Brik Hates the Academy Awards: 80s Edition

It’s no mystery that I hate the Academy Awards. Hollywood spends half the year binging on cocaine and hookers and the other half praising themselves for it. No other industry exerts so much energy and spends so much money on self-congratulatory masturbation than the film industry. These sick fucks have the cushiest, easiest jobs in the world, and they act like what they do is some kind of goddamn accomplishment. “LOL OH LOOK I JUST RECITED SOME LINES SOMEONE ELSE WROTE FOR ME AND SHED A TEAR AT THE SAME TIME! I’M A FUCKING ACTING GOD! QUICK SOMEBODY GIVE ME FIFTY AWARDS LOL!”

In theory, I could get behind the awards if they actually awarded things that were deserving. You know, giving a Best Picture award to the best movie of the year. But the Academy rarely gives that award to the best movie of the year. Hell, they don’t even give it to the most popular movie of the year. Usually, they give it to whatever cool person produced the movie, or to the most obscure, independent, foreign piece of shit they can find. Typically, no one in the mainstream public will have even seen the winner.

They’ve been pulling this shit for years. So, I decided to analyze the past years, offer my own nominees, and declare new winners. Best movie isn’t the one that makes you cry or makes you think. Best movie is the one that you want to revisit over and over again. A movie you watch once and never again isn’t good. It’s only good if you can’t help but watch it a million times. Rewatchability is the hallmark of something great.

This time around, I’ll be taking a look at the Best Picture winners from the 1980s.

Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (And Other 80s Dance Movies)

Dance Dance Revolu– wait, nevermind, that didn’t exist yet.

One time, in a state of delirium, I thought it would be a great idea to watch dance movies from the 80s. Apparently, dancing was all the rage in the 80s. There were exactly 15,335 dance movies made between the years 1980-1989. So in my state of delirium I watched Flashdance (incomprehensible), Footloose (“When I get angry I just have to dance!”), and Dirty Dancing (The Swayze). All of these movies are terrible. Even though I was delirious I could still tell they were terrible. They are so bad they are likely to replace waterboarding as the next form of government-sanctioned torture interrogation.

This movie is all wet.

A lot of times movies will be derided for having “no plot.” Usually this is a slight exaggeration because even movies with “no plot” somehow get from Point A to Point B. Very little may happen, but most times there is at least some minuscule semblance of a storyline. Flashdance, however, truly has no plot. Absolutely nothing of consequence happens in this movie. It’s provisionally “about” a young, beautiful female steel welder (I can’t tell you how many hot lady steel welders I’ve met in my life) who aspires to be a ballet dancer. The best way she knows to achieve this goal is to go to a dive bar at night and “flash dance.” Flash dancing is kind of like stripping/spazzing-out on-stage, but not actually getting naked. The audience seems to really get into it. Apparently, having attacks of epilepsy on-stage is super erotic. At one point, she pulls a cord and water drops all over her body. Eventually, she auditions for a ballet school, but runs away, realizing she has no talent. That’s right. That bitch has no talent as a dancer at all. Watching her thrash around on-stage for 50 minutes of the 95 minute runtime was excruciating. It’s like this movie is just a bunch of music videos strung together with the most paper-thin character imaginable. They should have just made a movie out of a bunch of music videos. That would have at least made sense. In the end we don’t learn if she gets into the ballet school or not. It’s not important. It doesn’t matter because there is no plot. This movie is an abortion of storytelling coherence.

Fate/Stay Night

Fate/Stay Night’s cast of clowns.

Fate/Stay Night is an anime series based on a erotic porn video game, so you know it’s going to be high quality. It features the exploits of a blockhead named Shirou who gets caught up in a war for the Holy Grail. He has a really great super power in that he can “fortify” the durability of any inanimate object (like a school desk lol). He also has the amazing ability to act like a complete dumbass in almost any situation.

The story here revolves around the “Fifth Holy Grail War.” These wars take place every 10 years. So, if these wars are every ten years, and this is the fifth one, then they only started 50 years ago. But the Holy Grail was created approximately 2000 years ago. So what about the prior 1950 years? I guess nobody gave a shit about the Holy Grail then. And why is it that the Holy Grail only shows up in Japan? Was Jesus Japanese? Do the Japanese think Jesus was Japanese? It doesn’t make any sense. They might as well have had the series take place on the Moon.

Fringe – Season 5

Season 5 title screen.

Fringe Executive Producer and Showrunner J.H. Wyman said this about Season 5, “My biggest concern was telling an authentic, honest story that I could stand behind, and that I would feel I was giving the fans the love letter that I think they deserve.”

Well, if the final season was a love letter to the fans, then the final episode was a gigantic fuck you.

General Thoughts

After watching the final moments of the show, a show I have invested years in, I couldn’t help but be furious. I wanted to smash something. Seriously. Wyman took a damn good season, a damn good series, and crushed it in a few confusing, contradictory final moments. He did two things: 1) he fucked up because he insisted on using time travel while failing to understand its logistics, and 2) he fucked up because he doesn’t give a shit.