Who won an Academy Award last night for producing The Cove, which in turn, gives me an excuse to defend Hackers, the role (other than Early Edition) with which I most associate him, from Alex Remington’s lambasting it, which I’ve been meaning to do for days.  I’m definitely not going to deny that it’s a patently ridiculous movie.  I mean, come on:

But despite the silliness of the cultural depiction of hacking, the movie has a number of virtues.  First, the cast.  I mean, my goodness people.  Stevens is a dorky, villainous hacker.  Dr. Melfi is his semi-dumb girlfriend.  Bunk Moreland is a hardass, humorless Secret Service agent.  J. Lo’s husband is one of his coworkers.  Lara Croft is a teenaged computer vixen.  Jesse Bradford is an adorable wannabe badass hacker.  Felicity Huffman is slumming it as a district attorney!  It’s this repository of things that were supposed to be huge in the 1990′s, and blew up in the aughts.  It’s also responsible for my irrational fondness for Jonny Lee Miller, which I will not attempt to defend except to say that he makes me happy, and sometimes that’s enough.

And while Hackers was obviously an inaccurate portrait of hacking, combined with special effects that have aged extraordinarily poorly.  But in one respect, I think it was extremely accurate.  As a portrait of bored, smart, angry kids, Hackers rang extremely true to me when my friend Tony showed it to me as part of his effort to instruct me in the ways of action movies.  I didn’t get myself into trouble with computers, but I sure had “Play with the best, die like the rest,” the movie’s hacker credo, taped to the back of the accordion files I used to store evidence in as a high school debater.  It gave voice to a lot of the rage and competitiveness I felt back then, and I still appreciate that.

Before this year, across every Academy Awards celebration, only four science-fiction movies had ever been nominated for Best Picture: Dr. Strangelove (if you count it as sci-fi), A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars and E.T.  None of them had ever won.  The nomination of District 9 and Avatar increased that number of nominations in the genre by fifty percent.

Now, perhaps I’m a science-fiction sentimentalist.  But I deeply hope that trend will continue.  I think it’s no coincidence that two sci-fi movies are nominated this year (Even if those nominations were enabled by the expansion of the Best Picture category. I think Avatar would have been nominated if there were only five movies, but that District 9 would not have been, which, in and of itself, says a mouthful about how the Academy values movies.).  Science fiction’s always been an incredibly valuable source of metaphors, whether about politics, or race, or religion, or capacity for wonder, or any kind of otherness.  But those metaphors are increasingly close to the actual problems that we face, and the gap between the possibilities of science in science fiction and reality is closing at an accelerating rate.  The Academy may be slower than some of us to recognize the value, the importance of that convergence.

It was never going to happen last night.  And even if Avatar had emerged victorious, I think it would have been more about the commercial power and technological advances of James Cameron’s latest behemoth than about a true recognition of the trend.  But I do think we’ll see a science fiction Best Picture winner soon.  The future is undeniable, in movies as well as in life.

I always feel vaguely dispeptic after watching the Oscars, an event that has everything to do with marketing, and the peculiar social rituals of a particular segment of Los Angeles, and very little to do with the actual purpose of the movies: to amuse, to emotionally engage, and to convey beauty.  My friend Ross, in the midst of a wonderful meditation on the greatness of Roger Ebert, and its treatment as an amazing archaeological find in recent months, has a great reminder of the interaction between love and criticism:

Culture, of course, has no analog. I love music because it touches me in a way that nothing else does. I love Paul Thomas Anderson not because he references a million other movies — if that’s all I cared about, I’d be the president of the Martin Scorcese fan club. Despite the calls of “Hipster” thrown at me, I don’t love David Eggers because he’s twee. I care about his work because it hits me emotionally. And I’m not detached from Eggers’ story. I’m not detached from our commons Suburban Chicago background or our love for the written word or our general outlook on life. Which is to say that the point of this piece was to simply say this: Roger Ebert endures. If I put on my cultural atheist hat, I say this: Illness or no, Ebert endures. He’s just as good a writer now as he was a year ago. His illness hasn’t made him great, it’s just made us appreciate his greatness. He didn’t win a Pulitzer (you know I’ll bring that up. I’m a journalist.) yesterday, everyone. He didn’t write his obscenely great 8 1/2 piece last week, everyone. He’s been doing this for forever.  He’s the best we’ve ever had. This didn’t happen overnight, but I’m glad everyone’s taking notice. He still writes and writes and writes.

Rereading it made me feel a lot better this morning.  It’s like a hangover cure, or something.

I don’t think I’m saying anything particularly shocking or counterintuitive when I write that the Academy Awards broadcast was quite bad this year.  I have a hard time blaming that on Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, both of whom I adore, even though their initial monologue was of such uneven quality and such manifest awkwardness that it seems entirely possible they were drunk and improvising the whole thing, in which case it was reasonably impressive.

Rather, it seemed like Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic, who produced the hsow couldn’t agree on a concept.  The multi-patterned sets (the ones in the backdrop were different from the ones on the front of the steps) clashed with the hideous tinsel hanging from the ceiling.  Neil Patrick Harris is uniformly charming, and it’s a nice sop to the fanboys and fangirls who loved him in Dr. Horrible and singing in How I Met Your Mother to have him sing.  But there’s nothing remotely witty about singing ”You can’t take Julia Child from her pie / You can’t take James Cameron from his CGI” and the song felt like an extremely deliberate attempt to capitalize on Hugh Jackman’s great, antic performance, which was wonderful because the anticness was something of a surprise.  After Martin and Baldwin’s only somewhat successful opening dialogue (the two of them shaking hands in a congratulatory fashion after referencing a threesome with Meryl Streep, and Martin’s fabulous “In our first movies, we were both born a poor black child” in reference to both Gabby Sidibe and The Jerk were marvelous, but lost in a sea of mediocrity), it seemed as if they were banished from the stage in punishment.

And in their absence, what mediocrity.  The Steve Carrell-Cameron Diaz bit was so poorly written and poorly delivered, it wasn’t clear to me if they were ad-libbing to cover Diaz’s flub, or if the jokes had been written that way.  Miley Cyrus botched her lines, too.  When Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. got up on stage, their competence was so refreshing that the somewhat weak jokes seemed like a miracle.  Carey Mulligan and Zoe Saldana are lovely, lovely ladies, but it breaks up the flow of things when you’ve got to smooth out your dress and joke about how it makes you immobile.  The long salutes to the best actor and actress nominees were, once again, embarrassing, stilted and a momentum killer (though Michael Sheen talking about how hot Helen Mirren is further endeared him to me).

I don’t really know what else to say.  The Academy Awards are a significant television event.  To do honor to the art they are about, they ought to be well-designed, well-executed, and well-performed.  This year, they were not.