Fucking Oscars

Unfortunately, my plans for sunday night feel through, i was supposed to hang out with this girl named Jenny but she cancelled cause of the 3 inch snow storm. Then to make matters worse, last night the Oscars were on. While i love film, ironically, i hate hollywood movies and the oscars with about as much passion as a love almost all other types of film, except for maybe bollywood films, because those are basically just indian people trying to make hollywood films anyway, and cause there indian ;) But like a moth toward light i am drawn and so i watch the oscars. i generally watch the oscars, and every year that i watch i always end up angrier and angrier as the night progresses. Last night was, surprisingly, no different. While i didn't agree with almost any of the nominations, and actually hated many of the movies they nominated, the main thing that upsets me more and more during the show, is that it is so blatantly a commercial for hollywood for several hours. The oscar awards are simply a device hollywood uses to advertise their movies, and their stars. The Academy is made up of a variety of people who work for one of the 5 movie studio's in hollywood(there are only 5 companies that release hollywood movies, each of those 5 own almost all of the smaller ones), obviously they will only nomiate their own movies, and that many votes will be traded and bought amoungest those running the 5 studio's. There is no way the best performance wins, in almost every category the biggest name wins, or the name of an up-and-come'r that hollwood wants to mold into a star, such a keira knightley for best actress. For example, in the best supporting actor category, George Clooney was guaranteed to win, it was his first nomination and his perfomance didn't matter, the hollywood film industry needs him to be a classic male movie star, such as cary grant. Or in the supporting actress category, there is no one who could claim that Amy Adams wasn't amazing in Junebug, i didn't even like the film, but she simply stole every scene she was in, but alas Rachel Weisz won, and she was good in The Constant Gardner, and i enjoyed that movie a lot more than junebug, but there is no comparison between the two roles. Another thing that bothered me greatly was that Memoirs of a Geisha won 3 oscars, the same amount as brokeback mountain and crash won, i didn't see the film and i definitely don't plan on seeing it, the main problem i had with the film when it came out was that it was a Japanese story set in Japan, but all the main actresses were Chinese, and most of the male actors where Chinese aswell, then to top it off almost everyone behind the camera were not Japanese either, almost all were from america. Furthermore, the movie was almost universally panned, with a common argument being that it didn't seem very authentic, and my favorite critique being that if you have seen any Japanese films then you will notice many aspects of this movie that are not authentic or traditional. One of the oscars they got was for costume design, surprisingly the people who did the traditional japanese costumes were two white americans. That pretty much sums up many of my problems with hollywood and the oscars.