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Subject: Re: Academy awards/Oscars - nonsense... ( 15 of 30 )
Posted by Douglas Adams

Of course it's politics. Everything in human culture is politics. Politics fascinates us. Gossip fascinates us. There are serious arguments - if you read Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Robin Dunbar and many others - that what drove the explosive growth of the human brain was gossip and social politics. What is Shakespeare about other than social politics? The Greeks had a word for people who had no interest in politics, which was 'idiotis'. Politics doesn't simply what's going on in Capitol Hill, it means what's happening in all of our communities.

Most of us are fascinated by movies. I certainly am at the moment because I'm working on one and beginning to get a (very sketchy) feel about how the film community works. If you're at all fascinated by movies, it's hard not to be fascinated by how the community which creates them works. The Oscars is where you see this community at its most exposed and its most intense.

Sure - these people are mad! They behave in completely insane ways. If they weren't insane they wouldn't be in movies. What sane person or group of people would gamble millions and millions of dollars on ideas, jokes, stories, emotions, spaceships and car chases. If they were sane, rational people they'd be putting the money into GEC or Microsoft. They are puffed up, jealous, childish, crazed with self-regard and they do everything that most people grow out of. They are our most basic instincts and emotions written terribly, absurdly large. That's why we pay them millions of dollars and then, if they're not very clever, take it away from them again, so we can watch them dance and fall. We're just sitting round the fire watching the shapes dancing in the fire and making stories about them. That's what the Oscars are all about.
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