Before I forget about it completely, the Oscars cannot be left behind in a week when motion pictures were, perhaps as a result of the 79th Academy Awards, more profoundly called into question as the vehicle of cultural dialog they've traditionally served than at any time in my memory. Here's an excerpt of my favorite critique (I've edited some of the spicier language for gentler readers):

... you may have heard that season 3 American Idol reject Jennifer Hudson just won a [expletive deleted] Academy Award for her supporting role in Dreamgirls. An Oscar. She won an Oscar. For her first acting role.

Now, admittedly, I am not a fan of musicals. I find it weird and uncomfortable to listen to dialogue that should be spoken but instead is being sung to one another (as my boyfriend's dad so aptly put it, "I'm confused...they're singing stuff they should be saying..."). Additionally, musicals are generally over-acted, over-hyped, and incapable of consisting of a plot heavier than "mild dilemma." (And even if the musical does have serious themes in it [ahem, Rent], the stupid melodic dialogue dilutes them to that of a mild annoyance expressed in song form.) Just because I'm predisposed to dislike musicals, however, doesn't mean I hate them all. I thought Chicago and Moulin Rouge were all right (although Moulin Rouge had the clichést of cliché storylines), and I have a soft spot in my heart for Little Shop of Horrors. (Is it wrong to name my firstborn child Audrey II? I thought not...)

That being said, I've grown to accept the Academy of Motion Picture's [expletive deleted] obsession with musicals. Whenever one is released, those [expletive deleted] go "OH MY [expletive deleted] GOD, THERE'S A MUSICAL OUT THIS YEAR!!!!!", and they start excitedly polishing the statuettes and engraving them. I don't agree with it, but I've learned to live with it. (Unlike you, Golden Globes, with your [expletive deleted] "Best Picture in a Comedy or Musical" award going to a [expletive deleted] musical any time a musical has been released that year. If you want to give the award to a musical every year, then separate the category and stop stealing Best Picture wins from more deserving comedies.)

What I REFUSE to accept, however, is any sort of justification, drug-induced or otherwise, in giving Jennifer Hudson an award for playing Effie in Dreamgirls. The last time I checked, you were supposed to hand out Oscars for ACTING awards, not for being able to adequately belt out a song. (And yes, I said adequately--we all know that any other black woman with a powerful singing voice could have sung those songs just as good, if not better, than Jennifer Hudson did.) Jennifer Hudson did a good job singing in Dreamgirls; what she did not do an award-worthy job of was acting in Dreamgirls.

Watch the movie for yourself. You'll see that when Jennifer's not singing, she's over-acting, and she's over-acting because she doesn't know how to act. Her acting ability in Dreamgirls ranges from shouting to...well, that's really about it. She shouts a lot. Her character's not that likeable. (Come to think of it, none of the characters in Dreamgirls are...)

Anyway, I can understand not awarding Abigail Breslin the Oscar because she's just a kid, and it's always novel to simply nominate the precocious child actor for being cute and able-minded enough to memorize her lines. I didn't see Notes on a Scandal because it looked like Single White Female with better actors, so I can't vouch for Cate Blanchett. I did, however, see Babel, and I can definitively say that either Adriana Barraza or Rinko Kikuchi certainly deserved to win more than Jennifer Hudson. Both of these actresses actually acted in their movie, and they did a great job. They displayed a range of emotion, vulnerability, and craft...but did they get awarded for their efforts? No, their only reward was watching some [expletive deleted] girl win their award based solely on hype and vocal talent.

What, do you imagine, is the source of this vitriol? I side mostly with the LATimes Op-Ed by Neal Gabler that, honestly, the movies just aren't that magical anymore... thus the title of this post. I almost FORGOT to even mention it, let alone watch the awards ceremony... mostly because of all the silly filler added to categories like "Best Gaffer" that make movies less relevant. I think we saw this in the winners too. Here's the rundown from Gabler:

The movie magic is gone

Hollywood, which once captured the nerve center of American life, doesn't matter much anymore.

By Neal Gabler
Neal Gabler is the author of many books, including "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination" and "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality."

February 25, 2007

TONIGHT'S Oscars will be awarded, most likely, in the usual atmosphere of solemn self-congratulation and decorous chest-thumping. But for all the outward celebration, the truth is that the industry is in a state of ongoing disquiet.

It is hardly news that for years now the American motion picture industry has been in a slow downward spiral. Though by some accounts attendance was slightly up in 2006 over the previous year, the box-office tracking firm Exhibitors Relations reported that attendance actually declined yet again, reaching its lowest point in 10 years. And though defenders of the industry protest that foreign markets account for 40% of a film's revenue and that those proceeds are compensating for falling domestic box office, foreign receipts have been down too, and even DVD sales are plateauing. In short, the overall trends remain discouraging.

Even more worrisome than what could be just a cyclical dip is how people are regarding motion pictures and the moviegoing experience. A recent Zogby survey found that 45% of American moviegoers had decreased their attendance over the last five years, with the highest percentage of that decrease in the coveted 18- to 24-year-old bracket; at the same time, 21% of respondents said they never went to the movies. The two most-cited reasons for seeing fewer movies were rising ticket prices and the quality of the films (a perpetual culprit).

Another survey, this one conducted by PA Consulting for the Motion Picture Assn. of America, reached an even more chilling conclusion. Eighty-three percent of its respondents said they were satisfied with the content of the films they saw, but 60% nevertheless expected to spend less of their income on moviegoing in the future, citing dissatisfaction with the moviegoing experience and the emergence of better alternatives for their time and money.

By this reckoning, no matter how much films may improve, their prospects are not likely to which suggests that something has fundamentally changed in our relationship to the movies. The long, long romance may finally be losing its bloom, and that is why Hollywood should be concerned.

What is happening may be a matter of metaphysics. Virtually from their inception, the movies have been America's primary popular art, the "Democratic Art," as they were once called, managing to strike the American nerve continuously for decades. During the 1920s, nearly the entire population of the country attended the movies weekly, but even when attendance sank in the 1950s under the assault of television and the industry was virtually on life support, the movies still managed to occupy the center of American life.

Movie stars have been our brightest icons. A big movie like "The Godfather," "Titanic" or "Lord of the Rings" entered the national conversation and changed the national consciousness. Movies were the barometers of the American psyche. More than any other form, they defined us, and to this day, the rest of the world knows us as much for our films as for any other export.

Today, movies just don't seem to matter in the same way not to the general public and not to the high culture either, where a Pauline Kael review in the New Yorker could once ignite an intellectual firestorm. There aren't any firestorms now, and there is no director who seems to have his finger on the national pulse the way that Steven Spielberg or George Lucas did in the 1970s and 1980s. People don't talk about movies the way they once did. It would seem absurd to say, as Kael once did, that she knew whether she would like someone by the films he or she liked. Once at the center, movies increasingly sit on the cultural margins.

This is both a symptom and a cause of their distress. Two years ago, writing in these pages, I described an ever-growing culture of knowingness, especially among young people, in which being regarded as part of an informational elite an elite that knew which celebrities were dating each other, which had had plastic surgery, who was in rehab, etc. was more gratifying than the conventional pleasures of moviegoing.

In this culture, the intrinsic value of a movie, or of most conventional entertainments, has diminished. Their job now is essentially to provide stars for People, Us, "Entertainment Tonight" and the supermarket tabloids, which exhibit the new "movies" the stars' life sagas.

Traditional movies have a very difficult time competing against these real-life stories, whether it is the shenanigans of TomKat or Brangelina, Anna Nicole Smith's death or Britney Spears' latest breakdown. These are the features that now dominate water-cooler chat. There may have been a time when these stories generated publicity for the movies. Now, however, the movies are more likely to generate publicity for the stories, which have a life, and an entertainment value, of their own

But in the two years since, another phenomenon has battered the motion picture industry, attacking one of the very fundamentals of moviegoing: the movies' communal appeal. Before demographics became the marketing mantra, the movies were the art of the middle. They provided a common experience and language a sense of unity. In the dark we were one.

Now, however, when people prefer to identify themselves as members of ever-smaller cohorts ethnic, political, demographic, regional, religious the movies can no longer be the art of the middle. The industry itself has been contributing to this process for years by targeting its films more narrowly, especially to younger viewers. In effect, the conservative impulse of our politics that has promoted the individual rather than the community has helped undermine movies' communitarian appeal.

All of this has been hastened by the fact that there is now an instrument to take advantage of the social stratifications. To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content. Television never questioned the very nature of conventional entertainment. The Internet, on the other hand, not only creates niche communities of young people, beer aficionados, news junkies, Britney Spears fanatics that seem to obviate the need for the larger community, it plays to another powerful force in modern America and one that also undermines the movies: narcissism.

It is certainly no secret that so much of modern media is dedicated to empowering audiences that no longer want to be passive. Already, video games generate more income than movies by centralizing the user and turning him into the protagonist. Popular websites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, in which the user is effectively made into a star and in which content is democratized, get far more hits than movies get audiences. MySpace has more than 100 million users worldwide, and Fortune magazine reported that 54 million of them spend, on average, 124 minutes on the site for each visit, while 11.6 million users spend 72 minutes a visit on Facebook. YouTube's most popular videos attract more than 40 million hits, which is substantially larger than the audience for all but a very, very few movies.

But these sites are arguably not only diverting viewers who might be attending the movies, they are replacing one of the movies' functions: If stars' lives are superseding movie narratives, audiences are superseding the stars. Who needs Brad Pitt if you can be your own hero on a video game, make your own video on YouTube or feature yourself on Facebook?

The promise of an alternative life the vicarious thrill of escape has always been one of the movies' greatest blandishments. In the theater we could all imagine ourselves to be Cary Grant or Bette Davis. Now with avatars essentially masks that one can use to represent oneself on the Internet anyone can be Cary Grant or Bette Davis without having to imagine it. In effect, we have become our own movies.

Film no doubt will withstand these assaults. The industry, with its synergies, will probably find a way to profit from stars' lives and from our own star-like lives.

But it is much more difficult to survive a change in consciousness than a change in taste or technology, and that is what the movies face now a challenge to the basic psychological satisfactions that the movies have traditionally provided.

Where the movies once supplied plots, there are alternative plots everywhere. Where the movies once supplied community, there is less hunger for it. And though we still love the frisson that stars provide, we like our own frisson too. How the movies cope with these threats will go some way toward determining whether they remain vital or will be usurped. But the problem for the industry, even on its biggest night, is that the answer is likely to lie less in the executives' hands than in our heads.

Was there ANY good news in this? The curiosity-seeking side of me looks for hope in phenomena such as Prediction Markets to save the day as Hollywood Stock Exchange had the only real breakthrough performance of the night - predicting 7 out of 8 top category winners this year on top of the much more difficult job of picking 82% of the field of nominees - way to go guys! And I say this despite their completely pandering, Hollywood-bootlicking rundown below:

The 79th Academy Awards commenced last night at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood, CA. It was a group unlike any the Academy Award had rounded up before. With international representation at a record high this year, the faces that walked the red carpet truly represented the world. The ceremonies also had their share of historic moments with surprise wins and upsets that will probably be talked about for months to come.

As host, Ellen DeGeneres (EDEGE) played it safe, joking with the crowd and bringing her signature brand of lighthearted delivery to her part. While she kept the evening rolling pretty smoothly, there were however a few moments that dragged. It is clear that Ellen was appointed in hopes of rescuing the ceremony from the past bad behavior of Chris Rock (CROCK) and Jon Stewart (JSTEW). On that level, Ellen pulled the evening off pretty well, making sure the antics always stayed within boundaries.

Alan Arkin (A7AAR) was responsible for the first surprise win of the evening. While talks that Eddie Murphy (A7EMU) had this category in the bag, Arkin took home the Oscar for his potty-mouthed, heroin-snorting grandpa from Little Miss Sunshine (A7LMS). This is Arkin's first win, although the actor was nominated twice before. Indeed all four acting categories this year went to first timers.

HSX traders nailed seven out of the eight major categories offered on the 2007 Award Options. But our traders were not far on the Best Supporting Actor category as Arkin trailed Eddie Murphy (A7EMU) by mere fractions. Kudos to you traders!

Jennifer Hudson (A7JHU) stood within steps of George Clooney (GCLOO) but didn't lay a finger on him. Not even a little peck on the cheek. Come on Jen, we know you have a boyfriend, but that was George Clooney back there. Anyway, the singer-turned actress gave a heartfelt and emotional speech when collecting her award. A deserving winner who stole the show in Dreamgirls, this was Hudson's first time coming anywhere near the Oscars.

Helen Mirren (A7HMI) was a sure winner for her stunning work in The Queen (A7QUE) while Forest Whitaker (A7FWH) walked away with Best Actor for his portrayal of another leader, the frightening Idi Ami in The Last King of Scotland.

Jack Black (JBLAC), Will Ferrell (WFERR) and John C. Reilly (JCREI) gave Dreamgirls a run for their money when they performed a hilarious number about the lot of comedic actors. They just don't get the kind of respect the Clooneys and the Pitts of the world get. Their performance was a comic highlight of the evening.

Of course the presence of former Vice President Al Gore was a major highlight of this year's Oscar ceremony. The VP's charm and dedication to his cause provided many entertaining moments. His win for An Inconvenient Truth gave a boost to the cause of environmentalism.

Finally, the moment everyone had been waiting for; The Best Director announcement! George Lucas (GLUCA), Steve Spielberg (SSPEI) and Francis Ford Coppola (FFCOP) presented the Oscar to a thankful yet well deserving Martin Scorsese (A7MSC). As Oscars past have ignored this director, he finally got his due, albeit his previous film deserved the honor more than this one. Either way, the director finally found some resolution and even joked asking them to double check the envelope.

On a closing note, for this writer, Pan's Labyrinth was the ultimate movie of 2006 and it is a shame director Guillermo del Toro (GDELT) was not honored for his work. That just means he will have to try again with another project, hopefully!

Finally, summing up, Slate.com hosted a dialog between movie critics the past few days discussing who'd win and a good analysis of what was really going on there - though I opened this post with my favorite critique, this one is the most astute:

While I quite liked Ellenhow can one not quite like Ellen?the show was edge-free, bland. I realize it's meant to be a tribute to movies, but what about a little spicy sauce? The week in which David Geffen kicked off the Obama vs. Hillary war and not a murmur about it on the Oscar telecast. It was a topic that morning on Face the Nation and Meet the Press but on the Oscar show, nada. Can't imagine Billy Crystal, much less Jon Stewart, would let that gift go unwrapped. (Imagine the Al Gore reaction shots!)

Ellen's little bits about slipping a script to Scorsese and getting Spielberg to take her picture with Clint Eastwood were amusing but hardly water-cooler fodder. Nothing was. That's a problema really big problem.

I am nicer than you about Alan Arkin. There were more disappointing speeches (Scorsese), but great actors get to mutter for 45 seconds. I may be nicer than you about Peter O'Toole. That look on his face smote me.

Those who said Norbit didn't hurt Eddie Murphy must rethink. Also, it would have helped if he had behaved in a more becoming manner at any time during the season. Yes, it's about the performances, but when it comes to campaigning, the academy definitely likes the sauce and they like it sweet.

Best presence overall: the kid from Little Miss Sunshine. She could give lessons in dignity.

The shadow-mimes were fun at first but as things dragged on, it seemed that having them do a sequence of the five nominees right at the top would have been wise.

On a Hollywood politics note, don't think I heard Graham King mention Brad Grey in that thank-you speech when he accepted for best picture. After Grey's quixotic campaign to be recognized as a producer, that omission must have hurt. Maybe King gave him a shout-out on the "thank-you cam."

Here are a few ideas about what needs to happen:

• Sound awards: outinto the technical presentation. Sorry, but they need to go.
• Film montages: out unless they are brilliant and serve a discernable purpose. What was that thing from Michael Mann? Any guesses?
• Put more creative energy into staging the songs, and drop almost all other gimmicks. Make it stop.
• Making Sid Ganis talk fast was a fine idea. This show desperately needs to be streamlined.

The idea of pushing back all acting awards until later in the show might have been a reasonable gamble, but it didn't pay off. The audience needs a little meat early in the proceedings to keep from dozing off.

So, you are much nicer than I am about the show overall. What it lacked most of alland this is not its faultwas a movie that really excited audiences. People liked The Departed as entertainment, but who loved it? This year, the best picture prize seemed like a tribute vote, which made it about as thrilling as the bestowing of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.