Myer, Grouch, astronotus ocellatus. A singing wiener, a distempered green muppet and a South American freshwater fish. While all three share the name of that naked statuette that will make the rounds tonight, I can only hope for their appearance onstage, perhaps to flip the bird at that golden mantelpiece decoration.

I marvel at my ability to withstand years of oppression and abuse upon my sanity, mercilessly doled out by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences like a cantankerous lunch lady. Yet like some hopeless drug addict clamouring for one final fix while wasting away on the streets of an inner-city ghetto, I keep crawling back to witness and watch every year, as I throw caution to the wind and renounce any semblance of common sense.

Award shows are a funny creation. On the one hand, the whole charade smells of shameless self-promotion. In the run-up to a ceremony where an industry is supposed to be celebrating excellence in movie-making, we are faced with arse-kissing campaigns reminiscent of student politics. The well-oiled P.R. machines and studios have engaged in a masturbatory display of adulation, trying to one-up each other in the minds of the voting members. “My list of nominations is bigger than yours…”

At the same time however, the show continues to dedicate a portion of its broadcast to remembrance: one of the few highlights of each year is the annual scrolling of those who are no more, ceased to be, expired and gone to meet their respective makers. Even the coldest and blackest of hearts must be warmed as the well-dressed pay tribute to their fallen comrades.

Enough pre-show musing. To borrow an oft used phrase, let’s get it on!

(What follows has been pieced together from scribbles found scratched into stale slices of bread with what appears to be a rusty pair of knitting needles. Preliminary analysis shows that the author suffered from a mental breakdown.)

golden statuettes are dancing around my head….one of them started speaking to me about Marx…Albert Brooks thinks White Chicks was the bomb…James Bond is croaking to a computer animated midget with a German accent...have I waltzed into a fantastical amalgamation of technology and espionage? I swear I’ve seen the same trick done countless times before… is that roadkill atop Adam Duritz’s tête – someone call the SPCA… Strapless gowns and backless dresses, rented tuxes and overpriced suits, thick rimmed glasses and wrap-around shades (but a notable lack of Jack) – a field day for fashionistas…respectful applause for Brando - one almost expects a final slap from beyond the grave...

Fear, Loathing and a Tangential Exploration of the Unknown

I may be off-base here, but I would surmise that the members of my generation (the ubiquitous 18-24 sect) will remember the dearly demised doctor through one of two mediums – comic strips and film. Not being well versed in Doonesbury, I’ll instead touch upon what Robert Mitchum on Pitchfork wrote: “the cultural distortion of his personality into a grinning Johnny Depp gripping a cigarette holder between his teeth and popping mescaline.” No doubt many of my contemporaries and peers will have that cinematic image imprinted into our collective minds. Anyone worth his weight in mescaline will gleefully recall the immortal words first uttered in the film (and printed in the book): We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

Chemical dependencies aside, cultural distortion, when used above, certainly raises some interesting questions. Has Depp created a situation where art imitates life so successfully that it actually supersedes the source? When we think of the words “godfather” and “mafia”, is not the first image that materialises in our craniums a mumbling Marlon Brando?

But what about life imitating art? In Tennessee, two boys were arrested for re-enacting an admittedly violent video game – Grand Theft Auto. Out of sheer boredom, the boys aged 13 and 15, decided to shoot at real vehicles on a real highway, and ultimately, resulting in a real death. Or what about the hyperbolic vitriol spewed forth by groups in the US over Spongebob Squarepants and the promotion of accepting homosexuality (as far as I can discern, the original complaint stems from the fact that Sponge and his male starfish pal, Patrick, are seen holding hands). If these fools are to argue that a single instance of cartoon character can, and will, influence children, my only question would be: where were you all when really appalling behaviour is being broadcast? Where were the howls of outrage when grown men and women (read: people our children should be looking up to) are forced to consume animal testicles and jump off cliffs for cash?

Of course, the cultural phenomenon of voyeurism is so abrasively amped up several notches in the Far East. Thanks to the wonders of piracy and the Internet, I had the “pleasure” of viewing a particularly grotesque form of torture. Not the graphic humiliation of school girls in pornographic snuff films though; what I witnessed was a televised event broadcast in Japan. Given my rusty handle on the language, and the half-baked interpretation I received, the story unfolds like so:

Two years ago, at the start of the Nippon Professional Baseball Season, two television comedians made a wager on whose team would win the league. The loser of this particular bet would undergo the greatest public humiliation known to mankind – for 23 minutes, the winner will essentially “own” the loser. Whatever the winner says, the loser must do, without protesting or reacting.

His punishment arrives in the form of the cream-pie-in-the-face-gag. What starts out as an innocent joke (a cream pie for every minute passed), quickly escalates into pure mob rule. Laughing and giggling the entire time, his tormentors proceed to throw that single rule out the window, and pelt the loser at choice moments. When he’s told to light a cigarette. When he’s told to fetch the newspaper. When he’s told to sit on the can. A particularly awful segment involved the loser being ordered to take a shower, only to be met with fresh pies to the head, chest and groin. The final blow was served by the winner himself, as the loser, naked and pinned to his bed by a group of men, pleads for mercy.

Ouch.

While I do cringe at the whole debacle, I must tip my hat to the winner for devising the entire spectacle. “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Oh, how true you were Doctor, how true you were.

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, 1937 – 2005.