Justin McClelland

The very first Oscars I watched was when I was eight. Because it was a school night (Tuesday, maybe) I had to tape the last half of the awards and watch them at a later date, with most of the big awards (Best Picture, Best Actor/Actress) spoiled for me by the time I saw the envelopes opened. This was 1988 so The Last Emperor won everything in sight, seemingly, and I really didn't know what a lot of the awards (sound editing? art direction?) meant. This sad habit of only being able to watch a portion of the awards live continued until a teacher's strike in 1993 meant there was no school the next day and I was able to see Unforgiven take best picture in real-time with the rest of the world (The 1993 awards were for 1992 movies, remember). My dad even took me to see it a few days later, despite its hard R rating.
I think part of the reason I like the awards is because they set some sort of verifiable achievement to an art form, almost like sports. Baseball has the World Series. Football has a Super Bowl. Why not a night for movies to sum up the entire year and say what was particularly good in that year?
In a more pragmatic sense, when I was a little kid, the Oscars offered a glimpse of movies I could hardly dream of seeing. All the acting awards, plus the Best Picture nominees, got to present clips from the films, and for a little kid who digested every movie ad he saw on TV, but couldn't actually view too many movies with a rating higher than PG, it was an overload of information. I still remember a clip from the 1987 awards for Best Actor which had this fully clothed man walking into water. Crazyness. I don't even remember what movie it was (and it clearly wasn't the winner because Michael Douglas won that year), but what an impression of a cinematic world outside of cartoons. It was pure catnip for a burgeoning movie buff (Checking Wikipedia the movie was most likely Marcello Mastroianni in Dark Eyes). The clips have been cut way back at the Oscars recently and even Best Picture nominees show more of a trailer for the film than any specific clip, which I think is too bad, even though at 32 and living in a reasonably sized city, I have access to pretty much everything nominated, shorts and documentaries notwithstanding. I still love the clips.(Ironically, The Last Emperor is the newest Best Picture I have never seen).
The Oscars are weirdly polarizing, because most people seem to care about who wins, but o