Now that it's after Christmas, if you live in Los Angeles, you are getting to hit full on with the onslaught of ads vying for your nod on the nomination ballots for the Academy Awards.
It's a lovely time of year to be in LA. Even if you are not a member of the Academy, you can't help but feel important as billboards, newspaper ads, and even radio ads all pucker up to you and offer something "for your consideration." After all, you don't need a ballot to not vote for a movie. And not voting for all those movies every year always made me feel good.
Now that I'm in Grand Forks, North Dakota - surprise, surprise - I am no longer assaulted by ads desperately seeking my "consideration." These days, my only form of ersatz rebuffery is refusing to purchase the brands of beet seed that billboards beseech me to buy.
But I am certain that back in La La Land, execs have purchased acres of ad space in Variety and on bus shelters throughout the city to tout Disney/Pixar's WALL-E for an Oscar nod. If not, it's because the movie is such a shoe-in it doesn't need any help. Not because it's good, but because it has great heaping shovels full of social and cultural MESSAGE of the sort the glitterati can't get enough of.
If you didn't see WALL-E, here's all you need to know [SPOILER ALERT:] Earth has become so cluttered with garbage that it has been abandoned by humans and all other life forms. WALL-E, a squat, adorable robot, dutifully scoops up the detritus of our consumption-driven society and stacks it into neat cubes. Humanity persists as race of sedentary blobs living on a spaceship where their fat bodies are whisked around in pods that move from one form of passive entertainment to the next. In the end, people learn to value the environment and exercise. In other words, the lesson is that humanity needs to take its political direction from Tinsel Town and strive toward having awesome bodies like those of all the underemployed SAG-members out jogging on the Miracle Mile on any given Wednesday. It's a beautifully animated validation of everything LA.
Now while the members of the Academy are being called upon to send in nominations for this orgy of SoCal self-love, we here in Grand Forks are not being ignored. We have our part to do. Specifically, Disney/Pixar is asking us out here in fly-over America to BUY WALL-E MERCHANDISE. In other words, we are supposed to clutter up the Earth with mountains of WALL-E licensed plastic crap and grow soft and pudgy with our WALL-E video games, DVDs, and other couch-viewed entertainment products that are compatible with a sedentary lifestyle. (Examples pictured.)
Ah, the irony! That would be like agronomy titan Holly Hybrids touting the aphanomyces tolerance of their beet seeds to North Dakotans but trying to sell muffins made with cane sugar to Californians. As if!!
[Cross-posted on Pixelization.]
