On February 25, 2007, the Italian composer Ennio Morricone strode onstage at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood for another of the awards that he’s been collecting for over forty years—one that he’d earned dozens of times over—that gold-plate doorstop nicknamed Oscar. With Clint Eastwood gamely translating, he delivered an emotional acceptance speech in Italian, with a special dedication to his wife, Maria (who was seated with Quincy Jones—what an endorsement!).

As Morricone strode offstage to his well-earned standing ovation, I smugly feasted on my satisfaction of being proven right after forty years. Then I grabbed the remote: PBS was showing a Nature documentary on the Andes, no music by Morricone, but featuring set and lighting design by non-Oscar winner  God.

I haven’t watched the Oscars since.

I first launched my Not-Watching-the-Oscars tradition after the 1974 show (where a  male streaker pranced across the stage behind David Niven who nailed it with his impish quip about the streaker
“showing his shortcomings.”). This was the year that The Sting, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, took home nine statuettes.

What, my idealistic mind wondered, was that about? I was a young theater major and deluded actor, high-minded and insufferably noble. I’d been patient as much better films by Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick  et al as been shut out, ignored. What was this Sting, this well-produced, but forgettable romp, doing being carried off on the shoulders of acclaim as though it were Ben Hur, which, even fifty long years later, still carries a lot of genuine oomph and artistry?

With my hand over my tender heart, I shunned—shunned I say!--the Academy Award telecast for the next sixteen years.

CUT TO the late 1980s. Still film-besotted, I decided to make a major push into screenwriting. Whatever profession you decide to join, you have to educate yourself about it, even its most arcane corners. Out went the checks for the subscriptions to Daily Variety, Premiere magazine and
screenwriter-related publications. I became one of those irritatingly knowledgeable people, able to tell the likely aprocryphal tale of the screenwriter who directed the final scene of Casablanca, and how screenplays themselves might someday be recognized as a form of epic poetry (I’m still waiting for that Nobel.)

Out I traveled to screenwriting conferences from Hollywood to Austin, Texas, where I pitched and groveled to agents and producers, to the point where a friend would occasionally ask, “Don’t you wash your nose once in awhile?”

In the end I’d never so consistently embarrassed myself with my neediness and greed; nor had I ever subjected to such fruitless encouragement (most of the people I met were nice).  But my screenplays
did get better and better until . . .

CUT TO: September 11, 2001. That day,  I realized that no one, including me, would be in the mood for my terrorist-plot screenplay. And by the time that cloud had passed, I’d be too old, by industry standards, to even acknowledge as being among the living. (“People over forty,” the saying goes in Hollywood. “Don’t their teeth turn brown and fall out?” Yeah, I made that up, but that’s one legend that needs constant reprinting.)

Even then, I was already souring on screenwriting. A fellow screenwriter who ripped up her roots to move to Hollywood with her children told me a creepy story of being shown around her son’s private school and seeing a sign that read (quoting from memory):

Joseph Stalin would have loved Hollywood.

But even after I’d given up on being a screenwriter, I watched the Oscars ev-ery, sing-le year until 2007.  And, right now, I’d share with you some of my favorite moments . . . but I don’t have many.

I remember a clearly irritated Billy Crystal being upstaged by old lion Jack Palance (“I crap bigger than him.”), followed by  Jack’s set of one-armed push-ups. Something about Stanley Donen dancing with Oscar in his hand. Clint Eastwood getting his statue for Unforgiven. There was Letterman, Oprah, and Uma. A glimpse of Lee Van Cleef’s fine Satanic visage in the tribute to il Maestro.

Frankly, I’ve had more fun work dreams.

Nothing fun has happened since the days of Sacheen Littlefeather, Mr. Niven, or Clint desperately covering for a traffic-delayed Charlton Heston. The Academy has put itself in the untenable position
of putting an entertaining live show where nothing messy—therefore entertaining--happens.

During my Oscar-watching years, some of my friends would extrude foam from their mouths while ranting about how unfair, unjust and a Crime Against Humanity that  Silence of the Lambs (1990) won Best Picture instead of JFK. I shrugged, the All-Knowing Sophisticate. My interest in the awards had turned pragmatic and political: I could be happy for Clint and charmed by Stanley Donen, but what made the Academy decide to award the awards they awarded was more interesting to me.

As I grew increasingly yawny and fidgety while waiting for Ennio Morricone to win one (and suffering through those almost-always terrible Best Song productions), I saw that my own fascination lay in
the fact that I wanted to become one of them. It was an industry in which I wanted to be an employee.

This was why who actually won mattered little aesthetically. I knew that Silence of the Lambs was really not much more distinguished than The Sting  . . .  or Going My Way (Best Picture, 1945) or Slumdog Millionaire (2009). Braveheart (1995) was no Ben Hur, but Mel Gibson won best director because everyone who works in Hollywood knows that 1) making a historical epic even halfway decently is extremely difficult and should be credited; and 2) they all still liked Mel back then. A lot of
politics with a little of the personal and sentimental, less box office than you would think and not too much ART.

For a moment, let’s pretend that I’m not writing about Hollywood, but the American Association of Widget Makers. Every year—usually around Christmas—the AAWM holds it annual convention in ohhhhhh . . . Turlock, California. The  widget industry’s brightest stars from all over attend. They show the widget models they manufactured in the last year. Toward the end, after a lot of drunken hoo-hahing, there’s an awards ceremony: Best Widget for a Toyota Gas Pedal, Best Widget Made for the Titanic, etc.

It’s true there are major differences between the AAWM and the Academy and their parties, but I want to point to two major similarities and one major difference that are germane to this discussion.

First, a similarity: Both the AAWM and the Academy parties are private industry affairs, held for the benefit of manufacturers and their employees.

Now, for that single overarching difference: You and I cannot watch the AAWM party on TV. We can’t even get in the door.

The other major similarity: Both parties don’t care what you and I think.

Nor should they. At all.

In fact, if Hollywood really wanted, they could go back to 1928, when the first Oscar ceremony was held behind closed doors, no media in attendance. They could cut that carpet up for cat scratching posts, roll drunkenly out of taxicabs, turn away the Media like Jesus chasing away the money lenders and lock the doors, all the while giving us their middle finger like Goldman Sachs: “We’ll award Best Picture to Gigli if we want to, you stinking proles. Deal with it!”

Of course, now there’s too goddamn much money to do that, even with the show’s dwindling audiences. Hollywood’s desperate glitter has become too infused into Worldwide Cultural Consciousness for them
to follow the wise lead of the AAWM. Turning the Oscars back into the private industry party it started as? Much too risky! What if we stopped going to the movies?

Or what if you stopped going to the movies? Because, Oscar or no Oscar, I still love them. To me, the movies are the cake and the icing. The chefs can pat themselves on the back without me.
    
Every year reviewers write inherently boring articles about how boring the Oscar telecast is, like one of those boring Michelangelo Antonioni movies about how boring life is. I only glance over them to see if Halle Berry’s dress fell off, Meryl Streep suffered a bile attack, or Quentin Tarentino drunkenly slurred, “Ohh fuck you, Harvey Weinstein.” Then I’ll find the clip on YouTube.

And that’ll be my Not-Watching-the-Oscars Tradition.

So, don’t waste your spleen if Inglourious Basterds walks off with it all (Earth’s climate is changing and how’s your health care coverage?), but smile for Jeff Bridges because, like Ennio Morricone, he’s been so good for so long.

But here’s hoping PBS broadcasts a new Mystery movie on Sunday night.