A long time ago, in the days of underage drinking and roses, Maria José and The Resident Alien and I used to hang out with an annoying group of guys, partly because The Resident Alien had the classic tortured “I think he really loves me even though he won’t let me call him my boyfriend or else why would he have called me drunk at two in the morning” thing going on with Jack, but mostly because Jack’s parents had a delightful habit of going out of town for long periods of time and leaving their gigantic house stocked with unattended beer, so The Resident Alien would phone me up all “so?” and I’d go, “I don’t know — what’s going on tonight?” and she’d say all ultra-casual, “Um, Jack’s parents are in Zurich again, so,” and I’d go, “Oh, God. Again?” and The Resident Alien would try to wheedle me into going all “come on, it’s fun — it’s fun, right? Free beer? Don’t have to drive home? Nothing else to do? Fun? Kind of fun? Not completely un-fun?” and I’d sigh, “Okay, okay, three-way it,” and she’d patch in Maria José, who’d say, “So what are we doing?” and The Resident Alien would tell her about Jack’s parents and Zurich and the alleged lack of non-fun, and Maria José would wonder aloud how many times she and I could whip six guys at speed quarters and still keep it interesting, so we’d try to think of another activity, but we never came up with anything, and a few hours later Maria José would screech to a stop at the bottom of my driveway in the Peugeot and I’d run down and hop into the back seat and The Resident Alien would swear that we didn’t have to stay if it sucked, and I’d giggle, “But it always sucks,” and Maria José would giggle, “And we always stay,” and I’d say that maybe that meant that we sucked, and The Resident Alien, who tended to take everything we said way too seriously, would tell me very earnestly that I didn’t suck at all, and Maria José would go off on her usual rant about Jack’s friend Curt and how Curt sucked seventeen ways to Sunday because, in addition to calling beers “brewskis” and cheating blatantly at poker, he looked exactly like Ron Howard, and he furthermore seemed proud of the fact that the others called him “Opie Cunningham” and “the Ope-ster” to his face, like, have some dignity, man, and also, it’s Opie Taylor, everyone knows that for God’s sake, or Richie Cunningham, and does he have to strike a stupid pose every time he enters a room and wait for the rest of them to chime in with “Ohhhhhh-peeeee Cunninghaaaaaaaaaaam,” it’s so goddamn stupid and he’s not Norm and maybe he’ll get hit by a bus.

The anti-Opie rant would take us all the way to Jack’s house, because Maria José took Curt’s very existence as an affront not only to her personally but to the entire human race, and we’d get to Jack’s and breeze inside and Curt would try to bring the smooth all “heeeeey, Maria,” and Maria José would go “pffft — okay, not” and head for the keg while doing facial gymnastics that equated Curt with an intestinal parasite, so you can imagine The Resident Alien’s and my surprise one evening when we went out to the car and couldn’t find Maria José, and as we started to cross the street we saw her standing next to my car and totally icing the puck in tonsil hockey with Curt, and we hid behind a station wagon and peeked over the hood and giggled hysterically into our sleeves for five minutes, and finally The Resident Alien gasped, “We have to put a stop to this, I’m going to pee in my pants and also it’s ten minutes past my curfew,” so I took a deeeeeep breath and let out an “OHHHHHHHHH-PEEEEE CUNNINGHAAAAAAAAM” war whoop that made about seventeen lights go on in the houses on Jack’s street, and Curt and Maria José sprang apart, and Curt scuttled inside all red in the face and Maria José stalked over to the car and snarled, “Not ONE WORD out of EITHER OF YOU!” before storming into the back seat, so we waited exactly twenty-eight seconds before beginning to murmur “Ohhhhh-peeee Cunninghaaaaaam” very softly at random intervals over the next, oh, decade and then clapping our hands over our ears when Maria José roared, “I was VERY DRUNK, okay? Shut up! SHUT UP!” “Hey, did you know that your boyfriend directed Willow?” “What b– OKAY SHUT UP JESUS CHRIST!”

That’s not a very good story. It’s boring, it’s irrelevant, it drags on way too long and gets bogged down in stupid details that only a few people care about, it’s not very funny, and it contains Ron Howard. Hmm. Sounds familiar, eh what?

The Academy Awards this year totally reminded me of one of those endlessly dull evenings at Jack’s house back in the day — so irritating, and yet so tedious at the same time, but it’s the only game in town, so you stay and hope that something good will happen, but it never does, and the next thing you know it’s one in the morning and you find yourself praying that you’ll contract gangrene just to liven things up. I don’t recall ever having suffered through an Oscars broadcast as deadly as that one; by turns drearily slow and offensively unfunny, it made me long for a checkbook to balance or a revision of the tax code to read. I didn’t even want to write about it, really — what could I say? What comment could I make about five-plus hours of television so boring that I actually hoped Russell Crowe would win, take the podium, and recite Leaves of Grass in its entirety, because his doing so would actually shorten the ceremony’s running time?

Besides, I don’t know for sure what I saw on Sunday night, and what I hallucinated after hitting myself repeatedly in the head with a container of onion dip in a vain attempt to stay conscious. Did Jennifer Connelly actually look so desiccated that her very soul seemed to require a hot oil — or did I dream that? Did Jennifer Lopez really find a Pomeranian at the pound, take it home, kill it, give it a posthumous perm, and staple it to her head — or did I eat a Rice Krispie treat too soon before going to bed? I know that Q stared at Ananda Lewis’s spinny bracelet for a good ten minutes and then began to mutter, “Redrum. REDRUM!” with increasing fervor until I backhanded him across the face, but after that, it’s mostly a blur. Unfortunately, the occasional bubble rises from the murky cauldron of monotony and reminds me of the more regrettable moments of the evening.

One of these bubbles contains the supreme horror of Gwyneth Paltrow’s chest. Now, I do not claim, and have never claimed, to possess a perfect body. It is for that reason that I do not swan about in transparent mesh, showcasing not only a tiny and flabbily dejected pair of lopsided breasts but also an evidently advanced case of scoliosis. I like Gwyneth okay, and I certainly don’t expect her to be without flaw, but there’s just no way around it — she’s got ugly boobs, and she needs to cover them up. End of story. I don’t know why she chose that dress, and I don’t know why nobody talked her out of it, but I do know that the peanut gallery met her appearance with a wail of authentic dread.

We couldn’t muster up the energy to object to much else out loud — least of all Whoopi Goldberg, who lulled us into a numb stupor with the aggressive stench of flop sweat. Over and over again she’d assay a “joke”; wait for it to hit; wait a bit longer; goose it along by mugging; wait still longer, until the audience collectively decided to bail her out by pretending to laugh; ad-lib a dated line on race relations; on and on and on. I suppose we can blame most of the leaden material on that foul Muppet Vilanch and the rest of the Catskills corpses posing as joke writers for the Oscars, but it still ranks as one of the three most forced and stiff “comic” performances I’ve ever seen — and I’ve gone to Catch A Rising Star, people. In New Jersey. Okay? I’ve borne witness to some forced and stiff in my life. I’ve seen balloon animals tortured in the name of laughter. I’ve sat in a classroom, at a desk, and listened to a Richard Belzer manqué wax reverent about the rule of threes. Whoopi? Worse. So much worse. How much worse? Allow me to demonstrate.

Q: Why did the door go into the light?
A: Because of Care Bear.

My brother made up that “joke” at the age of four. It doesn’t make any kind of sense, that joke. Even my brother’s fellow nursery-schoolers heard that joke, got up, and gonged his little ass right out of story hour. Now, let me ask you this — for whom would you suffer the two-drink minimum? The Steven Wright-esque comedic stylings of my four-year-old brother? Or…Whoopi? I’ve got to go with my four-year-old brother, and that’s knowing how much material he borrowed from Blankie over the years.

I mean, damn. I liked her in The Color Purple and everything, but the best thing I can say about her showing on Sunday is that she remembered to take the curtain rod out of her outfit before going onstage. And it’s worth noting also that, at the end of the day, “Whoopi” is not a suitable name for a voting adult, particularly one who has no future in comedy.

At times, though, I found myself longing for Whoopi to return to the mic and revive the lost art of Lewinsky humor, because I have to tell you, I don’t give a good goddamn whether Tom fucking Cruise found a deeper meaning for the film industry in the events of September 11th, or whatever stupid live-a-deeper-life movies-allow-us-to-dream sanctimonious circle-jerk magical-escape bullshit phrasing he used while slurring through that unbearably pompous opening speech like a ninth-grade student-council treasurer candidate on barbiturates, and I have a difficult time believing that anyone else does either. If Woody Allen wants to talk about September 11th, that’s one thing. Woody Allen lives here. Woody Allen has a well-documented love affair with the city of New York. Woody Allen has more of a right to address the topic than Born On The Fourth Of Cindy Brady over there. But I don’t care what anyone in Hollywood thinks of the terrorist attacks. I don’t care whether movie stars rummaged around in their navels and found a reason to go on making movies, or what justification they came up with for their outlandishly luxurious lives, or how Zee Craaahhhhft Of Feeelm really totally does give something important back to our society, really, we swear, like, you know what? You ain’t firefighters, so stuff it in a sock.

I love movies, don’t get me wrong. I watch several movies a week. I go around annoying my friends with quotations from my favorites. I love sitting in the dark and sharing a jumbo pack of Twizzlers with Gustave and staging a whispered mock debate about whether one of Ryan Phillippe’s butt cheeks is larger than the other. Film is art, and art is important, even essential; it’s not that I don’t appreciate its significance to our culture. And I didn’t go down to Ground Zero and pull bodies out of the wreckage, so I don’t expect Tom Hanks to do it either. But the online community didn’t use the Diarist Awards as an excuse to make it All About Us and remind our readers that if we don’t forge ahead with entries on dating and barfing and retarded pets, the terrorists have already won. Hollywood did exactly that, and seeing September 11th used in the service of yet more self-congratulation on the part of the most self-congratulatory industry in the world made me want to vomit. Of course they went on making movies. It’s what they do. Life didn’t stop. But their need to reassure themselves, and us, that it’s okay for them to keep paying Schwarzenegger obscene amounts of money to sit around looking massive…yeah, we know. It’s fine. Now stop patting yourselves on the back and get on with it. I’d like to get to bed before April.

And that’s really all I remember. I remember using my Oscar pool ballot to practice origami, and I remember tuning out the Best Song nominees in favor of watching Deborah read a book, and I remember trying to persuade The Man From F.U.N.K.L.E. that Will Smith had left his seat due to an attack of the trots, but the rest of that marathon night seems like a gauzy, infinite nightmare. Kind of like Willow, actually, but without the Val Kilmer.

March 29, 2002

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