The Oscars? Oh. Right…

The Academy Awards! What was it, really? A horde of finger sniffing brobots and Hollywood jizz toilets assembled to see their royalty on display? And the entire thing is on TV? Or was it something different? Everyone is going to have their own opinion. I didn’t watch the Oscars. I don’t watch professional wrestling, either, but I did watch everyone’s reaction, which was at least a little interesting. Generally, it’s the actors and actresses who get both the glory and the disgusted condemnation in people’s eyes. I always considered acting to be like photography- an almost-but-not-art. Not on the same level as, say, painting for example. I still feel that way. But there are real people behind the makeup. What makes them great, middling or suckdog is, when you think about it, strangely similar to the arts.

Maybe you can fake love, but it won’t be very convincing if you never really felt it, and I mean hard, like all the way down in the reddest part of your guts. And often. And big. A good artist loves his or her spouse and children. A great one loves that- and birds, the winds, the smell of baking bread and the morning light on the windows. Maybe you can fake compassion, but everyone will see right through it unless you see and feel and react to the world around you, inhale it, touch it- until you’ve looked into the eyes of people far different from you and felt, for a moment, something of their lives. You can mimic rage, but it will just seem like a tantrum if you never went out on a limb over dark waters for good, wholesome reasons and suffered bitterly for it. You can ‘project’ loss, but in the end it will ring hollow unless you really held something. All of it- warmth, joy, violence, shame and lust and love, the wildness of minds in transformation, those appear to be important for actors after all! That’s probably why there are so many more bad ones than good ones. It is a superficial goal as goals go, everyone knows that, but what no one seems to talk about it this- It’s their souls we’ll be watching- either rich ones full of life and admirable passions and bright light, great books and sunrises and private joys or… bland burps of expensive tooth whitener.

The exact same thing is true for artists, writers and musicians. So maybe ‘acting’ is, in the end, a real ‘art’. Or could be. Or might become. Or it is at its best moments. The real admiration was for the directors, for the most part. On a side note, Parasite really is a masterpiece. The Lighthouse. A few more. Definitely art. So a great deal of hard, difficult, soulful art is going on in Tinseltown (I think, anyway), but it makes me wonder. In acting school, do they teach people how to lead extraordinary lives of deep meaning or… do they teach people to pretend they already do? Inspiring to think about in any case, dear reader. These important things are undeniably difficult, but that creative road is its own reward.