81st Academy Awards

I don't much like awards ceremonies, no more than listening to annual budget reports. I don't have television reception and haven't for years so that makes it easy to side step most of North America's cultural references. Friends have learned that I don't have any knowledge of popular TV shows, sports events or popular mini-series.

But yesterday was my friend Frank's birthday party and he decided to hold a pot luck dinner party to watch the Academy Awards to celebrate. Also, given that he is president of a local gay men's nudist group, he decided to make it a nude event.

I am not shy. In fact, I came out at age 21 on Wreck Beach, preferring the sunshine and freedom of a nude beach to bars or saunas. I like swimming, sun-bathing, strolling and sleeping nude whenever possible, but somehow eating nude never gives me the same liberated feeling that others seem to enjoy. Perhaps I am too concerned with finding pubic hairs on my plate or pizza sauce on my dick, etc. My on-coming disability has made me increasingly self-conscious over the years, too, though no one has given me outward reasons to feel ashamed.

This Academy Awards show was a fairly crisp and entertaining one. I certainly saw more sides to Hugh Jackman that I have seen before, though most of the musical numbers weren't anything to write home about. "Milk", "Rachel Getting Married", "Waltz with Bashir" and "The Curious Tale of Benjamin Button" were the only films I have seen, but somehow I ended up winning $20 in a shared Oscars betting pool.

On Saturday, in advance of the party, I went to see "Benjamin Button", which I thoroughly enjoyed. It makes me sound like a common plebe or school girl but I have always been drawn to Brad Pitt, both to his acting and his looks. He's totally fantasy material and he often chooses interesting roles. Seeing him morph over the course of the movie from a garden gnome to a heart stopping, cock throbbing teenager was compelling and I failed to notice that the film is almost 3 hrs long (though it is made much longer by the films quizzes, advertisements and previews that preceded it, which make the high prices and crowds seem all the more unnecessary). I thought it was a good piece of story telling too. I had no idea it was based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, though the screen writer had updated it somewhat by setting it as a flashback told in a New Orleans hospital while Hurricane Katrina is approaching the city. I am glad it won as many awards as it did.