Chesil's Musings

The Oscars

I watched the Oscars last night. If the statistics are to be believed, I was in good company with around 600 million others around the world. Can you imagine 600 million people all doing the same thing? It boggles my mind to think about it. All of us sitting watching patiently and then when the ads arrive (assuming an average of two people watching per household) 300 million toilets being flushed at the same time! You would have thought that such a movement of water would actually disturb the environment? What a perfect system the Earth is to be able to assimilate such an unexpected shock and carry on regardless!

But, I digress. I watched the Oscars last night. I don't really know why. I am not particularly a great film fan, I don't go to the movies, I watch little television - less than an hour a day average - and we don't rent videos and don't buy too many either. But still I watched the Oscars. I watched the Grammies the other week too and don't really know why. I seem to like watching these award shows. The format is almost always the same: a brief snippet that gives no real sense of performance, followed by the speech. The speech is always the same too: thank you God, thank you mom and dad and thank you Ridley Scott. I quite like Steve Martin but would not go out of my way to see him perform. So why do I and the other 600 million watch?

I suppose some of the attraction is to see these celebrities dressed in their finery, competing with each other for the attention of the media and the public. The ladies appear to compete by the amount of skin they are daring to show, which, sadly,will still get them better coverage in the newspapers the following day. And the men - well, the men actually all dress pretty much the same. They do seem to act the strangest during the TV interviews though. Anthony Hopkins, for example, was virtually monosyllabic. Was this a strange way of bringing attention to Hannibal 2 or whatever it is called? Morgan Freeman was wearing an extremely unusual pair of sunglasses - was this his way of getting attention, being remembered? But to what end? All the casting people would have been at the show anyway so whose attention were they trying to attract? In that sense, or rather the sense of today's newspapers, it was apparent that more women were being interviewed than men and mostly women with 'interesting' outfits.

But is this enough to capture the attention of 600 million viewers? It seems so, the entertainment, such as it was, would never ever reach prime time otherwise. So it must be some sort of vicarious satisfaction from just being among all those celebrities?

It made me think about films I have seen and those I saw as a child. Can you remember which was the first film you went to see? The first one I recall actually going to see was Bambi. I recall being in floods of tears at the sad bit - started a trend for me and I still can't watch sad movies without tears springing unbidden to my eyes. Favorite film? A bit like favorite book or poem. The choice would change frequently. If it was determined by which film I had seen most then it would probably be The Great Escape. I saw it first in the cinema in Brunei - it was always strange that the script was dubbed into Malay and the film had English subtitles. I saw it again on a rerun in the cinema in England and must have seen it more than a dozen times on TV as it was always a Christmas film in the UK.

A number of films have changed perspectives of certain things. I recall being extremely shocked by The Deer Hunter and also by The Killing Fields. Vietnam and Cambodia had sort of passed me by as I am English and was living in England which had no direct involvement but these films gave me a real insight into the horror of both conflicts.

But mostly, I watch films to be taken to a fantasy world and so I enjoy the James Bond films, Star Wars and the Indiana Jones series. I have never watched horror films since the Exorcist took them away from the harmless and non-frightening Dracula movies, featuring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and into real horror areas. I dream about them and am unsettled for days and so I avoid them.