The Academy Awards really happen in too insular a vacuum. If they could expand their nominee slot to ten they might be able to broaden their choices. As it is, the same kind of movie gets in year after year. My 18 year-old calls it the “Oscar movie and it’s always the same movie.” The other problem is that the public is selected out in the new normal of the race once they pushed the date back by a month. Now there is no time for movies to break into an already fixed race. This year, for instance, the same movies that were ahead in September stayed ahead. Ditto last year and the year before. The Revenant looked like it would break the mold and it almost did but no, Best Picture winners have to be seen much earlier than that to win.
So all of that is true. But this video bugged me for a few reasons that kept me from thinking it was spot on. Its comedy, like so many of the parody videos of the Oscars, is way too dudebro-focused. It’s so annoyingly dude-bro that I could barely get through it. Dudebros control everything now – most of the perception of everything online, from Bernie Sanders to pop culture to video games. So it’s annoying to have them watch them try to parse why “racial tension” in a movie isn’t something to laugh about. Or a gay love story isn’t a big deal when it breaks through. So that bugged me. Dude-bros just can’t stand it when things are about anything other than their reality: watching football in white socks, eating pizza, surfing porn. It’s just one point of view and that point of view is, to me, far more irritating than the “Oscar movie.” Why pick on Viola Davis? Because they can. Get over it. What are you, 12?
Anyway, there are funny parts like “child actors with three names.” And some of the shot references are funny. But otherwise, MEH.
