Oscar

Meh. I really can't think of anything else to sum up the Oscars. But let's try.

I didn't see any of the movies nominated for anything, which is really more depressing than I thought before typing that sentence. So I wasn't particularly invested. Not that I usually am, anyway. There's usually one or two movies that I hope win for whatever reason and I am momentarily annoyed when it doesn't (similar to the Westminster Dog Show, but I am pleased with this year's winner, the Beagle). But there were so many things wrong with this year's show.

1. Not enough montages. Apparently if the writer's strike hadn't ended, they had prepared a bunch of montages to fill the time. When done right, movie montages highlight everything that's great about the movies. We got a couple of joke montages, the binoculars thing and the waking from a dream montage, both of which were actually kind of cool and among the more enjoyable aspects of this year's show. It seemed they were moving more toward montages the last few years, but this year most of them were montages of past Oscar winners accepting their awards.

2. Not enough funny. All in all, the Oscars are about entertainment. I know people watch to see who wins and to see what people are wearing and crap, but it's still an awards show, hosted by a comedian. It's supposed to be an entertaining three hours. But there was a decided lack of comedy routines by the presenters. This is, of course, a double-edged sword, since they are often incredibly unfunny. I think the only time I laughed was during Seth Rogen and Jonah Fat Guy's Halle Berry-Dame Judi Dench bit.

3. Too many awards. I'm not saying they shouldn't acknowledge their achievement. But most of the nominees in the more technical categories are from movies normal people have never heard of. They need to cut down on the time it takes to present these (I mean, do we really need presenters telling us how important costume designers are every year? These are perfect opportunities for more funny).

4. No "Wow" moments. It's a once-a-year event, can't they try to faciliate a few more special moments that people will remember for years? See, you never get that with the technical or artsy awards, because the artsy fartsy types are way too into their work and don't seem to take nearly enough joy in winning. And when they do, they're not articulate enough or entertaining enough to make the moment memorable. So that leaves you with the acting, writing, directing, and best movie categories, which isn't much. But there was just nothing memorable about this year, partially because there were no big surprises.

5. Lackluster In Memoriam. A little morbid, perhaps. But even Heath Ledger didn't get much applause. Usually there's one or two actors and a director who get a huge pop. Ingmar Bergman got decent applause. But otherwise, it was fairly tame, with very few big names making the cut. Which is either a good thing because it means the older generation is living longer or it's a bad thing because all the great old actors have already passed away and now we have the leftovers.

This is something that really concerns me and let me explain why. Do you ever stop and think about the great actors and actresses and directors, particularly the younger ones? Can you imagine 50 years from now seeing them during the In Memoriam or during montages of Oscars past and thinking about how great they were? I don't think you can. Now, I realize this is nothing more than a romanticization of the past, but it certainly seems like the great actors today don't evoke the same response as those of yesterday.

*****

In related news, who the crap is greenlighting movies?

The Hottie and the Nottie: Paris Hilton in a romantic comedy as her ugly friend gains acceptance and finds love. Yes, really.

Larry the Cable Guy's movie: I actually think his standup is decent but he shouldn't be acting in, let alone starring in, any movies. I bet he makes at least one more before he settles into a nice, Jim Varney direct-to-video career.

Never Back Down: Some background about me: Before Fight Club was released, I saw a trailer in the theatre. I knew absolutely nothing about it, except it was about guys fighting and it was called Fight Club. I mean, based on just that synopsis, you couldn't possibly expect anything from it. Little did I know that it was based on a novel and would turn out to be a kickass movie. But I've had the same reaction to Never Back Down. It's about some new kid in school who fights people in fight club like fights.

47 different dance movies: Apparently there's a market for these, but I can't imagine who that might be.

Penelope: This movie is going to be huge. It has a great cast. But still, it's about an ugly girl gaining acceptance and finding love. Is there no originality? At its most basic level, it's pretty similar to The Hottie and the Nottie. Funny world, Hollywood is.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan: Adam Sandler's latest, written by Judd Apatow. I like most of Judd Apatow's work, and Adam Sandler is one of the few guaranteed draws in Hollywood. As one of my friends said after seeing the trailer during the Super Bowl, "America will go see this." And it's true. It may have looked terribly unfunny and contrived, but it's almost a guaranteed $100 million.

It's just remarkable to me how much crap gets made. But there has been a huge push of late towards the plotless, random event movies, that started with Napoleon Dynamite and Anchorman and continues with most of Apatow's, Seth Rogen's, Steve Carrell's, and Will Ferrell's movies. And since they don't use convention as a crutch, they usually end up being pretty good movies.

Of course, I'm still the guy who thought Fight Club looked stupid, so what do I know?

Tom T. Hall I Am Not

"Don't you hate pants?"

-Homer Simpson

I actually like pants. It's other things I hate. Almost every other thing really. It's probably not healthy to hate as much as I do, but it's so much easier. I mean, in order to like something (or someone), you have to show an interest in it (or them), learn about it (or them), invest in it (or them). Hate merely requires ignorance and a fierce enforcement of that ignorance. I guess indifference would be easier still, but sometimes the world just won't let you be indifferent. It forces you to pick a side. If I were a huge dork, I'd make some sort of Star Wars reference about the Dark Side here, but I'm not going to do that.

Anyway, since I've accepted my hate, I've decided to spread it. I want you (there's no one reading this, if I was talking instead of typing I could be sent away to the looney bin (you know, the way they're portrayed on TV, insane asylums look like a ton of fun. Have you seen 12 Monkeys? If you haven't go watch it and then come back. ...Are you back? Ok, awesomeness aside, doesn't the insane asylum look like fun? And what about the episode of Charles in Charge when Buddy was mistakenly committed to a mental hospital? It looked amazing! I think I might have a plan for my next vacation.)) to hate as I hate.

I hate squinters. Not people squinting because the sun is shining brightly and they are without sunglasses. But people who squint indoors because they are too cheap or stupid to invest in a pair of glasses. People who need to read something and walk right up to it, squinting all the way. Stop it! You look ridiculous!

I hate people who end sentences with "so." Ending a sentence in a preposition? I don't mind. Depending on the company you keep, a decent grammar joke about prepositions here or there can work wonders. But don't end your sentences in "so." The implication there is that "so" is followed by "you can gather what my remaining thought is from what I have already stated." But you're not articulate enough to, um, articulate it! So why should we do the work for you? The only other possibility is you say "so" because you have concluded your thought, but did it so poorly that we cannot infer that you finished. And you can't very well say "The End." You can, however, say "And scene" to finish your thought. I recommend doing this at all times in your daily life, like in the office or soemthing.

You at work: And as you can see, our third quarter profits are up 13%. And scene.
Johnson: Very go..., wait what? "And scene?" Is that what you said?
You at work: Pssh, yeah.
Johnson: Why? What does that even mean.
You at work: Cut. That's a wrap.

I hate Johnson. Always so stuck up, takes his job way too seriously and isn't good enough at it to take it that seriously. He's the kind of guy that always gets promoted because he uses bullshit buzzwords, meanwhile I sit here unemployed typing bullshit.

I hate when married couples make a kissy sound on the phone to each other. You can't just say you love each other? You have to make everyone else around you feel uncomfortable?

I hate people who take the elevator to the second floor. There are stairs, dammit! It's one floor and you need the exercise, fatty! Funny story: When I was in college living in the dorms, there was always an unspoken agreement by most of the dorm that no one on the second or third floor would use the elevator, because it wasn't really fair to people on, you know, the 14th floor. Periodically people would take ride to the second floor and say something stupid like "Sorry, I feel like being lazy" and then laugh, as if that made it okay. I never spoke up, being the nonconfrontational type. But one day, on the way down, the elevator stopped at the second floor and I said aloud, "Seriously, who's getting on here?" It was some dude on crutches. I believe that was insta-karma. I hate being the douche.

I hate douchebags. They're all over the place and they're multiplying. Because they're the ones hooking up and procreating. Not those of us who still adhere to the conventions of society. We're shunned. I think there's some irony in there.

I love irony. That made me laugh.

Recycling

When I was in school (by which I mean elementary school, because I'm still in school, which would make that previous sentence a self-contained time paradox), recycling was the latest fad. We were told all sorts of facts related to recycling. But my favorite was that recycling just one soda can could power my TV for eight hours. How does that work? Is there some real life Mr. Fusion out there that powers TVs and other appliances? And if so, why don't I have one? If that's all it takes why is my electric bill so damn high when I can get a 12-pack of Coke for $5? For $5 I can power my TV for four straight days. I demand that this convenience be made available to me.

Also, I want to be able to turn my garbage into hot dogs via the Dog-O-Matic.

Love and...

It might be a day late, but it's still somewhat topical, I guess. I want to get married at some point. I figure there's a woman out there who can stand to be around me for extended periods of time. And isn't that what love is all about? But I have a requirement. I'm sorry, ladies, if this prices you out, but it's necessary.

My wedding ring must be a replica of the One Ring. I don't care how dorky it is, I don't care what sort of trouble you have to go through to get it engraved in the language of Mordor such that it only appears when placed in a flame yet remains cool to the touch. This must happen or our union will not. I'm even willing to let slide the whole invisibility thing and the controlling the Nazgûl thing, mostly because both of those will get me into unncessary trouble.

So ladies, if you think you might be the one (see, puns, what's not to love?), you best start planning.

Bowling for Change

Everything changes. Can you remember what your house looked like 20 years ago? The appliances, the furniture, even the paint or wallpaper. It's all different. I missed the 70s, but I've seen pictures and everything was various shades of green. Things were slightly more colorful in the 80s, if "darker than bright green" is a color.

Remember cars 20 years ago? All boxy, no real style to them. Computers, VCRs, TVs, everything changes.

Except bowling. Have you gone bowling recently? Me neither, because I'm not a middle aged man trying to get out of the house or a poor teenager with nowhere to go (I'm a poor twentysomething with nowhere to go). But I've bowled. The last time I can remember was something like 8 years ago, but it might have been more recently. But it doesn't matter. Because bowling hasn't changed in forever.

I assume the latest innovation in bowling was the introduction of computer monitors and automated scoring. I first went bowling about 20 years ago and these were already staples of my local alley. Ball returns, automatic pin set up, these things existed then as they do now. Even the shoes look like they're straight out of the 70s.

Why is bowling stuck in a timewarp? Or did bowling achieve perfection and thus it requires no further change? Wouldn't that be a kick in the pants. People constantly strive for perfection, no one ever attains it (there's a lesson here: aim low). It's a never ending battle to better oneself and the world around you, but it's a losting cause. Except for bowling. Bowling has attained nirvana. I can't think of anything more depressing.

'Tis the Season and other Jolly Thoughts

I drove by a house the other day that still had Christmas lights up. They weren't on, just up. I could understand if they were on, things happen, people don't always have time to take them down and they happen to go on when you turn on the outside lights. But when they're not on, something is amiss and I had a thought. You know those occasional news stories about a body being discovered in an apartment that police say had been dead for weeks and it took the neighbors complaining about the smell for the discovery to be made? Well, I think you see where I'm going here. I propose that once we hit February, any time the police see a house that still has Christmas lights up, they should do a body check. Because here in suburbia, ain't no one going to be complaining about the smell.

******

Have you used a Kleenex recently? I don't know if these were special Kleenexes or just the regular kind (and we're talking Kleenex the brand, not Kleenex the generic term for tissues, because, well, that's why we have the word "tissue"), but they were pretty much the exact opposite of what you need a tissue for. They actually repel liquid. I kept blowing my nose, only to discover the snot would find it's way out of the inside of my nose and onto the outside. Curious, I ran some tests. Test #1, which was purely accidental, involved dropping a fresh tissue in the toilet. It floated. Floated! On top of the water! I then proceeded to poor water on a tissue slowly, to see what happened. Sure enough, the water beaded on top of the tissue.

By my count, a tissue has three primary uses (and let's all please get our minds out of the gutters, though that would only serve to enhance my point), as there are three things that come out of one's nose. Boogers, snot, and blood. Why would I use a tissue that repels the latter two? And then there's crying, which is more tangential to the tissue industry, but do you want to dry your tears with a tear repeller?

*****

There hasn't been a new swear word in forever. I'm not exactly sure how swear words happen. I mean, I doubt there's some sort of international committee assigned to this sort of thing. It more just kind of happens, I guess. But I think we need a new one. And since it's so hard to come up with new words and easily integrate them, I say we take an existing word. I recommend "asterisk." It sounds a little dirty and it would wreak havoc with various word censors.

*****

If I had a band, we'd be called the Histrionics.

Going Your Way

I ride the train to Manhattan every day. Well, twice a week, but it feels like every day. Frankly, if I ever have to do it every day I might kill myself. I don't know how people do it. It's really one of the more awful experiences imaginable (for the record, I don't have much of an imagination for these sorts of things. Torture for example. I have no idea what that's like and it's probably worse than riding the train. Maybe. Or maybe we have something more effective than waterboarding (ohhhh, controversy!)). It's an amazing confluence of everything hateable about people and society.

No matter where I sit, I am invariably surrounded by people talking on their cell phones. As soon as they sit down, the phones are out, either because someone is calling them or they're calling someone. Now, I'm not one of those oh-who-needs-cell-phones types, but I'm also not constantly attached to it because, frankly, I just don't have anything to say. But apparently, everyone else needs to get their phone calls done while on the train. Not long ago I was sitting next to a woman who actually had her personal phone book (it was literally a little black book, I always thought those were a convention of TV sitcoms) that she'd thumb through to find a number. If you need to bring a phone book with you, maybe you should wait to make those calls until you're not hurtling towards Manhattan at 80 miles per hour.

Last week, some guy sat down next to me and immediately his phone rang. So my intial reaction was "Oh great, more conversations to listen to." But it got better!

Guy: I feel terrible, I'm sick as a dog...I'm on my way to work.

You couldn't have called in sick? You had to sit next to me? What's the matter with people?!

(Tangent: What's with the people who have regular phone rings as their cell phone ringer? Am I the only one who thinks a ringing phone is one of the five most annoying sounds ever? It's something like:

1. Alarm clocks, because nothing good comes from waking up to an alarm.
2. Car alarms, the jury is still out on whether talking alarms are worse than traditional alarms.
3. Suzyn Waldman, John Sterling, et al.
4. Telephones.
5. Babies crying (special exceptions are made for your own baby, but other than that, yeah.))

Of course, all these cell phone problems go out the window if you're on a rush hour train or you happen to be on a train with someone bitchy enough to shush people. Thank God for them. Someone's having a loud conversation and from some corner of the train you hear, "Shhhh!" And it works! That's the best part. I don't know how, but it works. The people most likely to be shushed are young people, especially girls, and anyone speaking Spanish. But not black men. No one shushes a black man. They can be as loud as they want, talk about whatever they want, no one does anything. I'm not sure if that's racist.

And then there are the bathrooms. It's a long train ride and sometimes you need to go and I refuse to use the public bathroom at Penn Station (I mean, if I came into your house and peed, you wouldn't be none too happy and that's how I think the homeless people must feel at Penn). There is a bathroom every other car and they are all out of order. The MTA makes an absurd amount of money, they can't maintain the bathrooms?

(Related Tangent: I've also periodically used the bathroom at the train station, which, while a public bathroom, is a single use bathroom. And yet, you'd be amazed at how rarely people go in there and don't lock the door. How do you go into a bathroom and not lock the door? That's the first I do, even when I'm alone.)

But it's not all cell phones and anger for me. I always hope to make a new friend on the train. You know, I'll get to talking with some businessman who then offers me a great internship at his firm, which leads to a job offer after I graduate. Or some hot chick sits next to me and we hit it off and then make babies. Of course, as soon as anyone ever sits next to me, I grow visibly annoyed, as if my personal space has been violated. And the only people who have ever talked to me on the train (I don't strike up conversations with strangers because, as I've said, I have nothing interesting to say) are the old guy who wanted me to explain how to retrieve voicemail on his cell phone, the guy who, after a 15 minute phone conversation (it keeps coming back to that), hangs up telling whoever was on the other end that he didn't want to annoy everyone else and then says to me "I sure hate when people talk on their phones," and the conductors, but they're just asking me for my ticket. And that one girl who I talked to once, as we commiserated about riding the train and not living in a nice apartment in Brooklyn or Manhattan. But that did not lead to baby-making. I was confused.

So, if you ride the train, don't be a douchebag. And if you are a douchebag, well, let's just hope that cell phones really do cause cancer.

Super

Eli Manning won the Superbowl. As a Giants fan I guess I should be ecstatic about this. But I just find the whole thing so improbable that it has tempered my reaction. Plus, I'm still recovering from the emotional high that was the Johan Santana trade and signing by the Mets. But I mean, did anyone really think Eli was going to win the Superbowl and be named MVP? Little Giants was on basic cable the other day. It amused me (not he movie itself, I saw it at some point not long after it was released and was not overly impressed) that it was on the day before the Giants were essentially playing the role of the little Giants against the Pats' juggernaut. Besides, in another 20 years, Rick Moranis might look an awful lot like Tom Coughlin does now. But damn if it wasn't an incredible game.

The commercials, on the other hand. What kind of garbage was that? Remember the year, I think it was 2000, when like every other commercial was for some new .com (I refuse to use the conventional "dot.com" spelling, the extra "dot" is as superfluous as anything gets, assuming there can be varying levels of superfluosity)? Those were some awful commercials. And it's been downhill since. The Superbowl used to be a time where companies would begin whole new ad campaigns, new packaging or something. The Budweiser frogs, assorted Pepsi campaigns, the old Jordan vs. Bird "nothing but net" commercials. Now it seems like everyone is just trying to do something ridiculous and while they're succeeding at that, they're failing miserable at being memorable or funny. Seriously, can you remember one commercial from the game? Probably not, since no one is reading this and by the time anyone does the game will be months old, but still, the point remains. And yes, I realize that one of the major goals of an ad campaign, if nothing else, is to get people talking, even if it is negative. But I mean, where were the good commercials? Something with monkeys, anything?

*****

Johan. Santana. The best pitcher in the world is going to be pitching for the Mets. He is replacing an aging and increasingly ineffective (I believe that's how he was described back when they signed him) Tom Glavine. I have spent many months trying to forget their collapse of last year and one of the few things that has kept me going is simply this: fundamentally the Mets were four wins better than the Phillies and Braves last year (thank you, baseballprospectus.com). While this isn't much, it's all I have. And what it means is that all things being equal, going into next season, the Mets are still the better team. And all that's happened in the mean time is the Braves lost Andruw Jones and Edgar Renteria, while signing Glavine, and the Phillies lost Aaron Rowand (who will never again be as good as he was last year, but still, it's a lot of production to lose) and they signed Pedro Feliz, a blackhole of offensive suck. Assuming even a moderate bounceback from Carlos Delgado and hoping and praying that Jose Reyes' second half was the aberration, and the Mets are pretty easily a 95 win team. No one else in the NL can make a remotely similar claim. February 15th can't come soon enough.