27 Feb Hooray for Gollywood: Entertainment at the Edge of the Abyss

Thank God Oscar Night has come and gone with all of its suffocating hyperbole, ever-deepening cleavage, breathless fans and endless pre, post and live television coverage. I’m not sure I could take another day of Mickey Rourke trying to smile but looking vaguely like a hung-over poet, and Kate Winslet bravely attempting to appear sexy and serious at the same time.

With Oscar in the can for another year, life can return to normal in old L.A., getting back to gang wars, celebrity abuse, freeway violence and other cultural pursuits.

I don’t know about the folks in places like Altoona, Pennsylvania, or Gridley, Kansas, but in the City of Angels there is more to life than death and taxes. There are not only the Oscars but also the Emmys, Grammys and Golden Globes.

They rank right up there with other elemental rituals that keep us going from day to day paying taxes, dodging death and waiting to see if the actress we love most will shower her peers with grateful air kisses upon receipt of an entertainment award, as the cadenced applause of the losers fills the auditorium.

I suffered through the Academy Awards along with about 35 million others because, as they say, it’s the grand-mommy of them all, acknowledging cinematic achievements, if not talent, since the days of the talkies with the presentation of gold-plated statuettes called Oscar.

While New York has its Tonys, the hoedown states their People’s Choice Awards, and unregenerated hippies their Spirit Awards, in L.A. we have not only the aforementioned, but honors piled upon honors by such as the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild and no doubt very soon now the International Guild of Dry Wall Plasterers. Yes, the Wally.

The importance of the Oscars must never be taken for granted. Like those among the terminally ill who fight to stay alive until Christmas, the same emotional draw keeps dying patients clinging to life long enough to hear who wins best picture, and then expiring with satisfaction thereafter. And while I am inclined to dismiss as urban legend a woman who delayed her suicide until after the awards had been distributed, one never knows.

It is axiomatic that America, in the midst of economic crisis, needs entertainment to help it forget that the wolves of Wall Street and the nitwits who once occupied D.C. have brought us to the edge of the abyss. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was established in 1929, the year that the Great Depression put America on its arse, to offer cinema as a panacea for hunger. We need that now as we did then. We need Mama Mia and the Terminator, we need high school musicals and teenaged girls in peril, we need stunt coordinators and blast experts, we need, well, Jim Carrey.

Huh?

I use Carrey only as a modest example of Hollywood self-absorption. If it were actually up to Carrey to pull us back from the edge we’d be in deeper trouble than we already are. Judging by a single encounter, I am inclined to conclude that, like most performers, he is oblivious to anyone but himself. I saw him once in a Beverly Hills restaurant, his necked stretched above the crowd like a flag over a fog bank and a smile of neon wattage, both constituted to attract attention to himself.

At one point I thought he had actually levitated and was spinning above the room, but it appeared to be only an optical illusion created by the power of his ego to dazzle and confuse.

While not up for acting honors or even noticed in the tabloids for the joyful iniquities that often characterize celebs, Carrey is a part of the mechanism that generates the Hollywood Mystique so successfully that when the award shows roll around, they are acknowledged with the same evangelical fervor that might greet Jesus riding a pony into the Kodak Theater.

And while the actors are honoring each other inside, crowds of mindless fans are screaming themselves hoarse outside although there is no reason to scream since anyone of prominence is already inside. A psychologist suggested that once they start screaming, as they do when the stars are actually on the red carpet, they are unable to stop; they are like a runaway train streaking down the tracks, smashing aside whatever is in its way.

A need for public entertainment in hard times explains our national fixation with award shows, most notably the Oscar presentations, but there is an additional factor here. L.A. is a show biz town and its movie fans tend to be more, well, emotionally involved than most. We take seriously that moment on stage when an actress in a Vera Wang gown clutches Oscar to her gleaming breast and tells us how much she loves and owes us.

In love-hungry L.A., these are moments to remember.

— Al Martinez