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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.
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