Hangout Review
The 77th Academy Awards
My living room in Glassell Park, CA
February 27, 2005
My roommate and I celebrated Hollywood's annual circle jerk by drinking Hefeweizens in our jammies, which, not suprisingly, was pretty fucking intense. My roomie, Mork, invested $20 in one of those Oscar office pools, which made the whole ordeal even more exciting. He started off pretty well (5 for 5) in some tough categories like Makeup and Visual Effects, but his luck ran out when it came to the really important categories like Best Animated Short and Art Direction. The ceremony got real boring after about ten minutes so I decided to do a little woodworking which was equally boring.Then I took a shower. I made it back just in time for the really important categories like the tribute to the dead celebrities (there were lots) and Best Picture.
The highlight of the evening was Ray Charles taking home the best actor award–I don't think he saw it coming. After accepting his award and thanking some really important people like his director, lawyers, agents and dead grandmother (truly one of the sadder moments), he broke into a beautiful rendition of the uplifting "I Can See Clearly Now", to which someone in the audience yelled bullshit. Ray then ripped off his sunglasses, revealing the two bloody testicles sewn to his face, which immediately caused producer Gil Cates to cut to an Oil of Olay commercial (thankfully this was censored due to the mandatory 5 second delay–the bloody testie eyes, not the commercial).
After a while some more boring shit happened, forcing us to question why the fuck we were even bothering to watch this stupid show. Then we heard a honk and saw the limo waiting outside and remembered it was because we were headed to the Variety Fair party to get drunk and blow lines with a thousand assholes. Some more crazy shit happened at the party. Old Leo the prankster stapled a rat terrier to Marty Scorcese's forehead and Morgan Freeman got old Clint pretty good by lacing his martini with arsenic, causing Clint to get real drowsy and tell everyone he was "gonna take a little power nipper on this here bench." Then Freeman pounded some absinthe and started reciting lines from The Shawshank Redemption ("That old man's crazier 'an a rat in a tin shithouse.") Kevin Bacon showed up a little later, causing everyone to get footloose. It was all very surreal.
What started out as a pretty typical evening in Glassell Park turned out to be one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. My disdain for everything Hollywood was quickly replaced with the realization that the Academy Awards truly are the most important event in the world.
