Notes From My Knapsack 2-25-07
Jeff Gill

This Week On the Red Carpet

Oscar Night is this weekend, and we’ll read all next week about the winners for
best picture, best actors and actresses, cinematography, and "the buzz."

Clearly, "buzz" isn’t just for apiculture anymore. Bee hive keepers know about
buzz, and now the contestants on "The Apprentice: LA" do, too, with their
venture into apiculture.

But if you work with honeybees, and are around the hive, their tone, their buzz
really does change. And I’m told, though blessedly have never been in earshot
to know personally, that you never forget the sound of an angry hive.
I’ve heard what I was told is the tone of a happy hive buzz, and it made me
profoundly nervous. So that’s all I need to know about angry.

"Buzz" is what drives the debate on the Iraq war, the ’08 presidential
nominating contest, and Oscar picks. There is, apparently, a tone of the
discussion and topics and attitudes that can be read to point out the ultimate
winner. Read the buzz, the logic goes, read the hive.

My problem with Oscar buzz is that for me, Best Picture is "Casablanca," Best
Actor is Bogie or Bing or Cary Grant, and Best Actress is (hmmmm) either Eva
Marie Saint or maybe Katherine Hepburn.

You could throw up "North by Northwest," Nobody’s Fool," or "Leap of Faith,"
Paul Newman or Steve Martin, Rene Russo in "The Thomas Crown Affair," or "A
Canterbury Tale," even "State and Main," and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and
Rebecca Pidgeon. The point is, I have no idea who’s made movies *this* year.
That’s not entirely true: the Lovely Wife and I took the Little Guy to see
"Cars," which was a delightful ripoff of "Doc Hollywood" if you ask me (did
they pay royalties to the doctor who wrote that, I wonder?).

And we had a grandparentally provided opportunity to see "The Nativity Story,"
which will no doubt win just as many Oscars as "The Passion" did (i.e., none,
with a consolation minor, non-TV show award). The guy who played Herod was
brilliantly evil, though, and having played many wise men through the years, I
delighted in Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior, perhaps more than I did the Holy
Couple.

Anyhow, none of that qualifies me to comment on the Oscars. I know that the
trophies will go to a number of people who are in very expensive clothes who
are deeply concerned about hunger and global warming . . . before they drive
off to the post-party in Escalades, catching a chartered Gulfstream to make the
morning shows in New York, pumping Lord knows how much carbon into the
atmosphere.

If they aren’t giving Longaberger gift baskets to the presenters anymore (they
dropped the whole basket idea once it got thirty thousand dollars worth of
lavishness, embarrassing even Hollywood publicists), why exactly do we care?
The buzz, such as there is one, is around the fate of Hollywood itself. Younger
audiences are watching clips and movies on portable media (read iPods and their
clones), downloading movies to laptops, wifi-ing them into the big screen only
occasionally.

So studios no longer control the taps, so to speak. Visual media comes across a
wide variety of settings, and people of all ages are getting used to amateur
content as more of the norm (read YouTube) from news update footage from
cellphone shots to churches with inhouse productions showing on their
bigscreens.

If they don’t control the taps, they don’t control who pays – or if anyone is
paying.

And the aesthetic side is even bigger. "Lawrence of Arabia," for all David Lean’
s beautiful photography and Peter O’Toole’s acting, doesn’t work on a two inch
screen. It just doesn’t. The sands of the Empty Quarter and the rocky cliffs of
Petra aren’t more than colorful smudges on a DVD player screen, and Omar Sharif
riding towards the camera from dot to mounted Prince has little impact on a
laptop.

Will this mean movies will start getting made less for the silver screen, and
more to the micro-formats? What does that look like? More talking heads?
And you can’t think about any of this without remembering that we’re now a full
decade into the era where all videogames make more money than all movies put
together. Talk about making your own story, within a broad framework delivered
by the designer/director.

Movies have long been a crucial element in how we tell our stories about
ourselves to each other. So when we talk about the buzz around where Hollywood’
s going, we’re talking about our own stories.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio,
and he’s used to using movie images in preaching. Tell him how the changes in
cinema might change your story at knapsack77@gmail.com.