My Kazillionith Annual Promise to NOT Watch the Oscars (and Try and Make Me!)

 Ennio Morricone with Quincy Jones

Last year, 2016, I watched the Oscar telecast. Rather, I watched teeny tiny, eensy weensy bit of the Oscar telecast.

While grazing through an old favorite on TCM ( I recall it was The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn, never won an Oscar), I managed to pull up a Slate article listing the Oscars in the order they would be presented. I popped in and out of the telecast a couple of times, checking against the list, and when it came time . . . 

Well, there he was: Ennio Morricone, more frail now than when he picked up his honorary Oscar from Clint Eastwood in 2007.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN OSHKOSH

I restarted my not-watching-the-Oscars habit on February 25, 2007, after composer Ennio Morricone strolled offstage to his well-earned standing ovation, toting that gold-plated hat stand. I took a minute to smugly feast and gloat on how a tone-deaf world at last had caught up with me.

Then I switched to a PBS Nature documentary on the Andes, no Morricone music, just sets and lighting by God.

I haven’t—well,almost haven’t--watched the Oscars since.

CUE HARP MUSIC AS SCREEN GOES WAVY.

The Year: 1974 (David Niven and the male streaker “parading his shortcomings”).

The place: a theatre party in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

I watch with amazed anguish as The Sting, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, takes home nine statuettes.

What, my tender soul swoons, was that about? An ex-movie reviewer and high-minded young actor, I’d been patient for years as the Academy passed over much better films by Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, and others. What is this Sting, this well-upholstered, but forgettable lark, doing floating away in glory as though it were Ben Hur (which, even fifty years later, still rolls and storms with genuine oomph and artistry?)

For sixteen years thereafter, I avert my delicate eyes on Oscar night. I watch Ingmar Bergman films and weep at the cold, cruel world.

“JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I WAS OUT, THEY PULL ME BACK IN!”

CUT TO: Late 1980s: I start a major push into the screenwriting profession, aware that whatever profession I choose, I must educate myself about it, explore its most arcane corners.

So, I start watching the Oscar telecast again. Every single year. But not out of pleasure.

I also subscribe to Daily Variety, Premiere and screenwriter-related publications. I become a screenwriting pedant, spinning the tale of the screenwriter who claimed to direct the final scene of Casablanca while pontificating on how the world would someday recognize the screenplay as a form of epic poetry. (And where’s m' damned Pulitzer anyway?)

I attend screenwriting conferences from Hollywood to Austin, Texas, where I pitch and grovel to agents and producers. When I get home, friends greet me with a long cool stare:

“Don’t you wash your nose once in awhile?”

I probably never display such intense neediness and greed as I do in those years; nor will I ever encounter again such fruitless encouragement. (Most of the people I met were nice and meant well.).

And my screenplays did get better and better until—

CUT TO: September 11, 2001. I realize that no one, including me, will be in the mood for my terrorist-plot screenplay.

And by the time that cloud has passed, I’ll be too old, by industry standards, to be acknowledged as a functioning life form. (“People over forty?” a Hollywood saying goes. “Aren’t those the ones with hair in their ears?” Yeah, I made that up, but pass it on, anyway.)

I’m already souring on the biz anyway. A fellow screenwriter who ripped up her roots to move to Hollywood with her children told me a story of being shown around her son’s new private school and seeing the following sign:

“Please be aware that many pupils of this school may be parented by employees of the film and television industry, so please use caution in expressing your opinion about any production or program.”

Joseph Stalin would have loved Hollywood.

But even as this latest dream swirls down the sink, I keep watching the Oscars ev-ery, sing-le year until 2007. And, right now, I’d share with you some fond memories . . . um . . . let’s see: old lion Jack Palance comparing his intestinal extrusions to host Billy Crystal, followed by Jack’s set of one-armed push-ups; something about Stanley Donen dancing with Oscar; Clint Eastwood getting his statue for Unforgiven. There was Letterman, Oprah, and Uma . . . .

Actually, I have more fun calling up those nightmares where I’m standing naked in a White House reception line.

THE END OF FUN

The Oscars were, once upon a time, about Things Going Wrong: Sacheen Littlefeather, Mr. Niven, or Clint gamely covering for a traffic-tied Charlton Heston. Now, the Academy has fixed it so accidents and miscues hardly ever happen. Nothing messy, nothing entertaining. The schadenfreude has gone out of it.

During my last era of Oscar-watching, I would shrug as other mouths foamed about the Crime against Humanity that awarded Silence of the Lambs (1990) Best Picture instead of JFK. In those days, I never felt particularly partisan about the Oscars. I’ve always been more likely to shout: “You’ve got to see this movie!” than “This movie has to win an Oscar . . .or . . . else!”

Remember: Citizen Kane: no Oscars; Hitchcock: never won an Oscar. Even with the new voting rules expanding the number of Best Picture nominees, a film like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2012) only squeezes through the door in other categories, while a farrago like Inception (2011) gets a Best Picture nod. The raft of excellent to great movies that never won any awards at all is nearly endless and will remain so; as will the list of mediocre (Oliver, 1968) and good but not great movies (Driving Miss Daisy, 1989) that do win awards and then dissolve to mist.

I’m not mad about any of this. My favorite movie of 2016 is the great horror film, The Witch, a film I believe will be regarded as a genuine classic someday (As I walked out of the screening, I pumped my fist, a gesture I'd not made in years). Only the other day, did I finally take a look at the list of best pictures. It wasn't there.

Now: Do you see steam bursting out my ears? Do you see foam bubbling from my mouth, as I call upon Black Philip? No, you don't. (If you want to see convulsions, try cooing the words "Donald Trump" to me and see what happens.)

I believe that all awards are contingent; there are so many factors in the zeitgeist—for instance, Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin--leading to these outcomes, that longer-lasting considerations, like Art, never will have much of a chance.

A conversation about the Oscars isn’t necessarily a conversation about what’s a good movie.

After I quit screenwriting in the early 2000s, I came to recognize I had no dog in the hunt. My boredom deepened. I kept watching, simply out of habit. I would tune away from those horrible Best Song productions, then forget to tune back. The only sequence I liked was the “In Memoriam” portion, but Turner Classics now does a much better presentation.

IT’S THEIR PARTY AND THEY’LL CRY IF THEY WANT TO

For a moment, let’s pretend that I’m not writing about Hollywood, but about the American Association of Widget Makers (AAWM). Every year, the AAWM holds it annual convention in ohhhhhh . . . Turlock, California. Widget executives from all over attend. They show off last year’s widget models. After waves of drunken hoo-hahing, there’s an awards ceremony: Best Widget made for the Oro Dam Spillway, Best Widget Used on the Titanic, and so on.

Sure, there are major differences between the AAWM and the Academy and their parties, but allow me to mention two major similarities and one major difference:

First, a similarity: Both the AAWM and the Oscars 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 our viewing machines. We can’t even get in the door.

The other major similarity: Both the AAWM and the Academy really don’t give a tinker’s damn what we think.

Nor should they. At all.

In fact, if Hollywood really wanted, they could dial the Wayback Machine to 1928, when the first Oscar ceremony took place behind closed doors. They could cut the red carpet up for cat scratching posts and lock the doors as they flip us all the bird: “We’ll give Best Picture to Yoga Hosers if we want to, you stinking proles. Deal with it!”

Whether you’re Roger Ebert or Ain’t It Cool News, your opinion doesn’t count. You’re attending a boring party where you’re not really all that welcome.

Of course, nowadays there’s too much hype and money involved for the Academy to dial the public back to private, even while audiences dwindle. The Oscars are now an arm of the studio marketing departments, who appear to be the ones running the show. The telecast is now too fused with Worldwide Cultural Consciousness for the Academy to follow best practices of the AAWM.

After all, what if we stopped going to the movies?

OSCARS. WHO NEEDS ‘EM?

Or, what if you stopped going to the movies, eh? Because, I still love the movies and I don’t need no stinking award show to keep me watching them. To me, the movies are the appetizer, main course, dessert, and after-dinner single malt. The chefs can pat themselves on the back and drink until they pass out, face down in the gravy boat, without me.

                         

Every year reviewers write boring articles about how boring the Oscar telecast is, like one of those boring Michelangelo Antonioni movies about how boring life is (or even this article). I only give 'em a glance to see if Sarah Silverman wins best actress for her turn in the new gender-bending James Bond movie; or if George Clooney gave a full-throated endorsement of Steve Bannon; or if Barack Obama pops in for a duet with Joe Biden of “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music. Then I watch the clip on YouTube. If I feel like it.

So, on Oscar night, instead of expending your finer feelings—and you do have them--on pressing your nose to a tinsel window, try watching a movie instead, at home or elsewhere.

Well, from now on, I can dead stop. This year, it'll be a movie on TCM, or a DVD from the library and there's that excellent PBS Civil War drama, Mercy Street, which I urge y'all to get to know!

And I don't care, really. Just so long as it's good.

(Re-edited 2/20/12; 2/23/12; 2/24/17).

Copyright 2017 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel will appear this April 2017. His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark won the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal and The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

My Third Annual Promise to Not Watch the Oscars!

Ennio Morricone and Clint Eastwood: My Favorite Oscar Memory

This February 26, instead of watching the Oscar telecast on ABC, do something different.

Watch a movie instead!

You’ll be glad you did! I sure am!

ONCE UPON A TIME IN OSHKOSH

I restarted my not-watching-the-Oscars habit on February 25, 2007, after composer Ennio Morricone strolled offstage to his well-earned standing ovation, toting that gold-plated hat stand. I took a minute to smugly feast and gloat on how a tone-deaf world at last had caught up with me.

Then I switched to a PBS Nature documentary on the Andes, no Morricone music, just sets and lighting by God.

I haven’t—well,almost haven’t--watched the Oscars since.

HARP MUSIC PLAYS AS SCREEN GOES WAVY.

The Year: 1974 (David Niven and the male streaker “parading his shortcomings”).

The place: a theatre party in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

I watch with amazed anguish as The Sting, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, takes home nine statuettes.

What, my tender soul swoons, was that about? An ex-movie reviewer and high-minded young actor, I’d been patient for years as the Academy passed over much better films by Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, and others. What is this Sting, this well-upholstered, but forgettable lark, doing floating away in glory as though it were Ben Hur (which, even fifty years later, still rolls and storms with genuine oomph and artistry?)

For sixteen years thereafter, I avert my delicate eyes on Oscar night. I watch Ingmar Bergman films and weep at the cold, cruel world.

“JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I WAS OUT, THEY PULL ME BACK IN!”

CUT TO: Late 1980s: I start a major push into the screenwriting profession, aware that whatever profession I choose, I must educate myself about it, explore its most arcane corners.

So, I start watching the Oscar telecast again. Every single year. But not out of pleasure.

I also subscribe to Daily Variety, Premiere and screenwriter-related publications. I become a screenwriting pedant, spinning the tale of the screenwriter who claimed to direct the final scene of Casablanca while pontificating on how the world would someday recognize the screenplay as a form of epic poetry. (And where’s m' damned Pulitzer anyway?)

I attend screenwriting conferences from Hollywood to Austin, Texas, where I pitch and grovel to agents and producers. When I get home, friends greet me with a long cool stare:

“Don’t you wash your nose once in awhile?”

I probably never display such intense neediness and greed as I do in those years; nor will I ever encounter again such fruitless encouragement. (Most of the people I met were nice and meant well.).

And my screenplays did get better and better until—

CUT TO: September 11, 2001. I realize that no one, including me, will be in the mood for my terrorist-plot screenplay.

And by the time that cloud has passed, I’ll be too old, by industry standards, to be acknowledged as a functioning life form. (“People over forty?” a Hollywood saying goes. “Aren’t those the ones with hair in their ears?” Yeah, I made that up, but pass it on, anyway.)

I’m already souring on the biz anyway. A fellow screenwriter who ripped up her roots to move to Hollywood with her children told me a story of being shown around her son’s new private school and seeing the following sign:

“Please be aware that many pupils of this school may be parented by employees of the film and television industry, so please use caution in expressing your opinion about any production or program.”

Joseph Stalin would have loved Hollywood.

But even as this latest dream swirls down the sink, I keep watching the Oscars ev-ery, sing-le year until 2007. And, right now, I’d share with you some fond memories . . . um . . . let’s see: old lion Jack Palance comparing his bodily extrusions to host Billy Crystal, followed by Jack’s set of one-armed push-ups; something about Stanley Donen dancing with Oscar; Clint Eastwood getting his statue for Unforgiven. There was Letterman, Oprah, and Uma . . . .

Actually, I have more fun calling up those nightmares where I’m standing naked in a White House reception line.

THE END OF FUN

The Oscars were, once upon a time about Things Going Wrong: Sacheen Littlefeather, Mr. Niven, or Clint gamely covering for a traffic-delayed Charlton Heston. Now, the Academy has fixed it so accidents and miscues hardly ever happen. Nothing messy, nothing entertaining. The schadenfreude has gone out of it.

During my last era of Oscar-watching, I would shrug as other mouths foamed about the Crime against Humanity that awarded Silence of the Lambs (1990) Best Picture instead of JFK. In those days, I never felt particularly partisan about the Oscars. I’ve always been more likely to shout: “You’ve got to see this movie!” then “This movie has to win an Oscar . . .or . . . else!”

Remember: Citizen Kane: no Oscars; Hitchcock: never won an Oscar. Even with the new voting rules expanding the number of Best Picture nominees, a film like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2012) only squeezes through the door in other categories, while a farrago like Inception (2011) gets a Best Picture nod. The raft of excellent to great movies that never won any awards at all is nearly endless and will remain so; as will the list of mediocre (Oliver, 1968) and good but not great movies (Driving Miss Daisy, 1989) that do win awards and then dissolve to mist.

I’m not mad about any of this. I believe that all awards are contingent; there are so many factors in the zeitgeist—for instance, Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin--leading to these outcomes, that longer-lasting considerations, like Art, never will have much of a chance.

A conversation about the Oscars isn’t necessarily a conversation about what’s a good movie.

After I quit screenwriting in the early 2000s, I came to recognize I had no dog in the hunt. My boredom deepened. I kept watching, simply out of habit. I would tune away from those horrible Best Song productions, then forget to tune back. The only sequence I liked was the “In Memoriam” portion, but Turner Classics now does a much better presentation.

IT’S THEIR PARTY AND THEY’LL CRY IF THEY WANT TO

For a moment, let’s pretend that I’m not writing about Hollywood, but about the American Association of Widget Makers (AAWM). Every year, the AAWM holds it annual convention in ohhhhhh . . . Turlock, California. Widget executives from all over attend. They show off last year’s widget models. After waves of drunken hoo-hahing, there’s an awards ceremony: Best Widget for a Navien Tankless Water Heater, Best Widget Used on the Titanic, and so on.

Sure, there are major differences between the AAWM and the Academy and their parties, but allow me to mention two major similarities and one major difference:

First, a similarity: Both the AAWM and the Oscars 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 our viewing machines. We can’t even get in the door.

The other major similarity: Both the AAWM and the Academy really don’t give a tinker’s damn what we think.

Nor should they. At all.

In fact, if Hollywood really wanted, they could dial the Wayback Machine to 1928, when the first Oscar ceremony took place behind closed doors. They could cut the red carpet up for cat scratching posts and lock the doors as they flip us all the bird: “We’ll give Best Picture to The Human Centipede: Full Sequence if we want to, you stinking proles. Deal with it!”

Whether you’re Roger Ebert or Ain’t It Cool News, your opinion doesn’t count. You’re attending a boring party where you’re not really all that welcome.

Of course, nowadays there’s too much hype and money involved for the Academy to dial the public back to private, even while audiences dwindle. The Oscars are now an arm of the studio marketing departments, who appear to be the ones running the show. The telecast is now too fused with Worldwide Cultural Consciousness for the Academy to follow best practices of the AAWM.

After all, what if we stopped going to the movies?

OSCARS. WHO NEEDS ‘EM?

Or, what if you stopped going to the movies, eh? Because, I still love the movies and I don’t need no stinking award show to keep me watching them. To me, the movies are the appetizer, main course, dessert, and after-dinner single malt. The chefs can pat themselves on the back and drink until they pass out, face down in the gravy boat, without me.

                         

Every year reviewers write boring articles about how boring the Oscar telecast is, like one of those boring Michelangelo Antonioni movies about how boring life is (or even this article). I only give 'em a glance to see if James Franco and Anne Hathaway returned for a rousing encore; or if George Clooney gave a full-throated endorsement for Rick Santorum; or if Barack Obama popped in to tell the crowd he likes “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music. Then I watch the clip on YouTube. If I feel like it.

So, on Oscar night, instead of expending your finer feelings—and you do have them--on pressing your nose to a tinsel window, try watching a movie instead, at home or elsewhere.

I’ll be watching another episode of Luck (which is starting to quicken my heart at last). There’s plenty on the DVR to watch too, including Olivier’s Othello. I think that won an Oscar . . . but honestly, I’m not sure.

And I don't care, really. Just so long as it's good.

(Re-edited 2/20/12; 2/23/12).

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

I Am Not Watching the Oscars! (And You Can't Make Me!)

Right after this, I switched over to PBS . . . .

I said it last year. And the year before that. And the year before that.

And I will say it again:

I am not watching the Oscars.

And you can’t make me.

Why should I—or anyone outside the movie business—waste three-plus hours of earthly existence watching a parade of over-dressed, half-talented, face-lifted, bulked-up, non-entities squeal tears over some gold-plated hat stand while making lame in-jokes about people we’ll all forget the next day as we suffer through songs that fornicating cats wouldn’t howl to.

No. I am not watching the Oscars.

Instead, on Sunday night, I am going to watch a movie. AND a TV show!

Further, I’m going to suggest—no, urge—no, DEMAND—that, instead of watching the Oscars, you at least consider watching one or more of the following movies (plus one TV show), whether you pipe it in over your computer, or trundle over to your local DVD rental store. (I have two in my neighborhood.)

Real movies that will feed you body, mind, and soul in ways that your fruitless wait for Angelina Jolie’s boobs to pop from her dress will not.

Even better, none of the four movies (and one television show) discussed below ever won Oscars. They may have been tossed a nomination or two—like a bone thrown to a spirited, three-legged dog—but these films were either completely ignored or went home empty handed, forgotten by the clique of cool popular kids (who, by the way, all grew up to be pimple-faced, sad-sack used car salesmen—oh, is my bitterness showing? Sorry!).

Snark aside, I’m not a bit mad none of the movies won Oscars, and don’t you be either. They all deserved better fates and met them—to be remembered as good, even great, movies, loved and admired years after most Oscar winners have been forgotten. (Come on. When was the last time you actually even considered watching Oliver? Really!)

The Oscars say nothing about whether a movie is actually good or great. It’s Hollywood’s party: If they want to award Silent Hill: Revelation 3D Best Picture of 2013, I say go for it, Tinseltown! I’ll back you all the way! To the bitter end!

When I first saw Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane on a Green Bay TV station one Sunday afternoon in 1971, I mistook it for an extraordinarily atmospheric horror film (which in a way it is).

Then, as I was transfixed, I realized just how bad those network TV series I had been watching until then were. I didn’t watch another TV series for over 20 years.

Citizen Kane remains the best movie I’ve ever seen and I’ll say that ‘til I die.

This thinly veiled biopic of media mogul William Randolph Hearst (the Rupert Murdoch of his day) is a feast for the senses, from your eyes to your toes, and your mind and soul, too. Full of dash, invention, and energy, it has not aged a day, not in its technique, not in its writing, performances and not in its bright dancing spirit.

Kane makes all those ten-best-ever lists for the simplest of reasons: It belongs there. It earned it. The Sight and Sound ten-best-ever list may have erred in dropping it to second place behind Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but it still embraces me completely every time I see it.

The Black Book (Reign of Terror), from 1949, makes history into a perfect subject for a film noir. Set during the French Revolution (the one with powder-wigged heads rolling off guillotines), it’s a gory, exciting, eye-popping delight.

Robert Cummings plays D’Aubigny, a French patriot who dives into a whirlpool of conspiracy and bloody murder concerning a black book. The black book is full of names, names of those slated to be sentenced to the guillotine by fiendish dictator Maximillian (“Don’t Call Me Max!”) Robespierre (brought vivid raging life by Richard Basehart). This key to Robespierre’s power disappears and it must be found before it’s too late!

Save a few plot stumbles, The Black Book is a feast all the way, one of the trippiest, the most beautifully shot noir of its era, as visually dazzling as Kane. Photographed by John Alton and directed by Anthony Mann on a $40,000 budget—peanuts--it shows what can be accomplished by great talents working from small purses.

Cummings seems a little miscast, but he’s more than compensated for by the performances of Basehart, Norman Lloyd, brutish Charles McGraw, and best of all, little-seen Broadway actor Arnold Moss as the smooth-tongued devil Joseph Fouché, the chameleonic head of Robespierre’s secret police and, eventually, the Minister of Police for Napoleon.

Leonard Maltin calls it right: in Reign of Terror every shot is a painting, stark compositions of light and shadow through which weave a thrilling story leading to a wild and wonderful movie. Here, the blood runs black like the shadows of that terrible event.

“I don’t want the monster to die!” a friend said.

Most critics point to 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein as the best of the James Whale/Boris Karloff trilogy, but my heart goes to the first one, released in 1931. In fact, Frankenstein may well be the best film from those early years when Hollywood was clumsily coming to grip with the emergence of sound, for one of the strongest impressions left by the film is a lonely, scary quiet.

With Whale at the helm and Karloff behind the makeup, Frankenstein is stark, bleak, and touching. Its haunting images reflect the humor, horror, and sadness at its heart and seem to be an influence on films as diverse as The Seventh Seal and, most obviously, The Spirit of the Beehive.

The absence of a music score, I believe, is a strength, giving its fantastic story an eerie, somber verisimilitude.

Especially memorable are the opening sequences in the cemetery as Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive, also excellent) and Fritz (indelible Dwight Frye) hunt for body parts and the brain that will bring Henry’s vain dream to dreadful fruition. The creation sequence is classic and the monster’s first encounter with the sun is one the most tender, beautiful moments in all film. The final confrontation between Henry and his Monster at the top of the windmill still brings tears.

“I don’t want the monster to die!” a friend cried when I showed it to her for the first time.

As for Boris Karloff, it is impossible to praise his performance too much. That it has survived decades of parody and has overwhelmed all other comers, is the highest compliment I can pay.

Whatever you think you know about James Whale’s ground-breaking horror classic, when you see it you’ll realize that you know very little. Frankenstein is a film that needs no monument, no statues, but itself.

You’ll have noticed that this list, so far, as shown a distinct prejudice toward black and white movies made before most of you were born.

Yes, I am being thoughtless and insensitive to my younger readers. To make it up to you, I will compromise and actually recommend a movie shot in color from just a few years ago.

So it is, I think you should watch Into Great Silence, a transcendent two-and-half hour documentary about the lives of Carthusian monks in their faraway home high in the Swiss Alps.
 

It’s a movie about people who choose to live quiet lives far apart from the clangorous grime and jittery bustle of the modern world, in the faith that they are drawing closer to something larger.

The most thrill-packed sequence comes when the monks are taken on their annual afternoon ski-shoe trip on a small hill a short drive away. The men seems so happy with this small pleasure, it left me smiling for days.

It’s said that the Divine is best encountered in stillness. This lovely movie proves it. It also shows how critics who refer to Die Hard movies as “meditations on masculinity” or whatnot haven’t the slightest idea what “meditation” means. This movie does.

Now, for that TV show (because, these days, TV is where the Art can really be found).

Girls, the funky, controversial HBO cable series, may not be the absolute best of this Golden Age of TV we’re in right now, but it’s on at the same time as the Oscar telecast, so, when that moment finally dawns on you—and it will, trust me--that oh-my-God, you really are bored . . .

(Note: In case you are concerned, I watch Girls under the strictest supervision, namely my wife’s, who stands ready to rip the remote from my hand the second I start breathing hard; say, when I start rewinding to the sex scenes “so I can see how good the acting is.”)

Honestly, this really is a very good show: sharp, witty, and poignant; well-directed, and very well acted by its entire cast, including show creator Lena Dunham, who plays dilettante writer Hannah. (Am I the only one in the world to cop to the idea that Hannah is no writer at all? Discuss!)

Though this comedy of rude manners focuses on a narrow slice of the world—wannabe twenty-something artists in a Brooklyn neighborhood—it resonates, even with a pair of 50-somethings a continent away. It even creates suspense: after all, what are these foolish people going to do with their lives? Even this grayhair recognizes the overwhelming confusion and terror experienced by many characters from his twenties. (Sorry, high-minded do-gooders: their foolishness is what makes it a comedy.)

Girls is not as innovative as some critics think—its roots in Seinfeld, Frasier, and, of course, Sex in the City, show everywhere. (The second Hannah finds her Ricky Ricardo, those roots will really show.)

Girls is one more sign that feature movies have lost their power, their edge, and their innovation. Most all the artistry has moved to television.

What other excuse do you need for not watching the Oscars?

(re-edited 3/5/13)

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.