OK. Let me just speak directly to the Academy. And I offer this in the best, most generous possible spirit:
If you select “Boyhood” as the Best Picture of the Year…You are done. You are dead to me! I don’t know you or your family.
Because I have had it! I. Have had. IT!
Or, I will have had it, to use the future subjunctive mood, since we don’t yet know what’s in the hermetically sealed jar on Funk & Wagnall’s porch. We have only a sneaking suspicion. And if our suspicions are borne out, we will be in an extremely subjunctive mood!
I’m just sayin’.
You know what?! No! I’m not just sayin’. I’m warning you!
Don’t do it! Do not choose a tedious, pointless underwhelming piece of tedious (yes, I said it twice!) monotony as the Best Picture of the Year just because it took the guy 12 years to make it.
Of course it took him 12 years! He kept falling asleep!
Not only that, his actors probably wandered away, not recognizing that movie-making was in the works. Like so many Alzheimer’s patients, they drifted off toward the mall, unaware that anything requiring their presence was underway nearby.
They had to be tracked down and corralled again and again and made to go through the same mundane motions they’d just completed the year before when they were 12 months younger. Wow. Isn’t that amazing.
But no worries! It wasn’t a hardship for them. After all, there were no lines to learn or depths of emotion to plumb. Nobody was put out by the pesky demands of acting! There was no need of a method!
Furthermore, the film has no beginning. It just starts. Of course every film just starts, but come on! Good story telling leaps into the middle of the action. We are plunged into the grit, the heart, the essence of our protagonist and his struggles. But not in this compilation of scenes:
“The child of divorced parents, Mason, learns to navigate through a world in which the strengths and frailties of the adults around him have a profound impact on his own life.”
No. Not profound. More accurately, the impacts are common. Typical. Run-of-the-mill. Every day. No need for concern. And oh, what I wouldn’t give for some good, old-fashioned concern!
Ah, there it is! Maybe this film was put together for those who need a break from the stress of dramatic conflict. There must have been those movie goers who cried out for a respite from so much man against man, man against nature, and man against himself. All that exploration of the human condition was just too hard to take for those delicate ones.
Linklater to the rescue! But he didn’t ride up on his stallion, sabre aloft. More like he pulled up in a golf cart, wearing plenty of sunscreen, ever mindful to stay within the lines – not-too-hot, not-too-cold, but just room temp.
And how did they know when they were finished? My money says they didn’t know. They could go on for another decade and be no worse for the wear. As it is, they just drifted away from the apartment where Mr. Linklater had set up his camera and let it record whatever came into frame. OMG.
And the Academy’s all atwitter.
But you know what? That’s OK. I’m going to have my party anyway. People are coming with finger food wearing sparkly clothes and we are going to have fun! That haphazard assemblage of 7000 Academy members cannot dash our dreams.
Let them ignore the ballot for their zombie-like fixation on a trance-inducing 165 minute ordeal.
Go ahead and pass over “Whiplash,” and “American Sniper.” “Selma” for God’s sake! “The Theory of Everything”! “The Imitation Game”! If you want to go quirky choose “Birdman.” Or even “The Grand BudapestHotel.”
But “Boyhood”? No flippin’ way. No way!
If you choose “Boyhood” as the Best Picture of the Year, I swear I will never, ever go to Party City again and stock up on black and gold glittery decorations. No more helium balloons only to have your nonsensical decisions stick a pin in them!
Oh, all right. I will probably do just that.
Same time, next year.
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