among reality television contestants, referring to yourself in the third person is usually the biggest giveaway of mental instability.
the number of times a person attempts to casually solicit interest in their upcoming travel destination is directly inverse to the number of interesting places they’ve been in their life.
i was convinced we’d finish borderlands 2 this weekend. instead, about twenty new missions opened and the difficulty curved just soared. i enjoy the game’s grindiness, but this just feels like homework.
ikea meatballs may or may not contain horsemeat (at least in europe).
apparently the fact that i think seth macfarlane did a fine (read: hacky, predictable, amusing) job as oscar host means that i’m a racist, sexist, homophobe. personally, i thought it was tame, and i wish he’d been able to go harder, but since the rest of the world has already tied their knickers in knots over the juvenile and barely offensive jokes he did make, perhaps it’s for the best he didn’t.
fyi, perhaps it’d be best for next year’s oscars to have, you know, like a trigger warning in front of them? you know, ‘cause like, being reminded that rhianna is with a guy that beat her to a pulp, and that, like, the sound of music has nazis in it and like, some women go topless on film sometimes is like, deeply scarring?
also, fuck you.
oh, and apparently that ted bit about a post-oscar sex party is a rape joke, according to this lunatic, because “Nicholson’s pad is notorious for hosting Roman Polanski’s sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl”. okey dokey, then.
i was mostly weirded out that that the majority of twitter commenters who were offended by macfarlane’s “sexism” were white men.
here’s a list of things more offensive about last night than any of seth macfarlane’s jokes:
- the average price of the garments on the guests, amortized over the amount of time they will be used.
- that a high ranking member of the government was conscripted to announce an oscar winner, along with a backdrop of military personnel.
- that the oscar in question went to a film that grossly rewrites history in a questionably jingoistic way.
- that the same people that took offense to a joke about a perpetrator of domestic violence are active participants in a star system that has gone on to reward him time and again. case in point? that perpetrator was sitting comfortably at elton john’s oscar viewing party at the time that joke was being made.
- that the value of the oscar gift basket this year is several thousands of dollars more than the average american salary… for a year.
how’s that for a start?
UPDATE: To be clear, I want to expand on my comment about Michelle Obama’s appearance last night, which is not coming from a partisan place. Over my lifetime, I have seen a distinct blurring between politics and entertainment. Whenever I see a sitting president or presidential hopeful and/or his family on
a) Entertainment Tonight, or the like,
b) People Magazine, or the like, or
c) any chat show that generally does not cover politics,
it makes me cringe. I understand that this might be my personal view, and that this might represent an old fashioned or out of touch way of thinking. While I do get that contemporary media tends to give equal weight to all issues, regardless of importance, and that politicians want to reach out to “the people” through the outlets that have access to the most ears and eyes, no matter how vapid, I don’t believe that it should necessarily be that way.
I understand that the office of the First Lady is mostly ceremonial. Traditionally, while campaigning, or once ensconced in the White House, the spouse of the president focuses on “soft” issues of a social and ceremonial nature. As an unpaid, unelected and unappointed role, the First Lady is not a government official. She is, however, considered a member of the Administration, and is a political figure in her own right, and while many might disagree, I feel that opening the envelope at the Academy Awards is absolutely beneath that role.
That the right wing is jumping on this idea to further attempt to chip away at the Obama presidency is not a surprise, and frankly, if the issue of “dignity” is in question, I’d argue that many on the right should be the last to weigh in. Ultimately, I think this boils down to perception about the awards in general. To those who consider the Oscars to be a venerable institution that rewards the meritorious in a specific industry in a gracious and dignified manner, perhaps her appearance is not incongruous. To those who consider the Oscars to be a self-congratulatory circle jerk for the vain and ultra-rich, like I do, the presence of someone highly connected in the sitting federal government is embarrassing, no matter how likeable or glamorous.
I guess my bottom line is, can’t we at least pretend that politics and entertainment haven’t become the same thing?
