Oscar afterthoughts.

That was a long night of blogging yesterday! But watching the Oscars without blogging is much more of a slog. And I relied heavily on TiVo, so, really, it was a snap compared to just sitting around watching in real time. I skipped nearly all of the speeches, all of the commercials, all of the walking to the the stage, and (the best part) all of the singing. I also skipped all the pre-shows, so I didn't really get the chance to see as much of the fashions as I would have liked. I also got so preoccupied writing that I didn't check around to see what other folks were writing.

This morning I see that this character, apparently a somewhat popular blogger, spent the entire evening simulblogging my simulblogging. His motivation seems to have been that he had me pegged as a conservative, the sort of person he despises, so he was going to wait around and jump on me for jumping on Hollywood for being liberal. In classic lefty form, he makes plainly sexist remarks without seeming to think it counts against him! And his commenters fail to call him on it. His long post mostly consists of my statements, copied. To this he adds his repeated assertions that I'm boring and boys won't like me because I'm mean and his generic comments that mostly just express antagonism toward a crude right-wing stereotype that has little to do with me (including imputations of racism based on utterly nothing that appears in my post). What a shameful display! He does append a meager apology at the end, when it seems to finally dawn on him that he'd been off in some fantasy world of his own all night, ideating about me. What the very idea of a woman with opinions does to a man's... mind! Oh, and one of our regular commenters, who stooped to a sexist insult against me here yesterday, shows up over there and preens about that insult, without admitting that it was a sexist insult and that he apologized for it here. Apology not accepted!

Anyway, I didn't get much chance to talk about politics, because, even with Jon Stewart hosting, I heard very little politics. I think somebody thought a lot about how to avoid offending ordinary Americans, whom they need to keep going to the movies, when they had a political host and so many heavily political or politicized movies among the nominees. The memo seems to have gone out. Quite rationally, the decision was to focus on the positive, how Hollywood has supported good values, like ending bigotry. The war and President Bush were not mentioned (or if they were, it was rare and I missed it). I think the stars were advised to act serious and elegant. Perhaps they were told to play Old Hollywood. Something caused nearly all the women to wear either black or beige dresses and to pull their hair back into a soft bun. Something caused the presenters to drain the life and playfulness out of their voices. They really do want us to love them, but when we see how they act when they are trying to win our love, we get a sense of what they really think we are like. We're the people in the dark, featureless, mindless. They were trying to fit in with us. A dreary display!

I haven't read the newspaper commentary yet, but I assume there will be a lot of analysis of why "Crash" beat out "Brokeback Mountain." Were the Hollywooders trying to make the America it imagines like them? It's hard to see how group behavior can mean that much. It can't be just a matter of getting tired of the frontrunner, because there were so many other predictable winners last night. What about the possibility that "Crash" is actually a better movie? But maybe the voters really did think it was a good idea to express their social consciousness in the anti-racism mode rather than the anti-homophobia mode, because America's caught up on the proposition that racism is wrong.