I love the Oscars. I don’t care if it fills a thousand stereotypes, I love it all: the prognostication, the political intrigue, the horrible fashion, the overwrought, all-about-me celebrity limelight, and the bad jokes. It fills me with a special, ridiculous feeling of happiness to watch over-hyped fame-whores wander around a red carpet in outfits that cost more than my college tuition and then go on to battle it out for tiny gold statuettes.
On an entirely different note, I am a huge geek. Huge isn’t even a strong enough word, really. I have seen every Star Wars movie at least 4 times. I down science fiction books like most people down Coke. If hard pressed, I’d probably admit to liking books more than people. Not only that, I am a computer programmer in the classic sense, complete with the glasses, the bad hair (and skin), along with the inability to function socially. I’d totally own pocket protectors if there was still a market for that sort of thing.
Do these two admissions really have anything in common? Besides exposing some of the more painful sides of my personality to the general internet-reading public, no, of course not. But for the purposes of moving this column along, indulge me for a bit. Because this year the Oscars could have easily been renamed “Praise be to The Lord of the Rings” without changing the content of the ceremony in any significant way.
And The Lord of the Rings? Is right up there on the geek scale. Really, it has its own special level on the scale that transcends normal geekiness to a form of über-geekiness so powerful that it can actually form a vacuum of anti-coolness for miles around. When popular people feel a cold breeze and shudder for no apparent reason, it’s really because they passed a hardcore Tolkien fan.
Luckily for my sanity and the sake of all the cool people around me, I am on the relatively low end of the über-scale. I still read the LotR books at least once a year, but I have never endeavored to learn any of the languages. I never wrote any of the really bad mass-produced fan fiction on Middle Earth, but I have read a lot of it. (Really, a 4 on the scale: intensely geeky, may cause temporary ostracism from one’s peers, but never becomes a long term destructive force. Mating is still possible, although very rare.)
But today the world (and by ‘the world,’ I mean ‘The Academy of Motion Pictures, Whatnot and Somesuch”) joined me in the high levels of geekitude and gave 11 awards to the LotR film series, winning everything it was nominated for. And it even won for things that it had absolutely no right to. Film Editing? It was over three hours long and ended at least 6 times. Best Song? Annie Lennox creeps me out in a very special way and I’m just astounded that people don’t flee from her at every available opportunity (Although I really liked the LotR entry last year for best song, so I can forgive this one, kind of.) (No, scratch that, Annie Lennox is too terrible.)
In any case, I am way too into the LotR movie series and associated industries. And apparently so is the upper-class of Hollywood. So I had a nice night, seeing all the people from the DVD documentaries give their little speeches with their fresh-won gold statuettes of victory. Not that I watched the acceptance speeches. Those things always make me uncomfortable so I have to leave the room. There’s just something so strange and off-putting about thanking all these people while people pretend to be interested.
Oh, right. Topic. Yay Oscars. Yay, Lord of the Rings. Yay, I am a big geek. And apparently very, very gay. Hmm. I probably should have thought this thing out a bit before I sat down to write.
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