It's Your Completely Unnecessary Guide To the Oscars

By Jason Neal

WARNING: The following has been satirized for your protection

First something of a disclaimer, back in college when I had something called free time and could engage my cinephile hobby. I would have seen every movie and performance on this list and could have given you complete breakdown of each category. But alas adult responsibility came along now I'm limited to occasional Netflix and anything playing on basic cable. So in full disclosure I really haven't many of the nominees, BUT that's OK. Because I suspect many of the actual Oscar voters have not either and at least I have the integrity to admit it. 

The likelihood of winning is measured in 'Jack' units or how many Jack Daniels drinks would you would need to get the swagger of Jack Nicholson before appearing on stage ranging from 0 representing just Happy To be there, to 4 meaning grab your sunglasses, smirk, and the thank you list cause your headed to the podium! The 'Jack' units will appear in the ( ) along side nominee and each category ranked most to least likely.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

Berenice Bejo, The Artist (3.5)

Octavia Spencer, The Help (3)

Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs (2)

Jessica Chastain, The Help (1)

Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids (1)

Personally I would give it to McCarthy but since Oscar voters have zero sense of humor so rule her out. Jessica Chastain's 'chestacular' performance will get her a Mr.Skin.com nod but sadly not here. Janet McTeer got overshadowed by Glenn Close. So we're left with Spencer and Bejo. Best Supporting Actress tends to favor the breakout role and Spencer would have had it locked had it not been for the late surge of The Artist so the Oscar goes to Bejo.

FUN OSCAR FACT #1: If you want to watch an actor squirm, find one whose career happened only because they are the child of some other famous actor, and ask this question: 'So Kate Hudson (or insert your own actress) now really tell us....assuming you weren't Goldie Hawn's daughter (or insert famous parent)...which of the following would you be doing.... working at a Wal-Mart or Denny's?'

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

Christopher Plummer, Beginners (4)

Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn (3)

Johan Hill, Moneyball (3)

Nick Nolte, Warrior (2)

Max von Sydow, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (1)

Now personally my vote would to go von Sydow to make up for the Oscar snub two decades ago with the classic beer comedy Strange Brew. Nolte is out because frankly the Academy is afraid of what a acceptance speech on LSD laced with Crystal Meth would look like. Branagh is like the Kate Winslet of male actors, great performances but always overshadowed by some one-trick pony. Comes down to Plummer and Hill and since this category always tends to go to older actors as sort of quasi lifetime achievement award, your winner is Plummer.

FUN OSCAR FACT #2: Here's a phrase, you'll never, EVER hear at the Oscars acceptance ceremony: 'Wow thanks but really I'm just some guy playing make believe. Seriously 4 year olds can do this so there's no need for all the hoopla and pageantry. I'm donating this statuette to be melted down so the proceeds from the gold given to starving children in Haiti.'

BEST ACTRESS:

Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn (3.75)

Violet Davis, The Help (3.75)

Glenn Close, Albert Notts (2.5)

Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady (2)

Rooney Mara, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (0)

Scratch Rooney Mara since watching the rape scene in Dragon Tattoo for voters was probably like sitting through Lindsay Lohan reciting the alphabet in a sobriety checkpoint stop, painful. Glenn Close gave a great gender-bending performance but the film required voters to actually think so she strikes out again. Streep nomination too controversial since Brits take offense to an American playing a Brit better than a Brit playing a Brit, so to avoid an international incident she's out. Leaves photo finish between Davis and Williams which very similar to the choice facing George Clooney whether to have the lobster or the crack crab when dining in the South of France while entertaining some hot, 'model turned actress' girlfriend.

FUN OSCAR FACT #3: On the red carpet, keep your eye out for when someone asks Kristen Stewart 'Why do you keep giving me that awkward look?'

BEST ACTOR:

Gary Oldman, Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy (3.5)

Brad Pitt, Moneyball (3)

George Clooney, Descendents and because he's George fucking Clooney

Jean Desjardins, Warrior (0)

Denian Bichiri, Better Life (0)

Best actor usually is all about star power so Desjardins and Bichiri are out at the start. Now Clooney already got a statue for his performance in Gets More Ass than The Driver's Seat of a Rental Car Syriana so probably won't get a second one this year. Moneyball focuses on the Oakland A's who actually never won anything with the moneyball system so neither will Brad Pitt. Thus your winner is Gary Oldman for The Professional urr...Harry Potter urr...The Dark Knight..urr..  Tinker Tailor, something or other. Oldman basically is like the Honey Badger of Hollywood:  'The honey badger is a bad ass. He just takes what we he wants because the honey badger don't care, the honey badger don't give a s...'

FUN OSCAR FACT #4: If Pitt should win, best part of Oscar night will be the camera panning to Jennifer Aniston as she tries to hide the scorn and thinks of her next entry in her 'Burn Book'

BEST PICTURE (ranked from least to most in 'Jack' units):

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Title also describes what its like living with a toddler, but the post 9-11 flick overloads on sentimentality. Though Oscars like sentimentality this movie had enough to give Diabetic insulin shock (0)

Tree of Life - Terrence Malick's spiritual piece undone by the fact no one knows what the hell is going on during the film. (0)

Midnight In Paris - First time in long time Woody Allen appears in category but film only seen by NYU Film students and by the .0000003% of American movie goers who actually think Woody Allen films are funny (1)

The Descendants - Alexander Payne best known as a director who can perfectly balance comedy with emotionally serious material. But it's the comedy part of the equation that rules out Payne..again... since Oscar voters are SOOO serious. (2)

The Help - The first Oscar contender where plot revolves going to the bathroom (2.5)

Moneyball - In real life being a statistician will get you a good job, but in Hollywood it doesn't get you golden prize or the hot chick (2.5)

Hugo - It's sort of like if Martin Scorsese directed a Pixar feature. Oh wait it is like Martin Scorsese directed a Pixar movie (3)

Warhorse - Two months ago I would have said this as the Best Picture, but if you're Steven Spielberg you're getting that queasy feeling that 1999 is about to happen all over again. You know where another war masterpiece Saving Private Ryan got eclipsed by a late surging indie flick Shakespeare In Love thanks to that undeserving hack Gwyneth (BLECCH) Paltrow..because now here comes....(3.5) 

The Artist - A silent movie that goes old school but wins votes because its storyline is based on something extremely rare in Hollywood these days...an original idea. Who knew? (4)

FUN BONUS: Since The Artist is a silent movie, I'm going to do an impression of the average West Virginia moviegoer's reaction to seeing it theaters:

'Hey Thelma Ray! Better move git yer beehind up and talk the manager I think something wrong 'cause the sound aint workin'. And shoot somethin wrong with the color too. It's black and white. And why they all dancin? When they gonna start blowing shit up?'

The Anti-Love Boat, Tim Tebow, and Move Over Las Vegas its Fargo!..North Dakota!

Were Going To Fargo, Baby! ....FARGO! - You may be surprised to learn that North Dakota actually has a Tourism department with the thankless job of trying to entice people to actually come to North Dakota. The dream is to have a plane full of tourists fly into Fargo which doesn't involve a emergency landing on its way to somewhere else. Below is their latest genius promotion. Look at it and let it sink in for a moment:

So let's say you are a strapping young lad with money to burn and wild oats to sow. Why waste your time in Las Vegas, Miami Beach, or New Orleans when you can go to Fargo, eh? Pretty much feel free to write your own caption below but my top favorites:

'And dude you wanted to go to Bismarck (high five)'

'So in No'rleans you throw beads to get chicks topless, so how's that work here?'

'The 4H Hokie Pokie? Were so there man!'

Who Knew...that Eli and not Peyton would be the Manning with the most Super Bowls? - With Giants' latest SB win, Eli has 2 Super Bowl rings to Peyton's 1. And to add insult to injury Eli won both over Peyton's arch-nemesis, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots. Anyone else have a feeling Thanksgiving at the Mannings could get interesting when Peyton tries to pull the big brother card?

Who Knew...that Michele Williams and not Katie Holmes would be the breakout actress from Dawson's Creek? - When we first watched Dawson's Creek we always thought that Katie's spaced out , ineffectual performance was just her character. Evidently that was basically upper limit of her acting ability.

In American politics, There Actually Are Some Things Money Can't Buy - This past month on January 18th you may have noticed Wikipedia, along with a host of other social media sites went black for a day to protest SOPA or Stop Online Piracy Act, the latest in a string of really bad ideas to come from the US Congress. Under the law, say you decided to share the latest funny moment from The Office over Facebook (yes, I know The Office jumped the shark long ago, but hypothetically speaking work with me here) In essence the Gov't could order Facebook to shut down your account and you could be fined or face jail time, because you technically stole copyrighted material and pirated it over the Internet.

The more you learn the more the flaws in the law become obviously apparent. Like how could Facebook enforce it? how could Gov't enforce it? how would anyone actually know The Office was still on TV? etc. Which is why public outcry managed to drown out the millions of dollars major entertainment companies lavished on lawmakers to try to enact SOPA. After that blackout day, majority of Congresspeople who supported it quickly backtracked and the law is about as dead as Tori Spelling's career.

In response I'd like to propose for Congress the IDIOT Act. No acronyms, just an act that says lawmakers must actually understand technology before trying to pass laws to regulate it. During the blackout, many congresspeople who sponsored were outed as having violated their proposed law on their own social media pages. Besides I don't know about you but those FBI Warnings they put at front of DVD's put the fear of God into me if I ever thought about pirating the latest crap TV show so why would we need SOPA?

Breaking Health News: Its good to have blood in your fat stream - Paula Deen, the queen of buttah, announced she has Type II Diabetes. Here's where you insert your shocked face that someone could get Diabetes from high fat, greasy, fried cooking. Of course in true American fashion she decided to capitalize on it by teaming up with Pharmaceutical company NovoNordisk to be their celebrity spokesperson for a new line of Insulin products. In business terms it's a WIN-WIN. Paula Deen's fans gets Diabetes from her recipes and then need high priced Insulin products to treat it. For all you Business students this is what they call a revenue stream.

For The Love of God - I'm sure Tim Tebow is a nice guy and his deeply held Christian convictions are sincere. But having grown up in a generation where we watched holier than thou religious leaders proclaim to be living embodiment of Jesus only to fail spectacularly (regardless of whether Evangelicals ever took notice). So it's not I'm rooting for Tebow to fail so much as waiting for the other shoe to drop.

What I teach my kids about faith is that no one is perfect, we will always have moral lapses but that's OK. It's part of the process for gradually becoming a better person because faith is lifelong process of learning about yourself in relation to God. The danger is in thinking and proclaiming that you are perfect and you alone speak for Christ. Because then you are just setting yourself up for failure since God has a way of making fools out of those people (just ask Eugene Robinson or better yet Google 'Eugene Robinson+That Super Christian football player busted for prostitution night before Super Bowl 33+that football player who gave up the game winning TD in Super Bowl 33 presumably because he was distracted from his arrest the night before')....

....Because the only universal absolute I know is this - God does not care about the outcome of football games. Or beauty pageants. Or the Country Music Awards. Or the MTV Music Video awards. Or the winner of American Idol. I'd like to think God has more focus on helping refugees in a war zone reach safety than petty little contests whose outcome is only symbolic in nature. So can we stop thinking Tebow leading the Broncos to an 8-8 record and sneaking into the playoffs was caused by the divine hand of the Almighty. It was the Broncos' defense and special teams, duh!

Karma Really Is A Bitch - According to study in the Journal of Sexual Health from The Univ. of Maryland Medical Center, as many as 50% of penis fractures seen in their ER (A moment for men to reflex in pain) were happened to men while in the act of infidelity (A moment for women to laugh hysterically). Researchers theorize men in the act of cheating may be more under pressure therefore more likely to miss or accidentally hit something hard (well harder than it). Might explain the prolonged absence of Ashton Kutcher from the set of Two And Half Men.

It Was Sort of Like The Titanic...minus the romance, iceberg, or chivarly - When the Italian cruiseliner Costa Concordia got stranded on a sandbar on to the Tuscan coast, it helped ensure that the phrase 'Italian Maritime Safety' will become the hot, new comedic punchline of the year. In engineering theory, major system failures usually do not start from one big mistake but rather from a series of small mistakes that snowball into one big 'We're Sooo F***ed' moment exemplified below:

#1 The ship deliberately went off course so one of the crew members could wave to family onshore.

#2 Being so close to shore, the ship's captain Francesco Schettino should have been manning the bridge but was instead having dinner with a hot Russian passenger presumably in the pursuit of trying to get some.

#3 In American maritime law, cruise ships cannot leave port without conducting a lifeboat drill, just in case that 1 in million chance something goes wrong does come to fruition, crew and passengers know what to do. The Costa Concordia never had such drill because the crew apparently had other more important things to do like trying to score with hot Russian passengers.

#4 Without this instruction, the scene on-board after hitting the sandbar resembled one big Cluster F*** since no one knew where to evacuate safely. The crew having never been properly trained abided by the old maritime tradition of women and children first...it was every man for himself leaving stranded passengers to swim for shore on their own.

#5 Capt.Schettino gallantly stayed on-board til every passenger was safe...actually jumped in the first lifeboat and high-tailed it to shore. Leaving the Italian Coast Guard to have to run rescue procedures on-board.

#6 Someone forgot to put Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On' in the CD player to add the ambiance of the scene.

When politics becomes Cancerous - If you think about it cancer is the ultimate equal opportunist. It does not care if you are rich or poor,  it does not care if you are Liberal or Conservative, it does not care for which race you are or ethnicity you come from, it does not care for gender, geography, age, or religion. It also doesn't care if you have health insurance which is why it was disheartening to see The Susan B. Komen Foundation undo 20 years of goodwill with one bad mistake.

Last week Komen tried cutting off Planned Parenthood with funds to provide breast cancer screenings for low income women, it ultimately was revealed the reason were its Pro-Life Board members did not like that PP provides abortions. Technically as a man I should not care about the abortion debate but this exemplifies why I have such disdain for the Pro-Life movement. They place an almost cult-like stature to the human fetus, and the fact they were willing to sacrifice lives of grown human beings in the name of protecting a fetus regardless of the circumstances surrounding an abortion reveals a distorted pathology.

Now being Pro-Choice, I consider it sad when abortion occurs since so many couples who desperately want a child and can't have one would gladly adopt one. But every situation different so who can really judge except a woman and her doctor. A logical solution to reducing abortion seems to me is to reduce unwanted pregnancies but that's where the Pro-Life folks get really weird. They also tend to be anti-contraception and anti-sex education, which for me explains what they are really about. The Pro-Life movement has never been comfortable with women taking control of their sexuality and reproduction which makes Planned Parenthood for them the ultimate evil. Never mind only 3% of PP involve abortion with rest focused on giving uninsured women access to reproductive health care.

Oh And One Other Thing About Komen... - College students taking Public Relations 101 in the future will study from the Komen-Planned Parenthood fiasco that bad PR can grow exponentially in the age of the internet. Tax returns showed that Komen annually only gave 25% of its charitable proceeds to actual research in combating breast cancer with rest going to Administrative and Marketing costs. Really?

I'm not a non-profit guru but seems like that number should be reversed. Every October I gave money to Komen and wore pink to show support because with a wife and two daughters breast cancer may one day affect me. But if only a quarter of every dollar is going towards fighting breast cancer then why am I donating? Komen says the marketing portion was about raising awareness but breasts tend to raise awareness all by themselves, since women already have them and men like to look at them. Until Komen gets its shit together I won't be giving a dime.