Please Don’t Take Me Anywhere

I am pretty sure the point of writing in blog format is to have the ability to be among the first-responders to happenings in pop culture (or news, I guess, if you’re into that kind of thing?) but guess what: I have a lot of catching up to do. For every stupid theory I tell you there are like 16 others that are rattling around in my brain waiting to be articulated (this concept stolen from this Dinosaur Comic, thank you Ryan North and T-Rex for understanding how the mind works!). So please bare with me while I revisit a topic that has been worked to death, that is so played out that I can hardly believe it still interests me. But it does! So please just deal with the fact that I need to talk about Kanye West and Taylor Swift.

Ok, let’s travel back in time to when you cared even a little bit about this. While Mr. West was pioneering the art of being a human interrupting starfish, I was probably teaching some English classes to Japanese 13-year-olds. I only saw the incident well after the fact, so there was already a narrative forming about how mean, classless Kanye West had bullied cute Taylor Swift and been all around inappropriate. Links to the video showed up on my newsfeed prefaced with” what a douche” or whatever. And this narrative is basically correct. I can’t argue that Kanye West wasn’t acting like a total lunatic. But I found myself identifying with him.

Listen: don’t hate me, I recognize that it was a mean thing to do. But I also felt that Beyonce really did make an amazing song and rejuvenated the dying art of the music video. Single Ladies was so amazingly catchy. In Japan us ex-pats paid endless tributes to it in karaoke.

Also: Taylor Swift blows, for real. In preparation to write this, I did due diligence and watched several of her videos. Boring and overproduced. I know I’m not the target audience and that I’m way to old to even care about this anymore, but, god. If that is country music then I am a soccer mom.*

I sound crazy, I realize that.

This is why I can’t watch award shows. I have not seen the Oscars since 1999, when Shakespeare in Love beat Life Is Beautiful for best picture. That a Gwyneth Paltrow romantic comedy that seemed to exist only to allow smug people to murmur “Oh, that’s from Twelfth Night” to each other could beat out a truly original, beautifully human movie about a mans attempts to maintains his sons innocence in the face of the horror of a concentration camp struck me as completely wrong. Life is Beautiful is one of a small number of uplifting movies that doesn’t male me feel like I’ve been emotionally manipulated. Life Is Beautiful took a clown and put him in the center of one of the greatest tragedies of modern history; Shakespeare in Love includes the bold and innovative casting choice of Dame Judy Dench in the role of Queen Elizabeth.

 

But Brenna, everyone said, Life Is Beautiful won best foreign film. Guess what, I do not give a shit. Shakespeare in Love was fine. It was entertaining. But it was not as good as Life Is Beautiful. These are not participation trophies, everyone does not get to take one home. Upon realizing at 14 that the Oscars were in fact totally arbitrary and had no value, I stopped watching.

And thank god I did because I don’t think I could have maintained when Chicago won best picture, beating Julie Taymor’s exquisite biography of Frida Khalo. Aah. Ok. Maybe, you didn’t love Frida. Fine. Maybe not all of us read Frida Khalo’s diary at the impressionable age of 13 and so it was not apparent to 100% of the population how inspired Salma Hayek’s performance was. So maybe Frida didn’t have to win.

But why Chicago? Ugh, world. Yes, there were some cool story-telling tricks. Yes, John C Riley is good at acting. Yes, we all like to see Queen Latifa doing well (especially because she’s doing so well without anyone in Hollywood having to come up with, say, original leading roles for ladies of color). But guys, this movie was stupid and boring. I’m going to use a minute example to illustrate what I felt was wrong with this whole movie: Catherine Zeta-Jones’ hair. How can you take one of the most beautiful women in the world, Mrs. Zeta-Jones, and give her one of the cutest haircuts of all time, the flapper bob, and somehow make her look terrible? So dumb and bad. Sloppy execution, no taste. And this deserves an Oscar?

I know it’s dumb to be angry about these awards. They are arbitrary and they do not matter. Beyonce does not give a shit about silly made up MTV awards. But am I so crazy for feeling like these awards should mean more? For being driven to ranting by evidence of bad taste? Is my impotent rage rediculous?

All I’m saying is that if I were in Kanye’s position, I would have wanted to do the same thing. Our only crime is caring too much (and, one imagines, in his case, lots of cocaine). I want good things to be recognized. I want shitty things to be called out for having inflicted their shittiness upon me.

Moral of the story: no one ever let me go anywhere.

*for that to make sense you should probably know that I’m not a soccer mom.