Brik Hates the Academy Awards: 00s 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 2000s.

Sandra Bullock in Space Made Me Shit My Pants

Gravity poster

I’m a little slow at getting around to new movies. I just don’t see the point in wasting $10 to see an overwrought, cliche piece of shit at the first-run theater. So, Mrs. Brik and I almost always wait to see stuff in the second-run theater. We spend a hell of a lot less money, and if the movie turns out to be shitty, it doesn’t feel like much of a loss. Gravity, like so many others, was a movie we waited to see in the second-run theater. That was a mistake. It was well worth the full admission price. I wish I had seen it sooner.

Gravity is less of a film and more of an event. It’s a massive spectacle that keeps you glued to the screen. You get completely lost in it. The typical things you expect in a film, like music, sound effects, character development, are thrown out the window. Gravity is like no other film before it. It is so different than other movies, you can’t judge it in the typical fashion. You don’t watch Gravity, you experience it.

Brik Hates the Academy Awards: 90s 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 1990s.

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.

I Lost My Combination to The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker poster.

The Hurt Locker is a 2008 film directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal. What is it about? I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that it is overrated as hell. Supposedly, this movie is about a three-man U.S. Army bomb squad operating in the Iraq War. That’s what all of the movie’s scenes revolve around. However, it would be a stretch to say this movie is really about anything. But that’s not for a lack of trying.

In fact, The Hurt Locker tries to be about a lot of things, but fails at all of them. You know that old saying, “Jack of all trades, master of none”? Well, that’s this movie in a nutshell.

It tries to be an honest look at the Iraq War, but it isn’t realistic in the slightest. It tries to be a suspense-laden thriller, but the suspenseful scenes are few and far between. It tries to give us an in-depth look at the psychology of the men who experience war, but it doesn’t know how to pull that off. At best, The Hurt Locker could be described as schizophrenic. At worst, a piece of shit.

Classically Shitty: Citizen Kane – A Tale of Forbidden Love

I bet Kane wishes Leland was underneath him right now.

Extra! Extra! Read All About it!

Greatest Film of All Time Reviewed by BrikHaus!

Citizen Kane is considered to be the greatest film of all time. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a score of 100%, the American Film Institute (whatever the fuck that is) ranked it as the #1 film ever made (apparently they haven’t seen Conan the Barbarian), and every film school instructor in the world jerks off to it on a regular basis. The real question we should be asking is: Why? Why do so many people give so many shits about this movie?

Film-fags will throw around terms like, “Deep Focus” and “Low-Angle Shots” and “Lightning Mix.” Those are film-making techniques that director Orson Welles helped to pioneer in this movie. Innovative techniques are not a reason for Citizen Kane to be called the greatest movie of all time. That would be like saying the 1893 Duryea Motor Wagon was the greatest car of all time because it had a 4 horsepower, single cylinder gasoline engine, a friction transmission, a spray carburetor, and low tension ignition.

You could say that Orson Welles is the “greatest pioneering film director of all time” but that has little to do with his movie being the best ever. So, again, why do people fawn all over this movie? Here’s why: it’s about gays. Yes, that’s right. It was a pioneering film with a rich subtext about a homosexual love affair. Orson Welles had HUGE balls to make a movie about gay love in 1941, and that is the reason it remains such a beloved classic to this day.

Classically Shitty: The Hustler

This would have been better than what we saw in The Hustler.

There are certain movies that grace every “Best Of” list of top films. These are the ones that filmfags can’t help but jizz over at their mere mention. They get praised by critics, and labeled as “groundbreaking” and “influential.” Typically, they are also boring as shit and are a test of patience to even sit through them. These are the movies I want to discuss in “Classically Shitty.” The ones you are supposed to like because the filmfags said they were great, but when you watch them you can’t help but feel like you just wasted two hours of your life.

Although the first entry into this series was probably my completely fair and balanced review of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I will officially kick off this series with a review of one of the worst pieces of shit ever put to celluloid: The Hustler.

This is a 1961 film starring Paul Newman. The American Film Institute regards it as the 6th best sports movie ever made. Well, if you consider “sports” to be standing around, smoking, drinking, and acting like a jackass, then yeah, this is a sports movie. It’s about a guy named Fast Eddie Feltcher Felson who likes to play pool, and wants to beat the reigning king of the game, a dude named Minnesota Fats. The apparent twist is that Fast Eddie is a lot better than he appears to be, and hopes to take out Minnesota Fats by surprise.

Reasons Why Predator is Better than The King’s Speech

The Fight of the Century.

I recently finished watching the Academy Award winning film, The King’s Speech. For those of you who have lives and don’t follow this kind of thing, this movie won awards for Best Actor, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture. Apart from that, it won a shit-ton of awards from all the other award shows that year. Hollywood has to have award shows monthly, because they need to continuously validate what they do for a living. Honestly, these people contribute nothing to society. Go ahead and tell me that the people who made Transformers 2 are adding things of cultural importance.

So, in order to satisfy their egos and justify getting paid millions of dollars for three-months of work a year, they need to give each other shiny metal statues. Somehow that tells them that yes, they are important. Not only that, they won this award, which means they are more awesome than they had previously realized! Here’s how a typical award presentation works.

Presenter: And the Jizzie award for Best Actor goes to, Douchey Guy!

Douchey Guy (feigning surprise): Wow, I can’t believe I won!

Presenter: Out of all the actors this year, you recited lines someone else wrote for you better than anyone else!

Douchey Guy: This is a tremendous honor.

Presenter: Who would you like to thank for this prestigious award?

Douchey Guy: My manager, my director, my mistress, my therapist, my tax attorney, my other therapist, my personal trainer, my wife, my kids, and Jesus.