Oscars 2006 – A Departure From Glamour

Sunday night, I finally had an experience that was more boring than waiting to have your car registered at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Listening to the presenter, Jon Stewart’s epileptic and lame jokes at the Academy Awards last night was like listening to one of those cheesy tapes that teach foreign languages. The only good thing that happened to him or with him was his apparition of Halle Berry…Matter of fact, he never woke up after then. He sleepwalked through out the entire show. I feel I should ask for a refund, after all I paid for the event with my time. There is no better way of putting it; the Oscars of this year was a crash that broke backs on the mountain of entertainment.

Which brings me to that movie, Brokeback Mountain…I don’t know about you, but in my household there are certain laid down rules in our process of movie watching. If anybody recommends a movie, he or she has to give a small dissertation on why the family should invest its annual salary on the tickets. So when the buzz about Brokeback Mountain broke, I read about it and thought it would be an easy sell to my household and alternative experience for everyone. On getting home that weekend, I called a family meeting excitedly.

“Woman!”

“Yes”

“Call everybody, we are going to see a movie this evening…”

“Ehnn…which one?”

“It is called Brokeback Mountain” I said in-between large morsels of pounded yam and ewedu galloping into my mouth like cowboy horses.

“Which kind movie be that one?”

“Na cowboy movie!”

“This Hollywood people sef…did they remake John Wayne abi na Clint Eastwood?”

“Actually, no…this movie is about two gay cowboys, I hear it is really cool.” I explained and took a gulp from my Schweppes.

It took me a while before I sensed the silence that descended on the entire acreage of my living quarters. You could hear the grinding mandibles of errant ants. The distant cry of a lonely bird seeped through the dense evening, making me sweat in uncomfortable locations. About eight pair of eyes fastened me down like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, and sank me beyond the already depressed sofa. Then, somebody finally broke the back of the silence by calling me in a steely voice.

“Ivictor”

The last time I heard my name called that way, was when I broke my mother’s favorite china, which was a generational heirloom.

“Yes” I answered, not to the calling of my name, but just to be sure I still exist.

“Is there something you want to tell the family?”

“Why – what kind of question is that?” My shaky voice couldn’t even fool me or my woman who started scrambling for all sorts of calling cards to call my mother in Nigeria for special prayers. My legs retracted to my stomach and I retracted my recommendation.

Well, all I can say is that the evening went very testily and since then I have not been allowed to nominate any movie that is not in the “animation” category. Therefore my analysis of the Oscars this year is far from the movies, but the people in the movies.

This year’s Oscars theme was “Return To Glamour” (I did not know the Oscars had themes, I thought it was only church revivals that do). Well it should have been “Departure from Glamour”. Nothing was glamorous, not even the numerous inflated boobs, or the gowns and frocks that looked like collection of scarecrow rags…blown by a terrible wind.

It was really hard for me to see other people from where I was standing or sitting, because of Reese Witherspoon’s forehead. My goodness, her forehead looked like the hood of a 1965 Chevrolet. Her name and forehead rhyme with spoon. It was a good thing she won; because with a ladle forehead like that…she could head butt someone if she did not win. It was a night of bigheads…with Phillip Seymour that won the best actor for his role on Capote. I was wondering all night, what would a cross breed between Phillip Seymour and Reese Witherspoon produce? The only answer that came to my head was “an off-white baby Hummer”. Off white because I think Phillip Seymour is a rare oyinbo albino.

Taraji Henson from Hustle & Flow looked like James Baldwin with those froggy eyeballs. I don’t know who made the gown she wore, but it looked exactly like those El Anatsui’s cover-bottles sculpture exhibited at Skoto Gallery in New York recently. With those froggy eyes of hers, she would have been better than that stupidity exhibited by green Ben Stiller. His mother should have told the “Focker” not to behave like that. I am sure I was not the only one disgusted with that son of a Focker last night. He should try the GEICO commercial, but again the British accented green gecko would do better.

Was that Dolly Parton or Dolly the clone? Who is her facesmith? They did a very bad job with her lip upliftment, the lips looked like a he goat begging to get some. I am afraid she is extinct, she is shrinking. Female musicians usually balloon to a U-Haul size in their twilight years, e.g., Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Patti Labelle etc. The only thing that ballooned on Dolly Parton last night were her trademark kaboozies. They looked inflated like NBA Spalding basketball, while her face looked carved like a white version of Grace Jones. How does she prop those XXXL kaboozies up? Please don’t tell me she uses wonder bra, it has to be some form of harness, like the ones used in transporting tranquilized elephants. If she ever gets broke, she should sell that blonde wig as attachment and start milk production for Cadbury in Lagos. Or better still, just sign up with Starbucks and take over the spot for jugs and flasks of Half and Half, Whole, and Low Fat…please someone should let me know when that happens, so I can become lactose tolerant again…GOT MILK!

George Clooney bagged one last night…It’s unfortunate I did not see the movie Syriana before it closed. It was released on Al Jazeera network. And that week, there was also another movie showing in the same theatre titled Catch Me If You Can by Tora Bora Production featuring OBL.

What is the matter with Jennifer Aniston? She looked like a walking bonga fish. Again, they all looked like that. Is there a famine in Hollywood that I don’t know about? All the presenters looked underfed…except Queen Latifah; I think she is a Brokeback kinda gal. Remember her in Set It Off, that scene at the garage…if that is not a Brokeback Moment, I don’t know what is.

Every Hollywood babe that climbed that Oscar stage last Sunda should be sent to rehabilitation center, to be fed intravenously. The only thing they have to show for all the money they make was their boob job. The boobs looked like someone put too much clay on two walking sticks, and put a chemise on them. How do Hollywood restaurant make money? No wonder the tabs are so high. A simple cheeseburger is the same price as a Harvard Business School textbook.

How come nobody told me that Geisha was that important. Or is it different from the geisha sold in provisions store in Nigeria? I could write hundreds of memoirs on my memory of geisha as an undergrad, starting from how I used to eat eba and bread with the canned fish back in the day. At Bendel State University, Ekpoma (I don’t know what the school is called now, I just hope it is not Lucky Igbinedion University) in the 90s, the quickest way to relocate permanently to the toilet was to eat the egusi or okro soup at any of the bukas. So we resorted to cans and cans of geisha and sardine. We used geisha to eat anything. We smoked garri with it, ate roasted yam with it, ate roasted corn with it, we even gave it as gift to babes as a way of toasting them. Any student with good supply of geisha back then was like Iraq with oil before the Brokeback Mountain cowboy from Crawford ordered his boys there. We are talking about the Oscars, so lets continue…someone might be PATRIOTICally and ACTively listening.

The president of the Academy looked like he escaped from an asylum. Somebody should please tell him to go and shave, with his beards like that he bumped the Oscars from PG13. He scared away children, with his hair that looked like haystack scattered by two amorous Brokeback cowboys. They should have given him an Oscar for the best scary man on stage. He was the number one reason the Oscars rating fell 10% from last year’s rating. Nobody wants his or her kids to go to the Emergency ward for paroxysm because of a disheveled man.

The next scary thing was Samuel L. Jackson…good Lord, when was the last time he saw anybody wearing a buttoned down shirt on a tuxedo? Who is his fashion adviser, Condoleeza Rice?

Last night was good for hip hop and mafia…old America will never change, while they rewarded a bunch of pimps with heavy Oscar statutes that can easily become a weapon at after parties, they turned their back on the Brokeback cowboys.

A South African movie, Tsotsi that is yet to be released in the States won an Oscar. I was happy for them, but it was just strange and ridiculous when the white dude started shouting amandla! That is for black people, and it ain’t for the Oscars either. Amandla is reserved for something stronger than the Oscars, something as acidic as apartheid! Did he hear George Bush shouting Allahu Akbar the day Dick Cheney heartlessly shot a lawyer in the ass? The same law that prohibits a white man from calling a black man “my N-word”, no matter the level of his excitement, should also be the law preventing a white man from shouting Amandla! at the Oscars.

Oh, before I forget I saw some faces from last year’s Oscars. How time flies, the only thing I could recognize on Hillary Swank, the Million Dollar Baby of last year were her teeth. She could easily have been any of the fishes from Shark Tales. She looked bulimic and anorexic, completely dried up with screaming cheekbones like a wooden sculpture by Elizabeth Catlett.

The only lady that saved the night at the Oscar was Salma Hayek. God bless her heart and the one sided gown that kept making one of her kaboozies bigger than the other, like a Muturu cow’s.

Ludacris looked very clean last night, with that cool tuxedo and tight Yoruba authentic corn-roll. I think he is trying to get a lead role in Brokeback Mountain for Black Cowboys.

The older Morgan Freeman gets, the more he looks like Wole Soyinka. I had to do a double take on him. I could not believe a great actor like him would be jumbling simple English lines from a prompter…I realized it was not Kongi when he started chewing the words. Hey somebody should tell him to ditch that earring, who does he think he is…Allen Iverson?

Jamie Foxx looked cool, except for his sister that accompanied him. She looked like a dancer at the Igwe Festival in Benin City…

Well, like I said earlier on, the Oscars was so boring that I crashed off, and by the time Crash won the best picture, I had gone through my third round of dreams with Halle Berry.