And the Oscar Goes To

Well, I certainly didn't see that forest for the, um, trees.

This is why I shall be neither critic nor writer of a movie, ever. I understood none of the greatness of Anora upon my viewing of this year's best film. The message it was intending to convey lost totally on me. I was looking at it one way where the intelligent universe was examining under its, um, hood, in a vastly different direction.

I once watched a movie starring a very young Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter. It was a Coen brother's film entitled "Raising Arizona." It was my introduction to the Coens and I confess I was lost. My brain could not fathom why anyone would find this movie of note. So my inability to locate the strength of what is before my eyes on the screen is clearly not a phenomenon of recent vintage.

Give me a remake of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and I will cry my eyes out and applaud the magnificence of what I have witnessed. Or the magic of "It's a Wonderful Life". They don't make movies like that anymore, or if they do, they are far too complex, or maybe it is far too subtle, for my feeble brain. Filmmaking has evolved. I, quite evidently, have not.

Actually, they should make a Mr. Smith redux now. Because the reality of what is occurring daily in front of us in our nation's capital is like the worst film ever conceived. Yet for some it should gather the Oscar for best picture. Of all time. Not "Gone With the Wind." Now "Gone With the Windbag."

So it's not only in gaging the value of a film that my understanding categorically is misaligned with many in the universe.

Anyway, I have wandered far off topic. Maybe I will have to go back and watch Anora, Raising Arizona and a few others with an open mind and a less critical gaze. Then again, unlikely. For I am nothing but what I am not.