, the set was spectacular but even Chris Rock couldn't make the turgid and sentimental litany of presentations seem interesting. Perhaps Rock was right when he said that only queers watch the Academy Awards. But even if the awards are the gay antithesis to the Super Bowl, they are still a national church service of sorts. The president of the Academy referred to the presentation program as ' this year's Academy Award service.' We Americans, for all our prattle about democracy, really long for an aristocracy. We want to live vicariously through our celebrities and heroes. Television and movies are the perfect passive vehicles for this type of idolatry. They let us watch the elite eat caviar and sip Dom Perignon while we munch on our Doritos and bean dip and drink beer in front of the wide screen. All award shows, like church services, are really sales seminars. They are selling an ideology or an ethic. In the television church of glamour and beauty everyone is rich and dressed to the nines and arrives in a limousine draped in furs and jewels to display their latest cosmetic surgery. Just how it is decided who will get the Oscar for Best Actor or Best Picture or Best Director, has always been as big a mystery to me as how the Pope was selected. Oh, I know, the Cardinals vote and The Academy votes, but who are the College of Cardinals and who is The Academy? And what goes on behind closed doors before the white smoke appears over St. Peter's or the envelope is ripped? Sure, Price-Waterhouse tabulates the results of the Awards voting and presumably God himself is the final arbiter in the Papal election, but it's all equally obscure to The Poet's Eye. The Poet's Eye has noticed a distinct similarity between the Oscars, The Super Bowl, The Repub and Demo National Conventions, American Idol and the recent Inaugural Ceremonies. All are over-produced like rock concerts or passion plays or melodramas. They are all national church services. You can add NASCAR to that. Yes, they are all High Masses in that vulgar sanctuary that we call American Culture. When NASCAR throws a revival in Daytona or Dallas, they draw a crowd of about 300,000 of the faithful, not counting the television congregation. That's bigger than the town I grew up in. NASCAR races are a spectacle of nationalism, technological religion and commercialism laced with blood sport, shiny loud machines emblazoned and decaled with twenty commercial emblems hurtling at 150 mph around an endless track. It's an advertisers dream. When the Academy Awards or the Super Bowl are broadcast, they get forty or fifty million viewers. These are big church services. The collection plates in these churches are large and deep. A thirty second ad during the Academy Awards costs a million and a half bucks. In his classic sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein describes the Fosterites. They are a commercial religion resembling the Mormons. They endorse products that are kosher to the church and have slot machines in the vestibule and dancing virgins resembling the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. It's all eerily like what The Poet's Eye sees on television today. • to comment on this article go here


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