Oscar Apathy

When I first started messing around with websites back in the 1994 (ughhhh), my first Geocities site was a movie related page called Binky's Movie Hut.  My nickname in college, was inexplicably, Binky, and it all just rolled together with my love of movies.  I had a pretty full list of movie reviews and the like, which I wish I had backed up somewhere.  I mean, I wasn't going to threaten Roger Ebert, but I was pretty happy with my writing at that time.  

As the '90s progressed and my skills became better, I morphed my site into Awards Avenue, and it became much more focused on the awards show circuit.  I covered music, television, theater, and of course, the Road to the Oscars, which became quite a very busy time between November-March.  I was really in on the ground floor of what became a cottage industry of prognosticators orbiting around movie awards.  Theater also got me a lot of hits, because there really were not a lot of people covering it, but the big focus was the Oscars.  I got a lot of hits for a fan site, and if I had not given it up because it was beginning to interfere with my real job, I really think something good might have come out of it.  My crowning achievement was my super inclusive calendar of Oscar precursors (critic and guild awards) being quotes by leading Oscar site OscarWatch, which is now AwardsDaily.com due to the Academy being stingy with their copywrites.  Years later, I am friends on Facebook with Awards Daily diva, Sasha Stone, and I think I comment enough on her stuff that she knows who I am.  It is the little things, but I digress.

During this time, I also held my annual Oscar Party, which started out as something at my apartment and grew bigger into my friend, Melissa's, house.  It then outgrew itself into a fundraiser for a local organization called Indiana Still Cares, which was my first tip toe into the Indianapolis gay community.  I got on the radar of Gary Brackett, who was also President of Indy Pride at that point, and I think you can see where this is going.  I owe a lot to my love of the Oscars, which is why my apathy for the show is a little disconcerting.

The Oscars have not changed with the times, and even though they seem to add more and more diversity every year, the decisions made for winners still seems to be stuck in the fuddy duddy white voters.  The fact that there is not one person of color nominated in any of the major categories or a woman director is just abysmal, and that is not to say that every nominee is not deserving.  It is just unfortunate that the wealth cannot be spread.

There is a lot more wrong with the system than I care to get into here, but the fact that I have only seen two of the nominated Best Pictures is pretty indicative that the Oscars are not in line with my tastes.  I am really hoping that piece of jingoist propaganda, American Sniper, does not win Best Picture on Sunday, because that might just be the final nail for me.