Ageless at The Oscars: The Boomers and the Bombs

At last night’s Academy Award presentation, there was an uneasy juxtaposition between the affable and  funny hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin and Oscar winning film, Hurt Locker.

Martin and Dan Aykroyd. "Two Wild and Crazy Guys"

Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, "Now do I have your attention."

Evidence of their baby boomer bona fides is their hosting of Saturday Night Live. Martin has hosted 15 times. Baldwin 14. Since its debut in 1975, Saturday Night Live helped a generation make the transition from  passionate idealism in the 60s to the reality based irony of today.

The men portrayed in Hurt Locker are Army volunteers defusing bombs in Iraq. There is little irony in searching out roadside bombs amidst a hostile if not combative populace.

The interpretive dance version of the nominated musical scores included a hip-hop, break dancing tribute to Hurt Locker where a lots guys fell down highlighted the chasm between the text and the subtext of the film. Hurt Locker became part of the award season spectacle and thus is another to squeeze viewership from its brand.

In Katherine Bigelow’s acceptance speech, she spoke about fellow producer and screenwriter

Katherine Bigelow, the first woman, to win Oscar for best director.

Marc Boal’s courageous script. Context is everything. And the pen may be more powerful than the sword, but they both get blown up by an IED. Gracefully both Bigelow and Boal thanked the troops and Bigeolow included hazmat workers and firemen.

Of course, the Academy Award history is replete with the awkward juxtaposition of the elation of award winners and the decidedly tragic subject matter of the winning films. This cringe-inducing reality was best expressed by Ricky Gervais at the 2009 Golden Globes, when he congratulated Kate Winslet for winning the Best Supporting Actress award for her role as a Nazi prison guard in The Reader.

“I told you, do a Holocaust movie and the awards come, didn’t I?”

2009, Golden Globes, Ricky Gervais to Kate Winslet ‘I told you, do a Holocaust movie and the awards come, didn’t I?

Winslet went on the win the Oscar for best actress in 2009 and her speech was professional and thankfully unmemorable.

As a devoted Oscar fan, (I watch every year and bet on each category), I acknowledge that I buy into the hype and the nature of this most prestigious of “pseudo-events.” Daniel Boorstin’s profound analysis of American culture, “The Image,” characterizes a “pseudo-event” as follows:

1. It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.

2. It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced. Therefore, its occurrence is arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media. Its success is measured by how widely it is reported…. The question “Is it real?” is less important than, “Is it newsworthy?”

3. Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. Its interest arises largely from this very ambiguity…. While the news interest in a train wreck is in what happened and in the real consequences, the interest in an interview is always, in a sense, in whether it really happened and in what might have been the motives. Did the statement really mean what it said?

4. Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Reality

And now today, TV, newspapers, blogs, radio, and social networking sites will cluck and chatter and comment on dresses (what’s up with Tina Fey?) and add their own spin to one of the grandest of the “pseudo events.”

And this year, I thank my blog platform software for giving me this opportunity to join in the mess.