Oscar the Grouch

Here come the Academy Awards!! This weekend. Counting-down the hours, are you? Printing out your homemade ballots on your dot matrix printers and sharpening a wicker basket full of golf pencils? Stirring the punch and frosting the mini cupcakes?? Popping the antidepressants and doing the shots of Popov? Slitting your wrists and burning a pile of your old head shots? Screaming out the window, "I was the best I tell you, THE BEST!! And look at me now!! LOOK AT ME!!! I smell like a mediocre biweekly direct deposit and I feel like a sack of potatoes with a wig on"??

Well join the club. That's what ALL of us do on Oscar week. Cuz when it comes to shoving the fame, success and beauty of unattainable goals into our smushy faces, no one does it better than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Sciences?! I just now decided that is weird).

My resentment/jealousy for these awards has long been a part of my inner workings. For instance, my Barbies** used to get dressed up to attend the awards every year. Because, astonishingly, at least one of them was always nominated! Actress roommates--who, between the two of them, never missed a nomination for 6 years straight?!  An unprecedented achievement to say the least. The only catch was (and here is where my resentment showed its ugly head) they never made it to the awards. One would always have sex with lie naked next to the limo driver minutes before they were supposed to leave! And the other would be jealous because she liked the limo driver too! And they would rip each others' Valentinos to shreds! And go to bed in a huff! But this was somehow a much more satisfactory end to the evening for me than if they had actually gone.

My clear issue was this: I didn't want to see my Barbies win instead of me. Even now, some version of that thought still lingers with me. Each year I (deep-down) think, "If someone is going to win that fancy award, why can't it be me?" And this absurd sentiment, I know for a fact, is shared across the board by my fellow longing-to-be-an-actor-of-the-A-list-type friends.

Ridiculous? Absolutely! Because...
A) I am not in a movie this year. Nor have I been in one prior to this year. And...
B) I am a regular person. Chubby, blemished, and just like the 1 billion other watchers who are sitting at home on their couch anonymously. All of us yelling at the TV. Calling perfect people "ugly", one-of-a-kind couture, "unflattering"  and decent, well-deserved nominations, "bullshit!".

[Hmmm. It seems that the mere topic of these awards is souring my disposition greatly. I just re-read this post and got the chills at how unrecognizably bitter and annoyingly actor-y I sound. But it's too late to turn back. So if you have made it this far in your reading, congratulations! You are almost through.]

Perhaps this year, instead of watching, I should rip my own Valentino and send myself to bed in a huff. Because when I DON'T watch--I feel like a perfectly happy, lucky, successful person with an interesting life. But when I DO, I feel like I am actually just watching life carve a notch on its bedpost-- indicating it has once again laid naked next to f#%ked me.


**Have I mentioned my Barbies before? I believe I have. I blame those b#%ches for a lot of my issues.