STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

What Happens When Narcissism Gloats Exponentially and Delivers Awards to Itself for Mediocrity?

It’s Called The 87^th Academy Awards… or Where did Oscar Go?

It would be fair to say that a significant number of you probably watched last night’s Academy Awards Ceremony. Since I voted for the best script, I started to watch it.  As many of you know from my previous blogs,  I picked two movies that I thought stood out from the rest of the films: “Whiplash” and the once ignored “American Sniper”. I am glad they won some awards. However, I could not watch the Oscar ceremony once the host,  Neil Patrick Harris came out in his underpants and thought that this puerile action was funny. For the most part, I have very little respect for the actors who celebrate their narcissism on a steady diet of false adoration and expansive platitudes. No two movies were more absurd both in their creation and their execution than the front runners: “Boyhood” and “Birdman”. 

As I wrote previously, “Boyhood” was a boring family saga akin to watching home movies of your most detestable family members who have nothing better to do than navel gazing. “Birdman” was another piece of cinematic farce. It was ostensibly a picture of a repulsive, faded actor played by Michael Keaton attempting a comeback. Ironically, I watched the beginning of the film when Keaton is floating in mid-air, then goes into rehearsals on a Broadway stage. The rest of the story is riddled with dialogue, drama and tension akin to free associations of one of my former lobotomized patients who had been hospitalized for a bad LSD trip. Yet, “Birdman” received numerous other awards from the Director’s, Producer’s and Screen Actor’s Guilds because it was considered a film of an unbearable length of time, shot in one take.

Now, for those you who do not know that movies are usually shot in small segments, then those segments are tethered together by a talented [in this case] or non-talented editor, “Birdman” in principle was shot without a retake or cuts.  I don’t believe that narrative. More importantly, I could care less whether the film was taken from a satellite perspective or that of a cockroach [sorry Franz Kafka], both the story and the lead character, Michael Keaton were at best boring if not completely reprehensible. I have had the misfortune of meeting Michael Keaton in Bozeman, Montana. What little interaction I had with him was both unpleasant and dismissive. I found him by personality to be just what the lead in “Birdman” was: self-involved, irrelevant and paranoid.

While watching last night’s Oscar Event,  I had feelings of tediousness, disgust and boredom throughout. Wasn’t this supposed to be entertainment?? I sense as the Hollywood movie industry becomes increasingly irrelevant to the world audience, the academy members have become more desperate in testing the borders of absurdity and narcissism. A host standing in his jockey shorts and making nonsensical pronouncements, followed by the Lady Gaga’s inappropriate tribute to a fifty year old film, “Sound Of Music” demonstrates that Hollywood is caught in the nostalgia, bereft of any convincing or worthy scripts that will engage the present or future generations into watching anything other than Netflix,Twitter, Amazon, You Tube, et. al.

I am writing what I suspect is the beginning of an obituary for the Hollywood Film Industry which was founded on the simple premise of entertaining the masses without resorting to ‘dick jokes’ or music that has been buried within the distorted cavities of nostalgia. I once again reaffirmed for myself that the nonsensical solipsistic palaver of the Hollywood presenters and ex-celebrities was very much akin to the nonsense that we, Americans hear on a daily basis from our present leaders in the White House; as well as, our self-adoring, dim-witted contenders for the Presidency.  America, it’s time to shut off the TV. 

We need some new forms of entertainment and leadership.  Let’s try to assess merit and achievement over self-glorification, fictional narratives and paeans to narcissism.

I believe in the following pronouncement by the great poet, William Butler Yeats:
“The best lack conviction [or taste]; while the worst are full of passionate intensity [ self-love].”