Little gold statues

Ah, the Oscars. The time each year when Hollywood breaks out its Sunday best, stops trying to undermine the American family by having gay sex, and pats itself on the back while handing out gold statuettes to remind itself how great Hollywood is. Thank goodness the ceremonies are over for this year. I got hooked into watching the program this year as I really wanted to see if Little Miss Sunshine won for best picture. It didn’t of course, as the combination of Martin Scorsese and a film with a plot was just too much to overcome. In particular I enjoyed watching the prissing and preening that was the pre-show program, where celebrities were interviewed on the red carpet. At the bottom of the screen with each person interviewed was sort of a news scroll, stating which award and movie they had been nominated for. For the males they added some trivia information about them. For the females they added such important details as who made the dress they were wearing, where the jewelry they were wearing came from. It was like closed captioning for the brain function impaired. As you can tell I’m not in awe of celebrity and I really don’t give a damn who made their clothes.

It was a movie weekend at my house again this past weekend. Typically we watch a movie at least one evening on the weekends, usually on Friday but sometimes on Saturday nights as well. Often my daughter makes the call on what movie we view, which means that the typical fare consists of her movies: Cars, Monsters, Inc., Toy Story, Good Boy, Shrek. But this past weekend was a bit different; she suggested that we watch It Happened One Night. When we went with our current satellite service a couple of years ago, it was the first movie I recorded to our DVR and then transferred to DVD. My daughter loved watching it for a while, then got bored with it. So I was surprised when she said she wanted to watch it again. I just love Frank Capra’s films, to be honest. And to prove that I’m not always the sharpest knife in the drawer, it only occurred to me watching the film this time that the obnoxious, sexist pig of a bus passenger who was Oscar Shapeley was played by Roscoe Karns, who I thought looked damned familiar. He should. His son, Todd Karns, played Harry Bailey in another Capra film, It’s A Wonderful Life.

But every coin has a flip side. Though Saturday night brought a good movie to watch, Sunday brought the Seventh Level of Hell to our living room. When I awoke Sunday morning I found that my daughter was watching The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. I’ve written about the last time she watched this movie, and this time I got to watch the whole movie, not just the last half hour or so. And guess what? The movie’s a bigger piece of shit in its entirety! I hate this film! Bad acting, bad script, crappy dialogue...I know it’s a kids film but dammit, it’s this type of crap that’s dumbing down our nation. For the sake of humanity, this film, and everyone in it, should be destroyed.