The fun part of winter is over. After it was over, it snowed for 30 weeks, and the cat got a toothache, and all the matches on Hinge were unappealing. I applied for Survivor. (Legitimately this time.) Everything Everywhere won Best Picture and somehow became a Dad Movie, instantly, overnight. I survived a shitty February and an anemic March. It’s the end of the first quarter and no one knows the score.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, is the question of striving. Maybe the first quarter is the time for thinking ahead and not actually doing ahead, because couches are comfy and movies are great. Thinking without doing promotes anxiety, at least in me; but, providing myself a bit of space to look between the two things, it also made me realize that I am forever balancing two irreconcilable “truths,” like (probably) many living humans: my life is going pretty good; and there are things I want that I don’t have.
How hard do I strive after the latter? Would things be better if I was just perfectly content with the former? Would that, in turn, be a recipe for torpor, listlessness? Are these neurotic thoughts? Round and round in my head it all goes. How hard do I try to do a thing that I don’t need to do but want to do? How hard to I work to like work? Fuck capitalism anyway, etc., and so forth? Which way is “up?”
In the meantime: I got some advice on one writing project and immediately parked it (!); and walked through some process-y musings on another one and immediately rewrote it. I put the least commercially viable project on my docket back on the priority list, with the intention to finish it this summer.
I find a scant 15 or 20 minutes every other day, on average, in which I can do the very real work of pushing the writing project(s) forward. It’s very, very weird to be working through creative work with no clear output in mind; I am trying very, very hard to make the doing of it the point, in the absence of any real gambling odds on the other point (i.e. that these things will find an enormous audience, make me financially very liquid, and result in hugs and kittens raining from the Tokyo sky).
It’s also very weird to be in the middle of something I might find complete or satisfying or worthwhile in the end, when the end might be months or years away. I have never really understood how people do it, even professionally — committing to direct, say, a feature film, when it will take 2 years of your very best concentration and effort to get to the end, and you have to believe in the picture in your head the whole time — except, I guess, to do it. They do it because they do it. It happens because it happens. There is no “up.”
No but seriously, the Oscars
Mamo! (the show about movies and popular culture) genuinely, really, no for real this time I do not care how much you miss it, outlived its usefulness about six years ago — and that’s why we folded it up. But, that said, I have rarely missed the outlet more than I did in the days following the 95th annual Academy Awards.
They were fine. (Price didn’t watch.) The telecast’s “they were fine”-ness was, arguably, the entire articulation of the point: after the absolute bullshit last year, the American film academy’s voting body needed to reestablish itself as a safe, predictable, comfortingly familiar “thing” that we all do one Sunday night in February/March. Which — they did! Kudos, one and all!
What’s weird is, all of the post-game coverage accomplished exactly one thing, which was to make me really want to rewatch the 93rd annual Academy Awards. You know — that one.
People shit on that one all the time. People who should know better shit on that one; and people who don’t know better shit on that one. I think it’s realistic to think that “that one” is going to get shit on in every review of every Academy Awards show for the rest of this decade, before popping up intermittently in other coverage for as long as Academy Award shows continue to exist. It is very popular to shit on that one: the weird one where there wasn’t an audience, wasn’t a big ballroom or a red carpet; and the Oscars were thereby reduced down to their only inextractible element: a room full of famous people giving each other prizes for stuff they’d done that was, charitably, of questionable overall cultural value, but mattered to the industry within which they are all employed.
(For the record: Nomadland was my favourite film of 2020.)
As an artifact of a) cinema, b) the pandemic era, and c) the state and nature of cultural institutions as an element of, and participant in, human affairs, I think the 93rd needs to go into the Criterion Collection.
Now, I’m biased on all this; especially with regard to point c), in that I was part of the efforts to, for whatever it’s worth, keep a cinema institution afloat in the year in which we weren’t going to movie theatres. There are a lot of parallels between pandemic-era Oscars and pandemic-era me, and I consider those aspects valuable and important, perhaps in ways that others would (and should) not.
But I need to return to point b) a bit, because I think (as with just so many things about the last three years), we are in tangible reach of simply forgetting what just happened to us, as a way of coping with the fact that it was awkward, and imperfect, and we didn’t exactly “nail it.” The pandemic era, such as it was, demonstrated in no uncertain terms just how Not Ready the human race is: as a body, as a political entity, as a series of ideas. It was disappointing, and honest; and looking at it with clear eyes leaves us way too vulnerable to the sort of reckoning with our frailties that I do not think our culture is wired to really accept any more.
The 93rd Academy Awards, like just about everything else in 2020 and 2021 that tried to adapt “normal” for a set of circumstances that were anything but, was completely unsuccessful at pretending the problem wasn’t there, and that life was rolling merrily along. I think that makes it more valuable as a piece of pop culture than pretty much anything in the Academy’s pantheon since Letterman hosted in 1995 (although the Moonlight swap comes close). I think most telecasts wish they had the kind of permanent, century-defining relevance to who we are as human beings that is part-and-parcel to the 2021 Oscars. I think we dismiss that show as “bad television” or whateverthefuck at our very, very great jeopardy.
ITEMS!:
- I finally saw Michael Clayton, and yeah, wow, that fucking movie
- Please follow me on Letterboxd; it’s probably the last social network I’ll ever be on
- Picard is happening, so naturally I am gradually and very randomly filling in the Blogging The Next Generation archive; and yeah, also, because I don’t have enough stuff to procrastinate with, considering a 30-part addendum on the sequel show
- I bought dumbbells. Fuck