An Award for the Awards -- A Short Comment

This is the first time I can say I loved and was entertained by the Academy Awards. Everything seemed to work and was done in good taste. There were no outfit malfunctions, no outrageous costumes, little profanity, often limited thank you's and buckets of talent. I saw most (not all) of the films.

Ellen DeGeneris was, I thought, wonderful. She makes the famous and non famous feel at ease. She has a gift for the ability to connect even to the everyman like me. I wanted a piece of that pizza she doled out to Meryl, Brad, Jennifer, et al and a bit of the money in the collection hat too! I commit one (only one) of the seven deadly sins when I watch the Oscars -- envy. Their talent is a gift from the DNA god or goddess that creates us all. They win life's lottery by having its genes of creativity and talent in seemingly perfect order.

I thought all who won deserved to win in a field of choices that were stunningly competitive. A special place in my heart is reserved for "12 Years a Slave," a film that shows each one of us who saw it one hopes the true malevolence of slavery's history and why this nation suffers from its massive impact the consequences of which we experience to this day. That "peculiar institution," so noted by the French historian de Tocqueville in his 1835 classic "Democracy in America" was democracy's antithesis to itself. It provoked discord and hypocrisy's division woven into the fabric of the nation's construct in that time and bestowed to us in ours.

The rage slavery invokes is emphasized by a film that reflects its magnitude so necessary for all to see. Perhaps, now, more will see it who need to see it and those of us who know it will keep working to ameliorate its sin and perfect the justice for which it cries out and to which the foundation of this nation speaks.

Kudos to all the winners -- well done, indeed!