Entry 2:

Dear Phillip,

Am I excited yet? The question I have to ask myself is whether, or how much, I ever was excited. Oscar night is something I generally anticipate with pleasure since whenever possible it's been the occasion for an amusing, occasionally boisterous evening with friends, an evening in which audience participation is usually part of the entertainment. Yet for as long as I can remember there was always a murmuring of "It used to be better ..." When exactly was it better? I can dimly remember the Oscar nights of childhood, when it seemed like the ultimate adult party, the kind that a child sneaks downstairs to catch a glimpse of when he's supposed to be in bed. In the '50s and '60s the thrill of the Oscars resided in the fact that the parade of stars consisted of (say) Lana Turner, Cary Grant, Kim Novak, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, and on and on. Actual stars, that is to say, elected by a mysterious process and not spoiled by overexposure; you didn't see them night after night hyping their new movie or their book or their pet political cause. To catch them unawares, so to speak, at the Oscars was a singular pleasure, accentuated by their air of relaxation (not to say inebriation), almost of indifference: These were gods in their element, nearly oblivious, it seemed, to the invisible audience peering in at them. Today's celebrities work so much harder and so much more visibly at being stars, yet they seem to be playing a role out of some manual called How To Manage Your Hollywood Career.

It never seemed to have all that much to do with movies, especially since the winners tended to be either well-meaning social message films or very expensive blockbusters. What I couldn't have anticipated was that perception of the Oscars would change so much: From being a pop event more on the order of the Miss America contest, it has become a cultural event more akin to the Nobel Prize. (Not that the Nobel Prize doesn't have its problems ... but that's another story.) Of course it's a cultural event that is nothing more than a vast advertisement, but what else is new? The ponderousness of the buildup does get more unavoidable each year. (I suppose the same could be said about Christmas, Halloween, Valentine's Day, and every other major marketing opportunity.) The Oscars have gotten so big that they needed another one to catch some of the spillover, so now we have the Golden Globe Awards, a tacky, ersatz Oscars that to my astonishment the New York Times reported on this year at length in the arts section. The weird thing is that in some sense the Oscars now seem like a bigger deal in the culture than movies themselves, as if the movies only exist to provide the occasion for the awards.

As for movies, I'm always hopeful, even when the rewards do (I confess) seem slimmer than they used to: Or, at least, my movie-going year was not quite as rich in astonishments as I would have liked. Maybe I saw the wrong ones. Still, even the worst movies have their peculiar jolts; I'm still haunted by a single shot from The Perfect Storm (the disappearance of the last crew member into the oceanic void), a kind of high-tech remake of the last shot of Murnau's Tabu that by itself almost justified the dull stretches in the rest of the movie. I think what I miss most about movie-going is the disappearance of that disreputable lower tier of genre movies that have gone the way of Times Square, movies that would never have been candidates for Oscars but that could be relied on for moments of surprise and weird beauty. As you suggest, today there is the commercial circuit and the festival circuit, but where are all those nameless oddities that used to slip under the radar, the oddball quickies, the dreamlike near-amateur horror movies, the deliriously unreal fantasies? (I suppose Polanski's The Ninth Gate qualifies as genuinely tacky and unreal ... I wish it had been a little more overwhelmingly dreamlike. Still, Johnny Depp lingers in mind as the unlikeliest of rare book dealers.)

But I digress into the past, as is my wont. Video, with its opportunity to explore lost eras at will, has fed that tendency, so that I would have to cite among the supreme cinematic delights of 2000 such slightly antiquated items as Douglas Sirk's A Scandal in Paris (1946) or Roy Del Ruth's Employees' Entrance (1933), curious bits of Hollywood product which seemed to find their way directly into my subconscious, there to become the stuff of dreams.

I look forward to hearing about your favorite films.

Best,
Geoffrey