So I was reading an article on the Academy Award winners this year (big film nerd) and it was shaming them for not showing sex in the film.
Sex and film is a weird place for me. Not because sex makes me uncomfortable (because AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA- hang on let me breath- AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA), but because of people's opinions on it. It's always commented on. I'd love to watch a film with sex in it or nudity where no one fucking talked about it. I don't mean just the sex, I mean the film itself.
That's the main problem with the article for me. One of the biggest letdowns I've seen, which I was just talking about with a good friend of mine, Blue is the Warmest Color, basically had smoke blown up it's (hopefully figuratve) ass because oh my God it has lesbian sex. So edgy. So cool. Gotta give it good ratings. Besides porn, I've never seen a film where there was some hardcore, intense fucking that wasn't rated highly. I can tell you from being a film geek and by watching Blue... how wrong that is.
Blue... is an okay movie. It's alright. The plot is eh, the writing is a little above average, but it's shot very nicely. So it's okay. But God damn did people lose their shit over that film. Every Goddamn film site talked about it like it was some sort of Holy Film of Godliness that could never be reached again in greatness because, holy shit, it had lesbians and sex.
People say "Oh well that brings awareness and lets it become normal." No. You know what makes something normal? Not fucking talking about it every second. You know why your friend never stops talking about that girl they have a crush on that's really cute and has an adorable laugh and likes art and shit and can name every song she's ever listened to? Because they feel something more than normal for them. So when a critic or writer says that we need more sex in films to normalize it, that's really not the case. When it can be in a film without every movie critic on the block talking nonstop about how nice that chick's vagina looked on camera, then it'll be normal. But they can't. Because it makes read counts go up when "nude lesbian" is a fucking tag on their website.
Instead of insisting that every Academy Award nominee has sex in it, how about we insist on good writing? The last movie I can think of that deserved to win (I can't really talk about Birdman because I am yet to see it-- Boyhood was boring as shit) is A Serious Man. That was a Cohen Brothers film that came out in two thousand fucking eight. It had nudity. But barely anyone talked about it.
Stop insisting that everything that talks about or advocates sex is so fucking incredible and revolutionary. Walt Motherfucking Whitman did it in the 1800s with Spontaneous Me. It doesn't help normalize it, it helps make it weird and something to talk about. Just give stupid-ass awards to movies that have good writing. Even though the Academy Awards mean nothing except "Oh I might buy that on DVD when it comes out in four months."
Fuck the Academy Awards.
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Mental Beatdown
RandomA book about the stuff I hate and why I hate it. And whatever else I want to throw in there because I don't follow your rules. NOTE: Seriously if you read any of this and get offended just shhhh because I really don't feel like hearing it at all.