POINTS OF LIGHT or Why I Want an Oscar

One morning I sat across from my energy healer and confessed to
fantasizing about getting an Oscar. It felt like a horrible cliche, and
I always feel like I jinx my life by mentioning it. She mentioned that
a friend of hers really, really wants a Grammy.

"Really?
A Grammy?" I said. "I don’t want a Grammy at all." It was a revelation.
People really do fantasize about different things! Wow! "I mean, the
Grammy awards are full of music that’s just awful, yuck. They’re
infuriating." I saw immediately this applied just as well to the
Oscars. But the Oscars are not about quality, necessarily, and that’s
where different people’s fantasies come in. What are they about? I
remember when it finally became clear what they represent for me.

When
I was young I watched them every year. As a teenager I kept a
three-ring binder and typed up my notes of the winners each year and
kept it on my bookshelf. (Ha! Imagine feeling you had to do that now.)
I looked up the technical people in copies of American Cinematographer
and American Film that my dad had given me as gifts. I studied the
gowns and found them all wanting, reasoning that a tux would be much
more comfortable and allow me to stride confidently to the microphone
to receive my award. My favorite speeches became models of how to avoid
saying a simple "thank you," my favorites being Vanessa Redgrave
accepting for Julia (standing for principles despite the booing, life
is bigger than Oscar, people matter, people’s rights matter
dammit!), and Dustin Hoffman for Kramer vs. Kramer, because he’d always
boycotted awards and used his time to praise the other nominees and
bless the community of actors, who race to auditions from their taxi
shifts, and none of whom, really, are losers, which makes the whole
idea of awards suspect (but not too suspect to show up, accept your
award, and point all this out very eloquently).

In my 30s,
long after passing by film classes for English lit and circling back
through cinema studies and dropping out of museum studies and being
unclear and working at nonprofits devoted to alternative media
exhibition, education, history, and criticism (the "little people" of
the film world), I was still watching the Oscars every year. In 1998,
my son was less than a year old and we still had television reception.
There were two things besides watching movies that H & I still used
the TV for: The X-Files and the Oscars, our baby a sleeping lump
between us. As usual, that year the awards dragged on with nothing very
interesting going on, except for any time the film Gods and Monsters
was nominated. There sat Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser and Lynn Redgrave
in a cluster, two of them behind the other so that they could hold
hands in a circle whenever their film was nominated. They radiated
intimacy, love and good feeling; they had made of their film set a functional family,
you could feel it. When Bill Condon won for his screenplay they hugged
and beamed, and showed real unselfconscious joy