Obligatory Oscars Post

teh
Since every blogger must, MUST have a post (or 400 if you’re Arianna Huffington) about the Academy Awards, here’s mine.

I didn’t watch the awards show. None of it. I saw only one of the major nominees this year and I saw it only Friday night so it would have been a bit of a waste of time; something like watching a foreign language film without subtitles.

I was kind of hoping Brokeback Mountain would win so wingnut radio and blogs could continue going ape shit over the Hollywood agenda to turn us all gay. But now they’ll have to find some other cultural offense to become exercised about.

I will say the one Oscar nominated file I did see, Walk the Line, is a good film. I’m a sucker for bio-pics (and biographical works in general). Plus I’ve always had a lot of respect for Johnny Cash, both the man and the musician. So, I was predisposed to liking Walk the Line.

I’m one of those people that thinks everyone has a story and if that person also happens to be particularly interesting they have a great story.

One thing I really liked about Walk the Line is it took up the part of Cash’s life I was unfamiliar with. The movie ends in 1968 which is about when I became of Cash in real time. However, I suspect younger people are not aware of the rest of the story and will be left with the image of Cash as the drug-addled musician who couldn’t handle super-stardom. Since the rest of Cash’s career and life were much more level, this is a little unfair.

I have not read any comprehensive biography of Cash but my understanding is that he was a deeply spiritual man. This doesn’t come through at all in the film. This may be because during his early career, the subject of Walk the Line, he wasn’t. I don’t know but I would like to know more about that side of Cash and how reconciled that with the music industry in which he worked. I’d also like to know more about the end of his life. He became strangely relevant again in the 1990s as the aging rebel musician and ended his career with the haunting rendition and video of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”. I guess I’m either going to have to pick up a biography or hope for an equally well-made Walk the Line II.