THE ANATOMY, I MEAN ACADEMY, AWARDS Chris Rock seems to have put the cat among the pigeons with his suggestion that real men not only don’t eat quiche, they don’t watch the Academy Awards either. He’s also let another cat out of the bag, that is, he’s revealed a secret previously unknown and calculated to shock the world when uncovered. This didn’t happen, of course. People who’d never thought about the matter before considered it for a minute or two and said “Of course! He’s right! Come to think of it, I’ve never met a man who watched the Academy Awards. Well, not a straight man anyway”. So how do you get men to watch the Academy Awards? The only idea I’ve been able to come up with is that a revision should be made in the titles given to the different awards. This might help. For instance the award now known as the Best Actor award could be re-designated the Most Valuable Player award. Men would respond to that. They now go to ball games and yell their heads off for the player they support for this award. Maybe they could do the same for an actor. Of course when they found out he couldn’t throw a ball or a punch or hit the side of a barn, they might cause trouble, but they might also just take it as a good joke. Other acting awards could receive the same treatment. Sexiest Leading Man could be renamed High Scorer. The Woody Allen Nudnick Award could be replaced by one for the Strikeout King. Best Director becomes Best Manager, Best Producer becomes Best Owner -- these are obvious. But how about the Flagrant Foul Award and the Beanball Trophy? These would arouse real interest. Certainly they would mean that the Academy show had morphed into a joint movie-sports production, but awards such as the last-named could only be accepted by real ballplayers. The movie people might not like sharing the spotlight, but they would have solved their problem of attracting a male audience. Would that chase away the women? Of course not. I know women like to reserve some affairs for themselves, like baby showers and such, but I doubt that they’re that keen on exclusively female Academy Award parties, while men monopolize the Super Bowl ones. My plan above bridges the gap between the two, combining the best features of both. The women could admire the beautiful actors and the men could take in the actresses with women there to explain to them just how they managed to keep their strapless gowns from sliding down around their knees. This would add a welcome element of suspense to the proceedings. What the chances are for this reform to take place I can’t calculate now. For once I find myself on the progressive side of a controversy. There is pressure on to create a unisex society and here I am with a proposal to advance it. Chris Rock exposed the problem when he faced the fact that there was a gender gap separating the audiences for the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl. The question now is how do we get to the point where a group of women will actually sit down together to have a real heart-to-heart talk about the World Series? Will that day ever come? Now don’t laugh. It could happen. At least the television industry seems to think so. It’s hard to find a ballgame these days where there’s no female announcer or reporter scampering around the sidelines propositioning the players for an exclusive interview about their last touchdown or field goal. It’s gotten so the players no longer look surprised when they find their elbows brushing the head of a little woman with a microphone and a set of questions for them to answer. They rattle off their interviews, “Yeah, we came to play…I was seein’ the ball pretty good…I don’ worry about my stats…the team comes first…thank you”, and they’re off to the locker room, to check up their stats. Am I uptight about women in sports, I mean refereeing, for God’s sake, and punching each other out in boxing matches? With Clint Eastwood in their corner acting as their cut man? With every prospect of winding up looking like Hedda Nussbaum after a bout with Joel Steinberg? Are we going from Apollo Creed, the Master of Disaster, to Sally Speedbag, the Mistress of Distress? No, I’m not uptight. Hysterical maybe, but not quite out of it yet. When I wrote some time ago about a female medic in Iraq who was pictured carrying a tommy gun instead of a medical kit and wondered if these pictures weren’t intended to soften us up for the idea of women in combat, I also brought up the question of whether if it was quite right for women to engage in gunfights with men in Iraq, what was wrong with them having fistfights with men in America? Now some people seem to have taken this question seriously and are busy training women for this new sport. There is a trend here. It looks like an Oscar is being readied for presentation to Million Dollar Baby, a picture about Ursula Uppercut trading punches with Mary Mouthpiece. This is expected to stimulate a great burst of popularity for cuties packing kayos and we can expect to see quite a few of them sporting broken noses, cauliflower ears, missing teeth and fat lips. The plastic surgeons are rubbing their hands together in anticipation of a boom in business. They’re doing plenty already. One columnist reports that one tenth of teenage girls in the U.S. are believed to be engaged in the fad of self-mutilation, cutting themselves, mainly on their hands and arms, for the thrill of it all. One thing leads to another and I’ve gone from the Oscars to self-mutilation with hardly a stop in between. But I’ve shown the connection. Hollywood’s preparing to crown a grotesque story about wacky women, almost guaranteed to increase their number, while the coming generation of girls is behaving as wackily as possible without benefit of movie encouragement. Show biz will take care of that, though, even if they only hoax the girls by reissuing old movies like “The Razor’s Edge” and “Cloak and Dagger” which the kids will watch just for the titles. I predict it: They’ll make them cult favorites pending the arrival of more realistic up-to-date stuff which will glorify the fad until the last five minutes when some character actor takes on the job of deploring it and disassociating the movie business from it. I.’ve found it fulfilling to critique the Academy Awards in this way and propose some improvements calculated to expand their audience even more. My own record with regard to them remains perfect. I won’t say how.
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