Come February next year, two things will be certain.
Number One is that your hand-on-heart resolution to make 2007 the hard-workin' year in which everything changes will have gone to seed in a haze of badly-rolled joints and 24 DVDs. And Number Two – precision-honed to remind you that literally everyone else in the world is dead famous and sexy and talented apart from ugly old you – Oscar season will be on us again.
We all know what that means. Yep – more innovative and thought-provoking films being overlooked in favour of whichever period drama featured the shiniest jackets (hecklerspray prediction: Keira Knightley for her starring turn in Lord, How Woeful Was My Accent?).
It also means that the golden-ticket-granted celebrities will be filing into the auditorium, ready to flash a grin at the cameras and pretend to be all noble when the bald little statue goes to their arch rival. But, hey, at least everyone gets a goodie bag. And boy oh boy does that ever get Edward Norton all narked up.
Oh, the pain the assembled Oscar-losers must feel. The heartbreak and the misery and the despair. But – by way of consolation, and simply because Hollywood stars are, like, six billion times more important than you and deserve all sorts of opulence and that – at least those plucky actors ne'er go home empty-handed.
Uncle Academy, you see, likes nothing more than to show his appreciation to the beautiful people by dishing out special goodie bags filled with reams of wondrous delights. Imagine how Tom Hanks' face must light up when he gets that $1000 Macys discount coupon. You hear us? Imagine.
But things may be changing. This year, spoilysport-pants Fight Club man Edward Norton has voiced the cray-zee idea that giving the rich and famous a bunch of ludicrously expensive gifts may be a bit of a pointless move:
"A lot of us have talked to the Academy Awards producers about this and I think they're actually going to scuttle the gift baskets and that kind of stuff. I mean the gift baskets, worth amounts of money that a low income family could live on for a year, (are given to) people who have so much already. It gets depressing. You sit there, going, 'This is an embarrassment'."
Damn you, Norton. Don't you realise that without these gift baskets the celebrities may not even bother to turn up? And that we wouldn't be able to huddle around our televisions, reaching out the pixels and pretending to stroke their glorious magical faces? And that we'd all maybe turn off this self-congratulatory borefest and go and do something genuinely productive and interesting instead?
Christ almighty, Eddie-boy. What are you thinking?
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Canadian says
I certainly agree with his sentiment, however if the gift baskets aren’t given out, does he really think that money will go to low-income families instead? Personally, I think the baskets should be accepted & then donated to the recipient’s favourite charity instead. Then they could be auctioned off on Ebay with a celebrity’s name associated with it. The charity would then probably make even more money than the value of the contents.