The Oppenheimer Report 2/29/16

I must hurry to write this report because I simply must watch the Academy Awards ceremonies tonight. It doesn’t matter that I cannot remember the last time I actually saw one of the nominated movies before the awards were presented; I am star struck. It must be the American in me, because I’m told that celebrities are not deified in other countries the way they are in America. I’m not sure how it is in Canada. I was talking to a new friend of mine who is a Canadian actor, and he suggests that Canada is like Europe in this respect. I’ve been in Toronto during film festival week, and there is a bit of fandamonium there, so I’m not sure I agree.

Shauna and I used to spend spring and part of our summer out in Banff, and our visits usually coincided with the Banff T.V. Festival. It occurred to me that there were a lot of inflated egos in that crowd, complaining about wilted arugula in salads and climate control in hotel rooms. It always seems that it was the obscure, semi-celebrities that were the biggest knobs. I remember standing at the front desk of our hotel while some low level food channel celebrity complained bitterly about housekeeping. He uttered the words that cause every hotel employee to jump to attention: “Don’t you know who I am?!” But my favorite I-hate-the-Banff-TV-Festival story involved one of our only visits to the famed Banff Hot Springs. Shauna and I had been hiking all day and decided that we would indulge ourselves in a therapeutic soak at the famous hot springs. Having paid our fee, we were no sooner in the pool when a large crew began to set up for some high level private function hosted by Disney. Television monitors were being set up, cables run, guys with headsets were scampering around furiously checking things off on clipboards. In sharp contrast to the bucolic splendor of the surrounding Canadian Rockies, these employees of The Mouse were only interested in one thing: Disney razzle dazzle. Though the hot spring was open for business for at least another hour, the surly Disney drones did their damnedest to make us paying customers feel like unwelcome guests on a closed set. I didn’t know the mouse handshake, so I was part of the unwashed masses.

Today, I penned a song from a melody that has been rattling around in my head for weeks. The song is about regret, one of my favorite topics of late, and the setting is our former summer cottage in Ft. Erie. I did something I rarely do; I sent a first draft of the lyrics to my friend James Carroll. James has been very supportive of my song writing efforts. My lyrics typically change substantially from a first draft, often written quickly to flesh out phrasing and meter. Sometimes meaning is forged from the first draft, and sometimes the song changes a lot. Rarely do songs come easily to me. My new friend Jon Brooks, perhaps the best songwriter I have had the privilege to meet, says an average song takes him 4 months to finish, sometimes a lot longer. I am revisiting songs I began to write over 20 years ago.

Final notes – we have now watched the 2016 Oscars, and I can say that they were marginally better than the 2016 Grammys. By 2020, we will likely have seen all the nominated films. I was interested to hear how host Chris Rock would address the issue of racism in Hollywood. In my opinion, he did what a good comedian can do – he made us laugh at the reality of our dysfunction. My favorite segment was a video short wherein he interviewed several Black people about the movies that were nominated for awards. The majority of the people interviewed had not even heard of any of the nominees, but most had seen Straight Outta Compton. I thought the James Bond theme, which won an award, was awful. Happy February 29^th. I think this is my first leap year report!

- Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2016 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED