Life With Oscar
In the spring of 2006, I was dating a man my parents had not yet met, and it was getting to be that time. And so I called my mother to ask if I might bring him to their house for our family’s annual Oscar Night gathering. “Oh, I’m not so sure about that,” she said carefully, in a tone one might take with the mentally unstable. “I mean, not the first time. Truly, I’d really rather meet him sometime like Christmas day than Oscar night.”
She was kidding, of course, but barely. And as soon as she said it I knew she was right. First of all, she likes to watch the show in her bathrobe. Furthermore, there’s this – inertia – to our family routine that is not exactly conducive to company. For most of the past several years it’s gone roughly something like this: My older brother Kip and I arrive promptly at our parent’s house at 7:30. Our mom orders pizza and divvies up bagged salad into bowls. Dad prints off nomination ballots from the Oscar.com website. At 7:45 Kip and I drive to Domino’s, finishing our final who-will-win/who-should-win debates. At 8:00 sharp we are all fully settled in our seats in front of the television for the red carpet arrivals.
For the next roughly four and a half hours, the atmosphere only rarely rises above that of a convalescent home. Sometimes we stand, stretch, and occasionally we roam the kitchen for snacks during commercial breaks. After the announcement of the last award, I tally the votes and retrieve the empty antique champagne bottle we’ve designated as our family trophy. Finally, blurry-eyed and achy, we collectively gather trash, and mumble goodbyes. No one needs to be exposed to that, especially not a man meeting his girlfriend’s family for the first time.
***
I remember only two things about watching the Oscars in the 1970s. First, it was the only
time of the year Kip’s and my bed times were not enforced. We felt an enormous amount of pressure to remain awake and I repeatedly failed. Secondly, it was the only time of year my father carried our nineteen-inch Magnavox from the basement to the living room. We had a perfectly suitable rec room in the basement where we watched TV every other night of the year. But watching the Oscars in the living room felt like eating Thanksgiving dinner at the dining room table instead of in the kitchen.
My parents took us to the movies often. And not just kid’s movies, although we saw all of those, too. The first movie I recall seeing in the theater was Rocky. It was 1976 and I was six years old. I remember liking Adrian; she was homely and weird and I liked that Rocky liked her anyway. The fight scenes eluded me, but Kip, three years my elder, took it upon himself to walk me through those concluding fight scenes.
“Look,” he whispered, urging me to remove the Jr. Mint box I’d strategically placed over my eyes. “See how Rocky is hitting Apollo in his sides over and over and over?” I had, indeed, noticed this. He went on to explain that Rocky was breaking Apollo’s ribs, which he believed was far worse than getting repeatedly punched in the face. Watching Rocky’s flesh inflame and split open before my very eyes, I wasn’t so sure.
***
Nineteen-eighty-three was the year I began “preparations” for the Oscar telecast. The Awards typically fell around the time of my Spring Break; my aunt and cousins had moved to Mobile, Alabama, four years earlier, and our family had taken to driving the eighteen hours each way to visit. On this particular trip, the four of us were joined by my other aunt and my grandmother. As the youngest (thirteen) and shortest, I knew in advance that I would be relegated to the middle spot of the front seat of our Chevy Caprice Classic. To compensate, my dad gave me some extra cash and took me to the bookstore. In addition to my usual magazines – Sixteen, Seventeen, Rolling Stone, Creem, and Dynomite – I picked up a special edition magazine tabloid titled simply Academy Awards.
The cheap, thin newsprint that came off in my hand was crammed with dense, sprawling articles, and I read every word of its teeny tiny font. Each nominee – technician to teen idol – was afforded equal space, a three-inch-wide column accompanied by a three-inch square photograph. I spent that week sitting on the beach, collecting facts and going at that magazine with a marker, underlining and circling.
The following Sunday, my Aunt Pat played gracious host to our Oscar night, while the rest of our family opted to go for ice cream and then watch the sunset on the Bay. Gandhi, one of the epic, early 1980s snore-fests that would become one of my brother’s favorite films, swept most of the major awards. Months before, I had positively suffered through that three-hour-and-eight-minute biopic while my brother, the budding political junkie, became enlightened. But E.T. won its share of the technical awards, enough to keep me optimistic in my rooting for it throughout the night.
***
My first year out of college, I worked as a literary apprentice at a theater in upstate New York. I was surrounded by people to whom the Academy Awards was a national holiday, and was invited to my very first Oscar party. I was torn. On the one hand, I was compelled by the idea of celebrating with a roomful of my “peers.” On the other hand, the party had been labeled “legendary” which was sure to attract exuberant guests, which, of course, meant lots of noise. Personally, I like to listen to the acceptance speeches, especially those of the lesser award winners like best live-action short and Sound Editing.
Also, Schindler’s List was the heavy-hitter that year. Even though I really liked The Piano and Remains of the Day, Schindler’s List was the only movie I’ve ever seen where not a single audience member moved until the final credit rolled and the house lights snapped on. There was no way it was not going to win everything that night and I thought it would be particularly respectful to pay attention.
And so I decided to stay home alone that night and watch in my bathrobe. As Whoopi Goldberg’s opening monologue faded to black and before the start of the first commercial, my phone rang. It was my brother. He questioned Whoopi’s ability to steer the show for the whole night. I urged him to give her some time to settle in to the gig. We talked straight through the break and said a quick goodbye when the show came back on. At the start of the second commercial break, the phone rang again.
“Your line’s been busy,” a voice said, my mother’s.
“Who could you be talking to tonight more important than us?” said another voice, my father’s; the parents in stereo.
“It was your son,” I said, and we proceeded to summarize and comment on the previous twenty-seven minutes of television, hanging up as the commercials ended. And so it went, for the next three and a half hours – minutes of solitary viewing peppered with far away home voices.
***
While the routine of our family Oscar nights had changed very little in the ten or so years that have passed, our collective enthusiasm for the telecast itself has lessened. American politics is partially to blame. My brother, mother, and father are all Conservatives, and the liberal bent of the Oscars often tests their patience. The mere sight of Barbara Streisand or Susan Sarandon in the audience will incite immediate eye-rolling.
One year I attempted a mini peace accord. I reminded my mother that she was once, back in the day, an unabashed album-toting fan of Barbara; I reminded my brother that he was one of the few people to even remember, let alone own Sarandon’s 1998 film Twilight. My mother countered by reminding me that I had somehow come to possess all of her record albums, and my brother chimed in saying he really admired Sarandon; her acting.
“You know what I think?” my dad said, smiling just a little, digging into his bag of Conn’s potato chips. “I think everyone should just be more like Jack Nicholson.” My mind shifted gears, winding up for a good comeback to that. But my dad continued: “Jack’s made some great movies and Jack’s made some not-so-great movies. But mostly, Jack just shows up and seems happy being Jack.” My brother mirrored my dad’s smile, my mother pretended he didn’t say anything; I left the room to get a bowl of ice cream.
***
I ultimately showed up at my parent’s house in 2006 for Oscar Night without a date. Mom ordered the pizza. Dad passed out the ballots. Kip and I sat on yellow molded plastic chairs in the lobby of Domino’s and discussed the merits of Munich, which, as he reminded me more than once, I had seen without him shortly after it was released. He told me it had no chance of winning. While I knew he was right, I held out hope, pointing out those years of the unexpected winners – 1999’s American Beauty upset over Saving Private Ryan, and Marisa Tomei’s trouncing of not one but four much older and certainly much more “serious” actresses in 1992. I chided him for being too “Republican” to go see Brokeback Mountain. He earnestly maintained he had no problem with the movie but just didn’t want to see it (translation – he but didn’t want to risk being spotted at the theater seeing the gay cowboy movie.) We were still in sparring mode when we made it back to the house at 8:04, and had to be shushed as we filled our plates with pizza and joined our parents.
At 10:30PM, my Dad, who was suffering a cold, went to bed. Ten minutes later, my brother, who then was living with my parents because of health and financial concerns, left the room during a commercial break and didn’t return. It was the beginning of the end when, at 11:00, Mom asked if I might trade my place on the sofa for the chair she’d been in all night. When I warned her she was falling asleep, she used the oldest, self-deceiving cliché in the book with, “I’m just resting my eyes.” At 11:20, Tom Hanks was speaking and my mother was snoring.
Moments after host Jon Stewart told my absent family goodnight, I turned off the television, gathered the last of the dinner and snack trash, and settled back into the wingback chair to determine the winner of our family prize. When I finished, I stood next to my mother, watching her sleep, wondering if our Oscar tradition hadn’t just finally dissolved. I lightly put my hand on her shoulder. She startled awake stared first at the dark television screen, then at me.
“What just happened?” she asked, unsure, for a moment, where she was.
“It’s all over,” I said.
She sat up with a start. “I missed Tom Hanks? I missed who won! Why didn’t you wake me up? I missed Jack!”
***
On April 30, 2006, my brother entered the hospital, suffering from severe pneumonia that was further complicated by his diabetes. He spent a week in the ICU, unconscious and hooked up to a ventilator, and remained in the hospital the entire month of May. During this time, a twenty-fifth-year anniversary edition of the 1981Warren Beatty directed movie Reds was issued. This was significant because the film had never previously been released on DVD, and Kip had been in search of it, on and off, for years. The boyfriend and I were browsing Borders on day when I came upon this find. In line to check-out, he caught me secretly congratulating myself, smiling as I re-read the back of the DVD. “You’re the only person I know,” he said, “who thinks to cheer up a sick person by bringing him a four hour epic on Communism.” But it did.
Kip came home with a trache inserted into his throat because scar tissue from the ventilator that had kept him alive had ultimately built up on around his vocal cords, hindering his ability to speak. Although he carried around a notebook, the comic timing issue created by having to write down the kind of random quips natural to conversation grew frustrating for him. Talking to him about taking better care of himself grew frustrating for me.
Going to the movies was the easiest way for us to spend time together.
I will admit that I let pure pity override my inclination to negotiate and I would allow Kip to choose whatever movie he wanted to see. I also know he knew this, and used it to his advantage. The first show he guilted me into seeing was The Last King of Scotland. Political movie. I shuddered; flashbacks of Gandhi. But it was riveting. We both loved agreed.
With a taste for the bio-pic, I was ready for The Queen when Kip suggested it. I left the theater with a buzz, impressed by the filmmaker’s ability to make me empathize so completely with the Queen of England. Walking out of the theater, I turned to Kip. “So,” I said, poking him in the ribs with my elbow, “pretty great, huh?” He shrugged and flashed me a fakey half-smile. “What do you mean,” I said, and over-dramatized his dismissive shrug back to him. Again, he shrugged and gave me an even broader fake-smile. I made him stop, take out his notebook, and explain himself.
We sat down on the only bench in the lobby of the old Drexel art movie house. He wrote, in his near-illegible scrawl, “I don’t mean it wasn’t good.” The way he tapped his pencil while I read along only confirmed the condescending tone I sensed in his words. He wrote on, “It was well made; well acted. It was fine.”
“But, what?” I said, irritated.
He thought, and then wrote each line carefully while I stewed. “I just wished they’d focused more on her early life, is all; her stint in the military, and being summoned from Africa when her father died. They didn’t mention her other children (besides Charles) at all. And very little was done with her sister, Margaret, don’t you think?”
“You’re a snob,” I said.
“Yes, yes I am,” he wrote.
“You’re blowing my post-movie buzz,” I said.
“Oh, you’ll get over it,” he wrote, and then closed his notebook and patted my head.
***
It was already mid January, 2007, and it was unusual that I had only seen two of the five films nominated for Best Picture. Babel had already left the theatres and I’d been dragging my feet on the others because I wasn’t up for the certain intensity of The Departed, or the certain tedium of the subtitled Letters from Iwo Jima. As a way to compensate and still ramp up to the Oscars, I devised a plan to rent some classic Academy Award winning films. Kip was on-board and we agreed to reserve the four remaining Wednesday nights until the Oscar show for this purpose.
Midnight Cowboy was first. I joined Kip in his room at our parents’ house, the one with the old-timey sailboat wallpaper that Mom had picked out special for him when we moved into the house in the summer of 1977. I rolled the desk chair across the carpet, closer to the TV/VCR/DVD combo my dad bought Kip and had carried upstairs when he returned home from the hospital. My brother sat in his recliner and I folded myself into the desk chair, stuffing my feet into the crack between his arm rest and seat cushion.
We both dug the iconic opening credit sequence, watching a spry, young, John Voight, clad in hipster cowboy garb grins his way through the streets of his small Texas town and cinematically onto the streets of New York. Then things just got weird. Now, we knew the subject matter – hustlers and homelessness – was not going to be light. Even still, there was something jarringly comical and disturbing about Voight’s aw-shucks, “I ain’t a for-real cowboy, but I’m a hell of a stud” outbursts. After forty-five minutes (and the third creepy grandma flashback scene) I looked over at my brother.
He nodded his head affirmative, reached for a nearby junk mail envelope and wrote, “Yeah, that didn’t go quite the way I thought it might.”
He pressed stop on the remote control and I stood up, gathering my bag. He put out his fist, which I punched lightly; one of our more casual, but not less affectionate goodbyes.
“What do you want to see next week?” I said leaning in the doorway frame to his room.
He flipped over the envelope, wrote something and held it up like a flash card. I took a step closer and read. “The French Connection?”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “See you soon, Dude.”
***
Two days later, my brother passed away.
He had driven to McConnelsville, the small, Southeast Ohio town where he practiced law out of graduate school. He was attending the funeral of a friend and died of a respiratory-failure-induced heart attack in his car in the parking lot.
As the weeks progressed, friends asked where I was going to watch the Oscars. Some invited me to their homes; others asked if I wanted company at my own home. My parents were ambivalent about their plans. No one expected that I would ignore the show altogether and accept an offer to go bowling with some new acquaintances. A few people felt compelled to say, “I think Kip would have wanted you to watch The Academy Awards.” I just couldn’t bring myself to believe this was true. First of all, the man barely forgave me for seeing Munich without him. But ultimately, I decided that I just could not bare the thought of sitting around being so sad. His birthday, yes. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, that I understand; Thanksgiving, and Easter, fine. Even Christmas day. But not Oscar Night.