With her typically brash economy of language, Brokeback Mountain author Annie Proulx offers up her Academy Award experience, “three-and-a-half hours of butt-numbing sitting” which ended, as we all now know, with a shocker.
Proulx spins her Pulitzer Prize-winning prose into a no regrets diatribe directed at Tinseltown in this Guardian commentary.
On entering the venue:
“On the sidewalk stood hordes of the righteous, some leaning forward like wind-bent grasses, the better to deliver their imprecations against gays and fags to the open windows of the limos – the windows open by order of the security people – creeping toward the Kodak Theater for the 78th Academy Awards. Others held up sturdy, professionally crafted signs expressing the same hatred.”
On “the Academy”:
“Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good.”
On the Best Picture:
“And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash – excuse me – Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline.”
And on choosing a Best Actor:
“Hollywood loves mimicry, the conversion of a film actor into the spittin’ image of a once-living celeb. But which takes more skill, acting a person who strolled the boulevard a few decades ago and who left behind tapes, film, photographs, voice recordings and friends with strong memories, or the construction of characters from imagination and a few cold words on the page?”
Proulx ain’t happy. And she calls her bitterness as others might see it, signing out: “For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays.”
Blood on the Red Carpet [guardian]
