Oh Dave! Now

The Oscar Awards are on this weekend and I hardly care. But I will watch the program dutifully from beginning to end as I do every year. There are two reasons I usually watch: 1) there’s a movie I’m really rooting for like “Brokeback Mountain” (lost), or 2) I saw every major nominee and can pretend I’m a Hollywood insider whose knowledge and opinion matters.

But I can’t get excited when I’ve only seen 4 of the 10 Best Picture Nominees and even less of the Actor and Actress nominees. Why rush out to see the Picture nominees when it’s probably between “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker” anyway. One of my highest rated and favorite movies of the year—I keep a list and rate every movie I see—was “Up” which will probably win Best Animated Feature so not much suspense there.  

I’m also not too thrilled about the dual hosts of Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.  I’ve enjoyed them in the movies but I’m guessing that they picked two old guys, instead of one, in case one of them has a heart attack or gets too drunk that there will still be one left to finish the show. Now there’s a reason to watch the show, to see if they both survive it.  It’s Live–watch what happens!

If they’re going to do two hosts, why not Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner from the “Twilight” movies? They’re not comedians and they probably wouldn’t bring any charm to their announcing duties, if they could get the words out at all. But they would look good just standing there and subtitles could do all the work.  

Why have a man at all? Why not a funny woman like Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Meryl Streep (on a year when she isn’t nominated if there is such a thing)? Whoopi Goldberg has hosted in the past but she’s as close to a man as a woman can get in primetime. Ellen was funny on the Emmys but she’s overexposed. I could get excited about the Oscars if RuPaul was the host—she’s hysterical as the host of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and with the Oscars her writers and camera filters would be even better.  

Enough Hollywood bitchiness, it will just give me more wrinkles. The other day I was walking down the street in downtown Oakland and a street person was about to solicit me for change, but he dismissed me with a wave of his hand and said, “Oh, you’re in a bad mood.”  I wasn’t about to give him change but I was taken aback because I was actually in a carefree, relatively relaxed mood, or so I thought.  

A couple of years ago in a stressful job with a long commute that exhausted me, I walked past a colleague in the aisle between the cubicles on the way to mine. He’s a semi-retired Quality Assurance expert in his early 70s who I had already talked to that day. Deep in thought with my to-do list, I didn’t feel the need to greet him again. He stopped me and asked if I was all right, and I said yes, why?  “You were SCOWLING,” he emphasized. I made some excuses and forced a smile, to assure him I had no reason to be scowling.  

My inability to crack a decent smile has become a trend. It’s probably been two years since a good photo has been taken of me. My brother Paul says that I’m photogenic, which I take to mean I look better in photos than in person–how distressing that now I don’t even look good in photos! I’ve taken some acceptable self-portraits for my Facebook profile photo but I gave up a couple of weeks ago to take a new one because in every photo I took, I indeed looked like I was scowling, even when I thought my pose had been “angelic.” Am I becoming like Alec Baldwin whose best effort at a smile looks like it took a crane to turn up his mouth just a smidgen? And when I do show teeth, do I have to look like a maniacal puppet like Steve Martin or Mary Tyler Moore (MTM)? 

Mary, Mary