wearing my geek badge with pride....

Okay. I know it's uncool in this day and age to be genuinely sentimental about anything. Especially - with all the blogs and the Defamer and the snark - about the Oscars.

But. Growing up? It was pretty much my favorite night of the year. Almost on par with Christmas. Not that I remember the winners or the moments - my memory is fuzzy at best and non-existent at worst - but the important things - the buildup, the dresses, the thrills? Are ingrained in me as long as I can remember. I remember my parents letting me stay as late as they lasted [on the East Coast no less!] I remember being so tired and frustrated the next day - frustrated because how many fifth graders can dish gossip and fabulousity in small-town suburbia?

But. But. I believe in the Oscars. What they represent and what they promise. Because, despite what anyone says, film is THE art form of the 21st century. And no matter how many times they get it wrong, no matter how many boring montages they put out?

Watching the canonization [or the attempt to canonize] of a medium as it's still evolving is....something that is so NOW, so thrillingly new and modern and exciting that...how can you not love it? And because cinema is so good at straddling the line between art and business, between the masses and the select few, between individual entertainment and community spectacle? That holds so much promise...so much potential - that to deny their power is to deny the trials and the triumphs that make us human.

Sure, I realize that for a shy, creative [i.e. 'gay'] desperately depressed boy from Tennessee who wanted so much to run away from anything ordinary that the glamour of Hollywood could appear to fill you/us/me to the brim with hope. It can offer an escape for all of us.

Allowing that - I don't subscribe to the US idea of 'celebrities - they're just like us!.' No. Screw that. As my teacher once said, 'movies are life as it should be.' Why not give us something to aspire to? Something to inspire us.

I don't want them to be 'just like us' I want them to be beautiful and terrifying that we can study yet never understand. I want them to wear things that are stunning or strange. I want them to have gigantic/excessive/'spontaneous' displays of emotion that play every emotion like a note on a piano until they reach places that make you mere humans seem totally dead inside [which means that, sorry haters, I adored Misses Berry and Paltrow.] Make you seem like old-school Cenurion model Cylons. I want them to carry themselves with such fucking confidence that they soak up the gaze of a billion fucking eyes worldwide and you can tell that they're thinking 'is that all you've got?' I wish them to flub, to fume, to fail spectacularly and then recover so well that all is forgiven, forgetten, and fantastic.

I know I'm not the first person to say this but, really, modern celebrities are our Greek Gods. And I'm okay with that. The Gods, if you know your mythology, felt free to come down from Olympus to mingle and mate with us mortals. But they're not us. They look like us, they play with us and they entertain us. But they're not just like us and they never will be.

Since I'm not exactly a religious person, cinema is as close as I get to God. Think about it. A gathering where you sit, surrender to a higher power and FEEL. Together.

It helps, of course, that I just saw 'Zodiac' with a huge group at the Arclight, in the Dome, in digital with seemingly all of this great, weird, disparate city of Los Angeles. [somehow I completely blanked that my friend I talked to 12 hours earlier was going to the same show...then Calliope brought her brother and his girl...and pretty much half of H'wood- an Office confab, the Best Week Ever crew and maybe Caroline Rhea, depending on how much work she's had done.]

I'm not exactly good with scary movies - especially one that, since it's unsolved, is way too real - and by 'not good,' I mean 'am a total fracking girl.' Seriously. I couldn't deal with the requisite nervous laughter [which, to be fair, was completely justified because the humor *was* weaved into the script.] Half the time I couldn't console the actual girl clutching my arm.

But all of us screaming, laughing, watching at the same moments? Breathing the same air, the same mood, the same dream [because cinema is nothing if but a shared dream...not that I can link to the requisite academic papers right now]?

That's fracking transcendent, right?

My one qualm? Robert Downey Jr. as a substance abuser? How much miscasting is that? :)

ETA: All men should be required to wear 70s slacks. Seriously, come Zodiac's DVD release, you'll be able to tell the religion of each of the cast's members.