I don’t understand how anybody can care about the lower salaries of Hollywood actresses or the absence of black Hollywood performers from the Oscars. To me, these are neither women nor African Americans. They are immensely rich folks who don’t give a crap about me and my interests, so I’ll be damned if I care about theirs.
And I especially resent the idiotic argument of, “Well, if these super famous people suffer discrimination, then what hope do we have?” There is no connection between their lives and ours. Their whole existence is about getting us to identify with their petty dramas so that we’ll forget about our real troubles. That’s what they get paid for. And whether they manage to get paid even more than they already do and get even more fame than they already do, they’ll never do anything for me.
Back in the harshest years of the post-Soviet economy, we were all glued to the TV screens watching a Mexican soap opera titled “The Rich Weep, Too.” It was comforting to imagine, in the midst of food shortages and an inflation of 1000%, that the rich experienced all the same problems we did. . . Only they didn’t. It was an illusion that they were peddling to us and that we idiotically lapped up. And while we stared beatifically at those screens, feeling sorry for the rich, the real oligarchs robbed us blind.
Clarissa's Blog 
Amen!
I also don’t get people’s fascination with the various awards shows in general. I often look at the lists of nominees and winners in case there are good films that I have not heard about. But I don’t really know anyone involved in making films and I see no reason why I should watch the awards show or care who wins the various awards.
LikeLike
I actually used to sort of enjoy second guessing the Oscars (nominations and awards) back when I went to movie theaters a lot (and would watch all kinds of things I probably wouldn’t click on to see now) but I never considered it to be anything more than mindless fun. My version of baseball stats (since I’ve never been into watching team sports).
The absolute deadly seriousness that people are taking the racial composition of nominees and subject matter of nominated movies is just scary.
It recently occurred to me that the extraordinarily odd and unrealistic scenarios for sitcoms in the 1960s (my mother the car, the flying nun, it’s about time and others) can in retrospect be seen as symptoms of a society having a kind of collective nervous breakdown (while trying to insist it was having just a grand old time) – and that’s what these earnest examinations of silly fluff like the oscars reminds me of that in reverse.
Florence King once described the In and Out Patient (a stereotype for women in the South where hangled nerves and nervous breakdowns were considered the height of feminine breeding). She describes meeting one of these creatures and finding out she’d committed and uncommitted herself to a mental institution a few times since their last meeting.
That’s what the oscar outrage people remind me of – they’re using their outrage and anguish as signs of their superiority….
LikeLike