Leftover baby back ribs from Hudson’s On The Bend
It’s Oscar Night again. Time for Hudson’s leftover ribs and Star Trek DVDs.
Star Trek DVDs are indicated when one eats ribs instead of watching the Oscars. Books require page turning, and TV requires constant channel flipping, and we don’t want to get sauce on the remote, or on Andrea Dworkin.
I watch the episode where the brilliant but delusional Dr. Roger Korby makes an android replica of Captain Kirk by spinning him around on a giant lazy susan. A bonus: this episode also delivers Lurch in an incandescent star turn as a robot in a puffy pink leotard. The leftover ribs, while pretty good, cannot hold a candle to Lurch.
Neither can the Oscars. Every year I purposely avoid it; my frail constitution is no match for the gruesome spectacle of the world’s biggest whores on parade. Yet every year, after Kirk has dispatched the evil androids, I take a quick peek.
Why, here’s some generic hottie struggling under the weight of 4,598 cubic zirconia, the smallest of which can be seen from space. She is singing a forgettable, overwrought show tune, accompanied on piano by professional bore Andrew Lloyd Weber, who looks like he was separated at birth from that creepy homo Liza Minnelli married a couple of years ago. The hottie’s thin voice is no match for the tedium of the Andrew Lloyd Weber ballad. I fall into a coma.
The sound of Chris Rock’s voice revives me. But poor Chris Rock! He looks shell shocked. Possibly he’s realized, too late, that he has officially become The Establishment’s butt-boy. He laughs weakly at his own tepid Janet Jackson joke. I can’t watch this anymore. It burns! It burns!
But wait! Here’s rich, beautiful actress Natalie Portman, giving an award for Best Film About Autism!
For comic relief, I briefly tune in "Law & Order: SVU," the show about mutilated women. In this gripping, patriarchy-affirming episode, the nebbishy serial killer buries a woman alive because his mother, Anne Meara, locked him in the closet as a child. Women! They just don’t listen!
Back at the Oscars, a corpse-like Jeremy Irons is presenting an award in the aisle, Monty Hall-style. This seems tacky, even for Hollywood, until I realize it’s only one of the little awards, Best Low-Budget Documentary About Unaffected Third World Tribespeople, so it can go to a female British director who doesn’t know any better. "This is the dog’s bollocks!" she exclaims, cryptically.
As a female winner, she’s an exception. Hollywood is Ground Zero for misogyny in the US. It’s where we turn when we want to know what to think about who should clean toilets or how big someone’s boobs should be. Never does Hollywood misogyny gleam with such radiant zeal as on Oscar night. Where else can you see so many hairy plug-uglies in tuxes being squeezed so adoringly by so many 22-year-old shiksas? The shiksas aren’t up for any of the awards; they’re just the bling. The male plug-uglies win everything, except for one or two awards specially reserved for the rich, beautiful actresses that all the plug-uglies want to bang.
Which is pretty gross, but there is nothing quite so repellent as celebrities high on celebrity, being themselves on national television. "Shucks, I’m just a little ole farm girl!" gushes rich, beautiful actress Hilary Swank.
Wait. There is something more repellent! Some merry prankster has told tone deaf Latin hottie Antonio Banderas that he can sing, and Banderas has bought it! He’s slogging through a horrifying, overwrought show tune, in Spanish, in front of a brick wall, accompanied on guitar by professional bore Carlos Santana! Banderas is singing to a motorcycle! Oh the humanity!
Fortunately, I am a Trekkie. I know what to do. There’s an episode from Season 1 where Charlie the alien adolescent can make unpleasant people disappear just by giving them the stink eye.
I aim my remote carefully. I may not get a second stink.
no, but wait: sauce on Andrea Dworkin. Let’s think about this.
Believe me, I have!