National Post (National Edition)
Oscars’ Hart disease surely just a symptom
What are the biggest days of the year for marijuana sales? Probably, if you are a part of what we used to call the “cannabis culture,” you know the answers. Me, I found out by accident when I stumbled upon Washington State’s open sales data from its retail marijuana shops. With Canadian pot retailers failing to meet supply pressures in the first weeks of legalization, I got curious about the details of the sales cycle in the U.S. states that beat us to it.
Washington, it turns out, publishes insanely detailed microdata: you can download a database whose rows have the exact time, price, quantity and location of literally every individual sale of marijuana made in the state over a period of about two years. The biggest sales periods turn out to be immediately before Christmas, New Year’s, and the Labor Day long weekend. Right up there with them, though, is April 20 — the 4/20 date consecrated to the holy herb.
And, to my surprise, the Friday and Saturday before the Oscars. (I do not know if Canadian cannabis shops are aware that they will face a siege before the Oscar broadcast, which is scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 24, but if you are in a position to profit from this information, don’t forget to thank me.)
I was thinking about this discovery Friday morning when the comedian and actor Kevin Hart resigned as the 2019 host of the Oscars — the last act of a minidrama that had lasted about a week, although Hart’s part in it was more like 48 hours. As December got underway, the Hollywood press began to notice that the Academy Awards, which usually has selected and announced a host by now, had not made any visible progress on the choice.
The gig, it was widely observed, has become the definition of a thankless job. It does not pay especially well, it involves a lot of work, and absolutely no one ever seems to emerge from it with positive reviews. (If they can manage it once, they get dumped on in year two.) Hart, as someone who has achieved mid-level movie stardom and has a broadly family friendly profile, was being mentioned as a good candidate. On Wednesday he announced that he was taking the gig.
This being 2018, the obvious sequence of events followed. Hart was instantly found to have made a few harmless gay jokes on Twitter many years ago; the one that invited the greatest quantity of pretended horror read “Yo if my son comes home & try’s 2 play with my daughters doll house I’m going 2 break it over his head & say n my voice ‘stop that’s gay’.” It is not a very good joke — as a rule, professional comedians don’t waste the primo stuff on Twitter — but it might be defended as a joke at the teller’s own expense, a joke really about dads. No one was ever supposed to literally believe Kevin Hart would assault his child for failing to conform to gender specifications.
But the zeitgeist insists on idiotic literalism as a moral imperative, so Hart spent a few hours deleting old tweets and explaining that he had already apologized for the edgy ones. This, of course, did not save him. It merely signalled weakness, and soon Hart was out. If Neil Patrick Harris has not yet sent his tux out for cleaning, he should probably get on that.
Whether or not the pressure applied to Kevin Hart was fair, I do not think it can be disputed that the Oscars, as an event, are in crisis. My little factoid about Oscarlinked pot sales shows how central they are to our culture. In principle, they have something for everyone. Just as you can watch a ball game in a beer fog while cursing at Joey Votto, or have the game on your computer next to a spreadsheet while you gamble or make fantasy-league transactions, you can enjoy the Oscars in a myriad of ways. They’ve got sex, economics, fashion, drama and surprises and absurdities exactly like those that make sports enjoyable. You can even bet on them.
But the contradictions inherent to the Academy Awards seem to be destroying them. The Oscars have always been torn between being a popular event and a trade show; between highart aspirations and the slick shinola that pays the bills; between being a display of cheesecake and a celebration of militant social justice; and between the imperative role of comedians in the ceremony and the brutality with which comedy is treated by Academy voters.
What’s new is that the bottom line is suffering. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the ratings for the TV broadcast are down almost 40 per cent since 2014. The Oscars need an A-list host more than ever — yet Kevin Hart’s drumhead trial is going to make the difficulty of finding one much worse. I am not sure there is even any sense in complaining about the pervasive touchiness, the feral “human search engine” activity, that did him in. What I wonder is to what degree common mass cultural experiences are even possible anymore. Then again, maybe that’s what all the weed is for.
THE ZEITGEIST INSISTS ON IDIOTIC LITERALISM ASANIMPERATIVE. — COLBY COSH