The Case for Outrage - Pt 1

Okay, I was going to launch straight into a long rant about the MTV Movie Awards- which will follow - but first, I have to report a sacreligious outrage: I went shopping today and saw that Big Uns are no longer sold in 200 gramme bags, but their largest size has been reduced to 180 grammes. In order to make it "look" more stuffed, the bags have been shrunk and thus appear to be bursting full of artificial evilness, but no, in fact, there is just less of it. Civilisation really is coming to an end.
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I am not sure if I have presided over the case of the MTV Movie Awards before, but considering how much I used to look forward to them, I feel I must express my view on the subject.

A wee while ago, I looked up the “recent” MTV movie spoofs after going through a spate of checking the “classic” clips on YouTube.

Ah, the classics. Who can forget the Se7en send up, featuring multiple William Shatners channelling Being John Malkovich in his various TV incarnations? Or Lisa Kudrow attempting to prove her worth to a senile Yoda in the Phantom Menace’s Jedi Council scene? Or the delightful Janeane Garofalo driving along in a Twister truck pointing out the tire rushing towards their windscreen in a scene that was in the trailer but never actually appeared in the film itself? And of course, if you have the Special Edition Lord of the Rings DVDs, there are (as hidden extras) the MTV send ups with the incredible Jack Black and Sarah Michelle Gellar getting their particular pierced ring out at another Council, and then Andy Serkis and Gollum accepting their award a year later.

After the Lord of the Rings efforts, things started to go awry. The waning years did see some classics, such as Will Ferrell as the Architect screaming, “Ergo! Concordantly!” as responses to the Matrix-ish questions posed to him, but the mock ups got more self-referential and the “funny award categories” became more laboured, catering to the teen audience “mainstream” taste rather than to comedic gold (Best Kiss won by Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair (and Sarah’s subsequent acceptance speech) has never really been topped).

My ability to view the awards was always a hit-and-miss affair on my televisual calendar, as the show appeared on random channels, especially affected whenever MTV surfaced as a channel in its own right. However, I did catch a few, with one with featuring the singing, dancing and comedic talents of Lyndsey Lohan, while another was presented by some hip teen rebels or youth-relevant comedians of whom I had never heard. From a celebration of movie mockery, the show seemed to have shifted to a showcase for the presenter’s many “talents”, though the majority of the time seemed to have shifted to musical performances by groups whose music may have tangentially appeared on one of the movies of the year.

And so, I turned to YouTube to bring me up to speed with the current crop of MTV Movie Award-generated humour. What I saw disheartened me. The spoofs, for me the main reason to show the film, seemed to end up as either a French and Saunders send up (where facets of the lives of the star were highlighted in a scene from a recent film, which kind of works for these two British comedy legends, but doesn’t really work for young Hollywood starlets); or else, if my YouTube search query is to be believed, a “write, film and send in your own” affair. I saw one mock Juno that I think should be used as a torture technique by Interrogation Artists rather than MTV material to amuse.

“What has happened?”, I ask myself. “Is my unappreciation a sign of the actual product’s decline, or of my own increasing age?” Possibly a combination of both – as mentioned earlier, I think the MTV Movie Awards are being pitched squarely at the youth market, with music the product to be sold and the lure of “MTV listening to your voice on the movies” as the reason to participate and watch.

If true, it’s a sad decline from the era when Lisa Kudrow (channelling Phoebe) scriptedly invited her Hollywood friends to ask her any questions on the industry and then shut down that idea after a few minutes when the questions got too hard. It may not be spontaneous, but it is hard enough for scripted material to be funny, let alone for off-the-cuff comments by actors not renowned for having sparklingly witty personalities to come across as amusing. But I suppose if that is not really the purpose of the show any more: if the life has been drained out of it so that the spirit of the Y generation could fill it, then I really am an old man, not in tune with the times.

Verdict: The time when the MTV Movie Awards were the awards show to watch, mercilessly mocking an industry sometimes so far up its own butt to see how far behind the times and how blind it really is, appears to be over as a new generation and/or ethos takes its helm. “Reality” TV and the people’s choice power MTV these days, making the Award spectacle an empty affair, stuck in its own time and place, leaving nothing for the future – nor for old farts like me. Two pieces of popcorn from a boxful.