Filthy says:
"Seriously, fuck them."

Maybe there are some interesting flicks playing near you, but it's dry here in Arvada. This time of year, it's more fun going down to Olde Town and watching local business fold. Not to worry, though; the Arvada Tavern is still open for business and the beer's as cold as a penguin's dick. The ratty office space above the Tavern is available, though. I have thins dream that someday I'll be so damn rich I can rent that. When I get so loaded on cough syrup and Budweiser that I can't walk or ride a bike, I just stumble upstairs and sleep it off with my head pressed against the floor so I can hear if Worm talks shit about me. In the morning, I go down thirteen steps and start all over again.

Actually, in my dream I also have a wheelchair that can climb stairs for me and has a hole in the seat for me to crap through. Oh, and I tell the Harelip I dropped a quarter down there at just the right moment. Oh, and that festering spot on my wrist oozes diamonds, not pus. Oh, and goats don't have satanic eyes.

So, it's a shitty time for movies and that's a big reason why I didn't fucking bother going this week. The other reason is they raised the price of tickets again. Good fucking God. Who long will it be before someone burns down the damn Olde Town 14 after paying ten bucks to see Four Christmases? I called the Arvada Police (from a phone booth at Chuck E. Cheese, with a napkin over the mouthpiece) to ask if someone would be arrested for arson and all they could say was, "We'll get back to you." To be fair, I tried to buy a ticket, but the new, overly-friendly Asperger's dude at the ticket counter knows the difference between a plastic button and a quarter.

I feel sorry for that guy. The new owners of the theater make him walk into each theater and thank everyone and tell us how our seats are flotation devices before the previews start. But the projectionist doesn't turn down the volume of the ads, and the teenagers throw shit at him. Yet, he comes out and does it every time. Some dumbass in management must think people are more likely to return if some oddball shouts at them.

So, to save myself ten bucks and because it still bugs the shit out of me, I'm gonna talk some more about the God damn Academy Awards. Why do people give a shit about them? Well, people give a shit about a lot of irrelevant stuff, like what celebrities name their future-adderall-addicted, VH1-reality-show-featured offspring, or what color to paint a baby's room.

Why the fuck does anyone care what "The Academy" thinks? First, it's no academy; it's a self-promotion tool for the film industry that may have had grand intentions 80 years ago, but is now little more than a shitty annual awards show with a few meager film collections in a vault somewhere.

People think of the Academy as some sort of amorphous, all-knowing thing. It's not. It is made up of 6,000 people who make their living on the swill Hollywood forces down our throats every year. When you care what the Academy likes, you're saying, "Elton John, tell me what to watch!" "John Singleton, director of 2 Fast, 2 Furious, what DVD should I own?" "Betty Thomas, you did such a great job on John Tucker Must Die that I'm dying to know what you liked best last year of all the crap you got sent a free DVD of." You also get the expert opinion of Greg Cannon, who did the makeup on Van Helsing and the hateful asshole who wrote You've Got mail thrown in for free. Oh, yeah, Jerry Fuckenheimer gets a vote too. You see, these aren't all-knowing geniuses. They're the same pricks who ream you up the ass with retreads for 95% of the year, because they don't want to try anything new.

Besides having bad taste and poor execution, these people also want future jobs and sure as shit are going to vote for the people they hope to work with, or who they have worked with before and liked. The Academy members who aren't so damn old they're senile or juicing their Depends don't give a shit too much about what was the best movie, just what was best within their circle of acquaintances. They also don't get out much. They don't see the movies in theaters every week; they get deluxe-packaged "For Your Consideration" to watch in their living room, while making dinner, doing e-mail, surfing porn or writing the script for the next Police Academy. Hell, I'm not even in their business and I can manage to get to a movie theater every week, to watch movies undistracted and on the big screen. Of course, I'm not like the fatheads in Hollywood who all seem to think they are special and need privacy. Clearly, that's why they choose to work in movies.

Hell, how can the Academy know what's good if they can't even make a decent awards show? It has to be some of the most boring-ass television ever shown, right up there with All-Pro football game and those weird-ass Pakistan-India cricket marathons on dish network. They try to hip it up, but they're old and more concerned about being TV-friendly than good. These people want to tell us what movies to love and they keep hiring that unfunny, neckless ogre Bruce Vilanch to write their jokes. God, I hope he does a Bill Clinton gag this year. Up until a few years ago they insisted on putting in infamously sad dance numbers that nobody ever liked except for dancers. And dancers have notoriously bad taste. Who do you think watches figure skating, drives Geo Metro convertibles and listens to Ani diFranco records. Still, the show is three or four fucking hours of unintelligent people reciting bad jokes and trite tributes from a teleprompter. They'll cut to Jack Nicholson smiling, they'll cut to the guy who was just the butt of some tepid jab and show what a good sport he is. They'll cut off someone who shouldn't even be allowed to speak his or her own thoughts in public to begin with. And the bulk of the show will be people reading thank yous to agents and husbands from a tiny piece of wrinkled paper. This is the culmination, the majesty, of the Academy Awards. This shitty ceremony is pretty much the only reason the Academy still exists. It's good business for ABC, and good business for Hollywood. And it stroked the ego of the talent. And, it's something that if you wait eight hours, you can get all you wanted to know in five minutes from the newspaper.

Most importantly, though, is this: make up your own mind about what the best movie, best actor, best director was. Look, you either love something or not. And your reasons can be completely different from the "Academy's" and still be perfectly valid. You poo freaks can vote for the movie with the most realistic depiction of a boy covered in wet diarrhea - Slumdog Millionaire. You nostalgia TV fans with no ability to remember what it was you liked about an old TV show can pick Get Smart. The point is, don't give a rat's ass what the Academy picks and you'll be happier. You have every reason to not even make the effort to agree or disagree with them. They are fucking idiots who are only important because you let them tell you they are. Like david Blaine on a bigger scale.

Listen, you don't need 6,000 industry hacks to water it down, weed out the independent movies and the foreign flicks for you, then filter it through the bullshit sentimentality of who they like and who they feel sorry for because he died or is dying, who should get one because she's been in bad movies for fifty years and now is old and the expectation for a good performance is so reduced they ought to give her something for just showing up, and which movie feels the most to them like political activism without having to leave their sofas.

Fuck the Academy Awards. You know better than they do what you like. And you aren't a self-promoting band of pricks hoping to God nobody notices you're just the emperor wearing no clothes.

Want to tell Filthy Something?

Pete Hamond of Hollywood.com

Hotel for Dogs:"One comedy will have you begging for more!"