Oscar The Gossip

The Oscars are over, semi-irrelevant again. No one, not even the winners, had much to say and could only say what they had to say in their allotment of :45 seconds. Bah humbug!

On the Roddan Scale of Consensual Approval (1-7, 1 the lowest and 7 highest), the Oscars achieved a score of 3.5. The ‘ceremony’ drew 19 million viewers, in comparison to Superbowl LIX’s all-time viewership of 127. 7 million.

During the broadcast there was the obligatory roll-call of those who had, as recently as 2025, become deceased. Have I used the past tense here? Or even worse, the pluperfect?

I am glad to know that Quentin Tarantino is still alive, as I enjoy his movies, a big fan!

Onstage, Oprah is Oprah and Whoopi Goldberg now looks like someone else.

3 people in the front 2 rows of the ceremony got up and danced to Queen Latifah. They were, to the best of my knowledge, white people.

Anora won Best Picture. I haven’t seen Anora, I thought it was a breed of sheep, then a high-energy protein- based powder I could stir into my drink.

I do want to see The Brutalist, a 3-plus hour movie starring the star, Adrien Brody. 

There’s a good piece written by Anna Kode in yesterday’s NYTimes (March 2, 2025) with the headline, “The Polarizing Politics of Brutalism”, which I am reading with my morning cup of darkness. Anna’s smart, she sees through the beautiful Brutalist style of many of these buildings to the ugly intentions of the current criminal element now in charge in D.C.

Brutalism is misunderstood as is the fiction of Samuel Beckett.

 Beckett remains refreshing despite repetition and the oddly and often desperate sorts of appeals made on behalf of idiots, half-wits, pontificators and other self-important creatures…I don’t know exactly why I love Beckett: the tangle of sentences always make some sort of sense to me, and I often find myself laughing and crying, or crying and laughing. I don’t know of another writer who had more fun with pretension or persiflage than Samuel Beckett. I know he’d be a star onstage.