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Although movie attendance has suffered a long, steady decline, and the Academy Awards are nothing more than another greedy industry's effort to garner acres of free and favorable publicity, the Oscars often manage to dominate casual conversations this time of year.
Perhaps we could elevate public discourse if there were similar awards in other categories:
· Best Performance by Bureaucrats when Budget
Cuts Loom. The perennial contender here is the National
Park Service with the traditional Washington Monument
Ploy.
Some Colorado school districts, contending with
Amendment One, have produced modern variations on that
them, such as Proposed Band Tuition,
Possible Bus
Fees
and Anticipated Textbook Rental Fees.
But there's really no contest this year. The clear
winner is Waco Raid
from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms. Drama, heroism, real blood, real
fatalities -- all in a great performance which may yet
succeed in convincing the public that the Branch Davidian
is more dangerous than that BATF, and that BATF thus
deserves a bigger appropriation as a reward for its epic
labors in trying to remove people from one guarded compound
in order to put them into another.
· Best Overstated Scare Script. Over the years, we've seen some great ones -- Alar, nuclear winter, ozone hole, Red Dye No. 2, saccharine, dioxin, impending ice age, global warming, VDT birth defects, heterosexual AIDS epidemic, just to name a few.
So the competition was tough as Cellular Telephone
Brain Cancer
emerged a narrow winner. The vote was
close because the scaremongers did fail to cover one base
-- many car-phone users are immune from brain cancer for
the same reason that Manx cats are immune from tail
cancer.
· Best Makeover. We've seen George Bush go from a Yankee patrician to a Texas roughneck, Ross Perot from country-club billionaire to sweat-soaked populist, Ronald Reagan from Hollywood swinger to dedicated family man. None, though, compares to the U.S. Department of Defense. Just two years ago, it was a military machine that rained death on Iraq, and now it is a humanitarian agency feeds the hungry in Somalia and the Balkans. Way to go.
· Best Acting. One nominee is Mo Siegel of Celestial Seasonings; the other is New York Boycott Colorado. One claims an extortion attempt; the other says there wasn't one. Our judges couldn't tell which one was telling the truth and which one was acting, which means that there's a stellar performance in here somewhere. We'll give it to whoever comes forward to claim it.
An annual presentation gala might increase public
interest in significant matters, and in these times, it
would be appropriate -- American political life is mostly
events staged for TV. Shakespeare was apparently about 400
years ahead of his time when he wrote that All the
world's a stage, And all the men and women merely
players.
((NOTE: I'm not sure how Mo Siegel spells his last name; hope somebody there is.))
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