What I've realized is more serious: that awards season is killing my love of the movies.
The reason is something I'm calling the Chicago syndrome. Chicago, in this case, is the movie musical starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renee Zellweger and Richard Gere, which carried off six Oscars, including best picture, in 2003.
At the time, I was not impressed. In fact, I was furious. I'd seen The Pianist, Roman Polanski's stunning, highly personalized story of survival in World War II Poland, and became convinced that granting top honors to any other film would be a travesty - especially at a time when the United States had just invaded Iraq and the horrors of war were on everyone's minds.
For weeks, I refused to see Chicago. A few days before the Oscars, out of professional obligation, I popped a copy into my DVD player and sincerely hoped I'd be able to hate it with a passion.
I watched for maybe 30 minutes. I remember being forced to acknowledge that it had a certain visual flair, but I also found a way to rationalize that as part of the film's problem. In one piece I wrote, I tossed it off as "an exuberant piece of all-American flim-flam." In my report on the awards themselves, I sneered, again, that this was the academy's "bid for musical escapism in the midst of the invasion."
How wrong can a guy be? Six years later, my children have become huge fans of musical theater. So we rent Chicago, I pop it in the DVD and . . . I'm transfixed for the entire 113-minute running time. A day later, I'm transfixed all over again. It dawns on me that this film is pure genius. I don't have enough superlatives for it - the music, the performances, the breathtakingly inventive staging, the editing. I even find it deliciously topical, as only a film steeped in decadence and celebrity obsession can be.
