Sunday, February 22, 2004

As readers have noted, this column reliably provides ample evidence that I'm an idiot, so I don't need anything as disposable as next Sunday's Oscars to validate my documented shallowness.

But if "Lost In Translation," the soporific Bill Murray vehicle actually wins the Academy Award for Best Picture, then I'll be forced to consider the cinematic arts just another aspect of an ever-morphing culture on which I'm conspicuously clueless.

Few films in recent memory have left me feeling so emotionally vacuous as "Lost in Translation," ostensibly the refreshingly ambitious study of a "relationship" between a post-midlife crisis quasi-celebrity (played by the normally likeable Murray) and a confused just-graduated co-ed (the very promising Scarlett Johansson) over the course of a week in Tokyo. It went past me like a light breeze through a frozen pine forest. Nothing moved. Nothing stirred.

Apparently, when it comes to Bill Murray films, I need something to stir. Like a gopher, as in "Caddyshack", or a groundhog, as in "Groundhog Day", or one or more ghosts, as in "Ghostbusters."

In one scene, Murray carries Johansson back to her hotel room after a night of partying. Coming down the hall toward the camera, he wears the exact same expression he used carrying the possessed Sigourney Weaver around her Manhattan apartment in "Ghostbusters" 20 years ago.

Which is fine, I guess. I just needed something more. Was Godzilla booked?

There are a select few 50-somethings who've had a similar reaction to the film, but it sounds hollow in the larger context of critical acclaim and the resounding approval of younger people.

My 19-year-old son, an actor and a theater major at a major theater majoring type university, considers "Lost in Translation" the best movie of last year, his No. 1 in a meticulous personal rating system he's ever ready to discuss. My 39-year-old brother, a Ph.D. and a literature professor, says my son's analysis is mostly dead-on.

Both say the triumph is in the audience's ability to connect with the connection between the platonic characters, both of whom I found to be as vapid as I feel for having found them so vapid. Murray's character is an uninteresting adulterer; Johansson's an understatedly frightened young woman trying to find her way in the confusing place called life, which is very real but not necessarily very interesting.

The only sympathy she coaxed out of me was from lighting her cigarettes, making her the star of still another in the endless series of Hollywood commercials for smoking and gun violence.

I should interrupt this program to note that I'm beginning to sound like my friend Zan Overall, the cantankerous 78-year-old right-winger who annually protests as near to the red carpet as he's allowed against what he considers Hollywood's flaming left-wing political agenda and rampaging sinfulness. In a disappointing e-mail from Zan this week, he announced his intentions to lambaste none of the nominated films, but rather a development project likely to star Liam Neeson as the noted academic and sexology pioneer Alfred Kinsey.

Zan said his main hand-held sign next Sunday will read: "Kinsey Transformed -- And Deformed America! The Upcoming Movie Glorifying Him Will Honor A Sexual Predator Who Encouraged Serial Child Rapists In Their Crimes. He Should Have Been Up On Charges, Not Up In Lights!"

A big sign there, but not some of Zan's best or most effective work, frankly. Why not at least a more topical rant against "Seabiscuit," another Best Picture nominee, this one about a horse we can assume had sex with animals quite habitually and without thinking twice about it?

I could be perfectly happy with "Seabiscuit" taking the Oscar since I admired it nearly as much as Laura Hillenbrand's book, or with "Mystic River," a scorchingly acted Boston story about the way common tragedy tends to metastasize. I don't think "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" or "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" should win because, as Murray used to say as the theater critic on "Saturday Night Live," "Haven't seen 'em."

You'll be cheered to know the full red carpet pre-game with screaming bleacherites and riotously overdressed celebrities will return. Last year it was toned down and the bleachers removed, according to the official Oscars Web site, "in recognition of the seriousness of the world situation and the impending war in Iraq."

I guess an actual war isn't nearly so serious as an impending war. You gotta love Hollywood.

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