I H8 The Oscars
I hate Oscar night. Watching young, famous, good looking, rich people win awards is not entertainment to me, it’s painful. That’s because I take it personally. It’s like the entire world is graciously applauding these Gods and Goddesses and then turning their collectively heads to me saying, “And what have you done that was so great?” Nothing. In fact, I’m zero for four in the real Oscar categories:
Category 1: I’m not young. I’m 46 years old. In Los Angeles, that means you’re close to needing life support. I was talking to a girl at work the other day and she said, “This creepy old guy was hitting on me at the gym.” Before I could stop myself, I asked how old he was. “I don’t know,” she said, scrunching up her nose, “like … 50, or something.” She actually spit the word “fifty” as if disgusted by its relevant taste. It’s official: I am now three years and seven months away from being “creepy old.” Nice. This was the same girl, mind you, who came into my office the week before and said, amazed, “Did you know that John Travolta started in television?” She seemed shocked that he would stoop so low, as if he himself were Oscar material. “He was on some stupid comedy series about high school, or something,” she mused. I thought about “Welcome Back Kotter” and how my buddies and I would rehash the series the following morning in the school cafeteria. We’d all try to do the sucking-in-air-laugh like Horshack and would repeat Washington’s cool catch phrase. “How ah you today, Mistuh Kotteah.” Travolta is 53 … does that make him creepy too?
Category 2: I’m not famous. I tried conjuring up a moment when I felt famous. I think it was when I went back for my 25th-year class reunion in Madison Township, Ohio. I hadn’t been back in years. Apparently, a wild rumor had started. (Not very difficult to do in a town where a few gossips serve as the city’s equivalent of a network provider.) Word was that I had “made it.” People had seen me on commercials and sitcoms; they had heard me sing the national anthem at Jacobs field in Cleveland and listened to one of my songs on the popular local radio station. Of course, I had done none of that. I kind of new something was up when a couple weeks before the reunion I got a call from an old high school buddy of mine in Ohio that I hadn’t talked to in decades. “Hey, uh, if this is the Jeremy Baka, uh … the one that went to school at Madison High School,” he continued, sounding like a teenager gearing up to ask out a girl. “Well, uh, if this is you, then, then, this is your friend Ted Ellis.” Beat. “Anyway, we was all wondering if you was comin’ to the reunion. Cause, you know, folks back here are proud an all…” Proud? I was working at a PR agency promoting car lubricants. When I arrived at the reunion, people stood a polite distance, talking in their decades-old cliques but watching me out of the corners of their eyes. “I seen you!” exclaimed a pudgy guy in a wrinkled dress shirt as he slapped his knee, a guy whose name I didn’t even know in school. “You was on a Doh-rEEttohs commercial or somethin’ … or was it that ‘Got Milk?’ thing?” He looked famous too. I was positive I had seen him on an episode of COPS.
Category 3: Good looking. Hardly. Average … maybe. All the damn models in L.A. skews the one-to-10 scale by at least two points … and now Beckham shows up. Great. That means I’m hovering around a 4.5. In the ‘80s, girls told me I looked like Patrick Swayze. In the ‘90s they said I looked like Bruce Willis. Now, I look like the creepy old guy at the gym.
Category 4: Rich. No. “Rich” has a meaning all its own in L.A. Rich to me used to mean a house. In L.A., “rich” means having a Bentley as big as a house and several homes in different parts of the world, each overlooking another heavenly body of water. What’s more, in L.A., it’s not enough to have a ton of money, you have to pull up in a Brinks truck and swim in it. I was walking down Sunset Blvd with a former female colleague of mine the other day, and I was naming the cars we were walking by that were parked back-to-back-to-back-to-back on the street. “Bentley, Rolls, Ferrari, Bentley,” I said, shaking my head. “Great – and I’m supposed to meet women out here,” I lamented. “I think that’s gross,” she said, sneering at the cars. “It’s just showing off. It’s disgusting — who needs a car that costs that much anyway,” she huffed, subconsciously shifting her Prada purse from one shoulder to the other.
So, there you have it. And the award for the “Oldest, Unfamous, Salary Dude With Average Looks” goes too … me.