I didn't watch the Academy Awards the other night. My wife and I rented a couple of movies instead: Lost In Translation and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The former was immensely better than the latter. I have no idea what could have been going through the minds of the producers, let alone the writers, of The League. But if I had to guess, I'd say it was something like, "Let's make a really lame movie and dig up some old cinematic fossil to star in it in order to sucker people into spending their retirement money on tickets."

To be fair, though, I'm sure it's the kind of dopey crap that would appeal to the very young and the addle-minded; people either too immature or too dumb to know any better than to waste two hours of their precious lives on something about as interesting as midget wrestling.

Sunday morning, my wife Liz was watching My Cousin Vinny on television. This movie is astoundingly stupid and predictable. Yet, for some reason, Marisa Tomei (playing the role of Mona Lisa Vito, Joe Pesci's girlfriend) won an Academy Award for her lack-luster performance as a ditzy Italian numbskull (think Fran Drescher, who's idiocy comes naturally).

I think it's obvious to even the casual observer that Marisa Tomei has no soul. If she had an ounce of humanity in her, a sense of decency and ethics, she would have declined the Oscar. How she managed to wrangle that coveted award from those far more deserving will surely remain as mysterious as the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa.

Without a doubt, Marisa Tomei is the type of person who would force-feed a Hershey bar to a diabetic, if she thought she stood to profit from doing so.

I'm not one to make a public display of my emotions, but when I heard she'd won the Oscar for Best Actress, I cried. I cried for her, for the poor sap who should have won it, and for the revelation that there is no God; that all my years of Christian upbringing were swept away like fallen leaves on a brisk October day. I didn't just lose hope in humanity. I lost faith in it, as well.

I wasn't surprised that The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won best movie. I liked the books well enough when I read them over twenty years ago and the movie adaptation was superb, even surpassing the quality of the books. Still, I liked the movie Master & Commander more. Sure, I was a bit saddened, but not terribly distraught or pushed to the brink of suicide.

I've never seen the movie Seabiscuit, which was nominated for Best Picture, and I can't imagine that any movie centered on horses or horseracing could be very interesting. I remember watching the commercials for it on television and thinking, "Who the hell gets emotional about a goddamn horse?" People who bet on them, most likely. And I'm not one of them, so I didn't feel any need to rush out and see this emotionally charged equine farce.