Paul Sassone

The outpouring of Trump trashing that no doubt will take pace at the Academy Awards on Feb. 26 is almost enough to make me tune in.

Almost.

Not that I don’t like movies. I love movies.

Though I confess a lot of movies made these days leave me unmoved, unenlightened and unexcited.

In fact, many of today’s movies strike me as just incompetent. Have you noticed that character relationships never are made clear? You have to figure out for yourself that these two people are married or are brothers, or whatever. Would it kill the writer to somwhere early in the script to let us know who the hell these people are?

And lord help you if some necessary information is shown in writing.

All printed matter in today’s movies is in such small type it is impossible to read.

But, it hardly matters since almost every movie looks as if it was photographed through a layer of dirt. Even scenes supposedly taking place in daylight are dark and muddy.

Why make movies so needlessly unpleasant to watch?

I do not make these criticisms out of ignorance. I have  seen many of the films nominated for Oscars.

My brother Mike is an fine actor and a member of the Screen Actors Guild. As a member, he is sent DVDs of award-nominated films so he can watch and vote.

Mike lends the movies to me when he is finished viewing them.

I have seen some good acting amid the drearily dark, hard-to-figure-out and tiny-type movies up for Oscars this year.

I won’t go into a lot about the movies I saw this year. But, because I like you, I will warn you against the movie “Arrival,” which is almost literally impossible to see and is numbingly boring when it is not being embarrassingly pretentious. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

No, I’m not going to watch the Academy Awards because I have no desire to see a parade of spacey, scantily-clad and overpaid actors trivializing our perilous political situation.

And I say that realizing I probably would agree with the criticisms that will emanate from the stage.

It’s just that I’ve just had my fill of swaggering wealthy people.

–I love movies, but won’t watch Academy Awards–