Here's a modest proposal: Next year, let's ignore the Oscars. I'm not talking about the winners or the show itself, but I sure could do without the obsessive buildup to the event that devours everything in its path. Let's let the Oscars sneak up on us on those proverbial little cat's feet and see how that plays.
I say this not out of unhappiness with the way things turned out or dissatisfaction with the show itself. Quite the contrary. The new-look Oscars played beautifully in my living room, and I could not have been happier to see that, despite multiple attempts by its detractors to muddy the waters, the Hollywood community recognized "Slumdog Millionaire" as one of its own and rewarded it with Oscars in eight of the nine categories it was nominated for, including best picture.
Rather, I found myself troubled with the way the protracted Oscar predicting season has become an endless game of gotcha, obscuring the movies themselves and the love of film that should be at the event's core.
While journalists who cared about the Oscars could at one time all fit into a small booth at Nicodell's on Melrose, the advent of the Web and its ugly, insatiable appetite for anything smacking of celebrity has meant that hordes of folks are now thick on the ground, scorching the earth in search of tidbits and chitchat.
The problem with this obsessive quest, with constantly taking the temperature of contenders as if they were billionaires in an intensive-care ward, is that it becomes an end unto itself.
In the case of "Slumdog," for instance, the dealing with rumors and counter-rumors about how the film's young actors were treated, of paying attention to the dunderheaded "poverty porn" backlash and then the backlash against the backlash, had the effect of obscuring the film itself. As a result, where ordinarily I would have felt nothing but joy at "Slumdog's" multiple victories, an underdog-makes-good tale every bit as improbable as the one told on screen, I found myself feeling simply relief that the film had survived the gantlet of 24/7 media attention without self-destructing or worse. This is the tail wagging the dog in a really unfortunate way.
