Academy Awards

The Academy Awards are such a weird thing.  Now with all these other awards shows, do they mean anything? Of course they do for a career, but they are and have always been so caught up in all the Hollywood bullshit, that I have ambivalent feelings about them.  Once we begin to lobby for ourselves to win, and once we start thinking that our creations deserve to win anything, i think we sabotage ourselves and our projects.  We then start honing our stories and ideas and actors to an accepted paradigm. In the long run, I think we cheat both ourselves and our audiences..........but I think we all grew up watching them and anticipating the outcomes......I think it is an interesting time to assess what the Hollywood vein of film makers are doing and thinking......it's a time to get a feel for the pulse of the industry and how we fit or don't.......and it's also a time to discover some new talent and maybe get pissed off at some of the old..............what I think the show has forgotten, is that the awards should be a celebration of film and film making.....instead of creating lame  comedy routines and t rying so hard to appeal to a certain demographic, why don't we go back to what we all love....FILM......show more film clips....show long enough clips of the actors and movies to get a real feel for the performances and the stories......and encourage the winners to hold down all their long lists of thank yous and talk instead about the films or the process or their inspirations.....the most memorable moment shave always been off the cuff comments or interesting stories, or heartfelt emotions.....if you're reading an unending list of thank yous, then you should be cut off, but if you are engaging the audience with something more original, lets hear it.........let's bring back a little more intelligence and a little more class to an industry which is sinking into hurtfulll humor and boring
celebrities so out of touch with everyday life...........and let's start celebrating the brilliant film makers and actors of the past a bit more....not just American, but all of the foreign geniuses .........we should finish watching the show filled with the passion to explore more films and more directors.............and more unknown artists who are creating brilliant but unseen work.............................and talk about brilliant work, the single best performance I saw all year by any actor was John Hawkes in Winter's Bone...........to me, his performance soared into another stratosphere........it was so good that I went home and googled him after seeing the movie to see if he was a real actor or a real life character from those Missouri mountains.....his performance left you constantly uneasy, off balance and was so unpredictable from moment to moment that  it brought that film to another level of immediacy.  Seeing a performance like that is such an inspiration to me to push my ideas and art to another level, to never accept the comfortable, but to take the chance and go for something you are not sure you are able nail.   But just the attempt is invigorating and exciting for us as artists and the audience as viewers...............