Since our superior technology permits us to vault time and see into the future, I already know the exact outcome on Oscar night a week from Sunday (by your calendar). Truly, though, such technology is wasted on you people, and not least on this ritual. Why? Because it’s always exactly the same. You are a predictable bunch, or, as one of your brighter members once put it, “What’s past is prologue.” But give yourselves credit: You are at best richly predictable. That’s why your Oscar ritual reveals so much about you and is so edifying to us.
For example, Glieseans have noted an uber-category among your species, a separate breed clearly blessed by the gods with an abundance of physical, if not intellectual, gifts – their features perfectly symmetrical, their muscles definitively chiselled, their curves sinuously pleasing. These beautiful ones are indeed lovely to behold, and well-deserving of the special label you’ve conferred upon them – the genus Actor.
We have further observed how, at the Oscar rite, the female Actor is always attired in a colourful costume impeccably designed to call attention both to itself and to the epidermal layer it so tantalizingly exposes. Kudos – top Gliesean scientists all concede these costumes are a marvel of engineering. As yet, though, we are mystified why the male Actor tends to garb himself in dreary black and white, with far less epidermal exposure. Here on 581g, female Glieseans are upset by this discrepant practice.
Of course, only the blind could fail to see that your gods have not been democratic in their allotment of blessings. In fact, many Oscar specimens appear to make up a decidedly lesser breed characterized by rotund girths, balding pates, bulbous noses and other uncomely traits. They are, as variously named by you, the genus Writer or Director or Producer or Sound Engineer. This genus is patently inferior to the Actor in every regard but one: When called upon to speak, they are generally more capable of spontaneously expressing themselves in your native tongue, a strange language that seems to consist almost exclusively of proper names attached to the prefix, “Thanks to …”
Sharing the homely looks of these lesser beings are the multitudes gathered behind barriers to shout excitedly at the Actors who, taking these shrieks as their regal due, pass by on a garish carpet. Then others clutching crude microphones (by our standards) stop this parade of beauty long enough to ask the Actors, frequently but not always the female, the same fascinating question: “Who is dressing you?” I confess this repeated query has us completely puzzled. Our scholars have speculated that perhaps great beauty is infantilizing and, consequently, Actors lack the wherewithal to perform basic tasks, like dressing themselves. This theory would further explain their other inadequacies.
Still, we are not entirely naive about your Oscar habits. I know, for instance, that the unattractive Writer is paid to put words in the mouth of the pretty Actor, who is paid infinitely more to say those words while pretending to be someone else. I also know that this pretence is called a performance, that the recorded result is a film, and that, every time the Earth completes one rotation of your star, a wise man named Oscar selects the best of those films “for your consideration.”
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