people keep talking about the oscars

and
my immediate gut reaction is always
somewhere around the
oh, do they still have that
latitude

i used to love it as a kid

i watched it religiously
like the olympics
like the miss america
like gone with the wind in the fall
like wizard of oz in the spring

and
i think the oscars lasted the longest
but
i think they only made it to 1987
when paul newman won his only oscar
for color of money
which i can't remember at all now
but which
i thought at the time
was pretty weak
and it beat out
children of a lesser god
which i thought at the time was
brilliant
hurt translating
the whole enacting both voices
as it were
i guess
i thought it was
a tour de force

now
retrospectively
it was a romantic film
but at the time
that was really just a vehicle
for the storytelling

i understood viscerally, then
something i had known intellectually
for a little while at that point:
it's a process

newman had deserved an oscar
for a long time
and how many more opportunities were they gonna get
hurt had just gotten one for kiss of the spider woman
did hurt deserve to get 2 in a row
when newman hadn't had one yet

but
to me
in my mind
i said:
it's just a bullshit political system

and
i never wanted to watch it again after that

because
i don't care about the red carpet
i don't care about celebrity
or what so-and-so is wearing

all that hollywood glitterati stuff
i just really couldn't care less

does that make me too weird for you

because
i know
you might care about that stuff