Oscar Hangover 2010

This year, for the first time in many, many years--perhaps for the first time ever, in fact--I didn't catch even a single second of the Oscarcast. I didn't feel the urge to flip over to my local ABC affiliate and check on the proceedings. I really, seriously didn't care.

Instead, I cooked a bottom round steak and covered it with grilled onions and garlic while Dave Brubeck wafted from the living room. Then I sat down and watched The Oscar on TCM. It's a truly dreadful 1966 movie starring Stephen Boyd as a selfish, manipulative, vindictive bastard who nonetheless snags a Best Actor nomination who goes to the ceremony alone because he's dumped all his old friends. His inexplicably loyal best friend (Tony Bennett!) then tells the story in flashback, starting with their days together working bottom-of-the-barrel clubs with Boyd's stripper girlfriend (Jill St. John, looking fine in a tiger-print bikini) to hooking up with an older woman (Eleanor Parker) who connects him with an agent (Milton Berle in a completely straight role) and up the ladder to success, throwing off friends and lovers left and right. He's finally pissed off all of Hollywood with his asshatery when the surprise Oscar nom comes in, thus allowing him to become more insufferable than ever before, even to Bennett and Boyd's also-inexplicable faithful wife (Elke Sommer, looking lovely in lingerie).

There are lots of other past and present stars throughout the movie, including Broderick Crawford as an abusive small-town sheriff, Joseph Cotten as the head of Boyd's studio, Peter Lawford as a washed-up actor now waiting tables for a living, Walter Brennan as a network sponsor, Ed Begley Sr. as a strip club owner, Ernest Borgnine as a sleazy private eye, Edie Adams as Borgnine's sleazy ex-wife, and loads of people playing themselves, like Edith Head, Bob Hope, Hedda Hopper, Merle Oberon and Frank Sinatra.

All that star power can't make up for a melodramatic screenplay (adapted by Harlan Ellison, among others, from the novel by Richard Sale) that never fully explains why anyone wants to be around this creep, much less help him on his way to the top. Even more inexplicable is the Academy's cooperation with this project--didn't anyone there read the script?

Despite (or, perhaps because of) the utter lack of quality of The Oscar, I had a good time. Or maybe it was the TheraFlu I was drinking to shake the bug I've had for the past week. Or, most likely of all, it was because no matter how awful The Oscar was, it was still shorter and funnier than the actual Oscars ceremony. And that's just plain sad.