It’s that time again when our focus drifts away from the flotsam and jetsam of Jersey Shore, Ben Shalom Bernanke and Russian douche knobs like Evgeni Plushenko, and lands like a sharp beam of light on more critical, substantial issues. Like the Academy Awards.

Because going to the movies, for me, is held in the same light as a religious ceremony (or tribunal), the Academy Awards is a particularly exciting event. I often resort to benzos the night before the awards, much like a nominee (or Barbara Parkins in Valley of the Dolls), because I can’t sleep due to nerves and ‘voices’ in my head. This year there were some genuinely stellar films and performances. Here are my winners and (sigh) predictions for winners — two notations that rarely mirror each other. Please, dear readers, add your predictions and favorites at the end of this celebration.

Disclaimer: When I take a disinterest in a film it’s for visceral, irrational reasons. The movie Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire is such a film. Wouldn’t see it. Never will see it. The obnoxious structure of the title alone was a huge turnoff. Too, the Oprah touch pushed it instantly into a kind of Hallmark meets Human Horror category, and then there were other reasons having to do with what I call ‘the emotional cow being milked’ syndrome. But I’m getting sidetracked, so here are my winners and predictions: (read the full article)

Paper-mâché dinosaurs, blue-skinned troglodytes, blond pageboy ‘dos, loincloths, chick fights, flaming swords, decapitated robots, and spacehips.

Greatest. Movie. Ever.

It’s Yor’s World…we just live in it.

When we first mentioned furries on Nightcharm, we had no idea that a movie like Avatar was in the works. The “Furry” moniker includes the the fans and artwork of anthropomorphic animal-human hybrids, typically with animal faces but human bodies and hands, and they’re often cast in a sexual context, with bulging genitals and insanely kinky sexual habits. A furry fan can design an human-animal character to epitomize her or his own personality, which is called, coincidentally, an avatar.

Which brings us to the film. Imagine slender, blue-skinned warriors with deerlike ears, polished fanged yet human-looking teeth and amazingly proportioned physiques. Their faces are vaguely feline, eyes large and yellow, their tails thin and whiplike. Imagine them running around with loin-cloths and arrows, with an intense sense of tribal duty and honor, leaping around on gigantic trees and floating rocks in a brilliant otherworld where familiar mores and taboos are unknown.

Sound familiar?

Furries have been special fodder for jokes in the online world for years, but Avatar might finally bring their anthropomorphic forms something that those with a wealth of imagination and mischievous creativity still lacked: mainstream recognition. (read the full article)

Why do you Liberal Dems hate Christmas, families, and Charlie Brown?

Yes, every year the crusade to put the Christ back in Christmas commences, and even though none of us actively signed up for duty or even give a fuck, apparently we’re on the front lines of the battle any way.

It’s a veritable Nutcracker Suite of self-branded, self-styled victimhood for the God Wads this year: The American Family Association and other nuisance groups have issued sundry fatwas against the Gap, Best Buy, and Bed, Bath, & Beyond for being corporately-operated witch covens; Glenn Beck’s tear-jerking (or jerk-tearing) The Christmas Sweater simulcast has reportedly been tanking in regions where jaded urbanites reject Jesus by loving quality entertainment; and the House of Representatives heard the angels calling and felt compelled to vote on a resolution to federally validate Christmas in a nation full of secularists — wearing our slutty Santa costumes — bent on decrucifying our zombie Savior. (read the full article)

“What I am, Michael, is a 32-year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy. And if it takes me a while to pull myself together, and if I can smoke a little grass before I get nerve to show this face to the world, it’s nobody’s goddamn business but my own.”

The cutting words of The Boys In The Band’s sharp-tongued Harold aren’t just one of the most hyper-aware self-assessments in the history of filmdom — they’re a fitting tagline for a landmark movie that’s as many simultaneous things as Harold, its birthday boy is.

At once a social document, wry sexploitation flick, hissing bitchfest, repository for immortal camp dialogue, midnight movie, urban character study, bleak outsider period piece, and parlor drama run amuck, The Boys In The Band has managed to endear and repel, engage and repulse, disarm and dismay its viewers in equal measure, and as it nears the big 4-0, it’s apt that as the film reaches midlife crisis time, its target audience finds itself at a heady vantage point of not only looking back at a turbulent past, but looking forward to as precarious a future.

By now, scribe Mart Crowley’s watershed 1968 Off-Broadway production that inspired the film has become a part of New York history and Big Apple mythology beyond. (read the full article)

On June 10, 2006, just in time for her birthday, Judy Garland appeared on a U.S. stamp.

I always think of Judy at this time of year, as the rainbow flags unfurl and the floats come down the street with their glamor-girl boys and near-nude leathermen.

Hyper-real spectaculars that would not be out of place in the Emerald City — or Munchkinland!

“Are you a friend of Dorothy?” soldiers would ask each other during World War II, using this code phrase to signal that they were gay. It was only a matter of time before the brass caught wind of it, without quite understanding its significance. In a dither that Reds and homos were sneaking into their ranks, the military spent $250,000 to find out who this diabolic den-mother of the GI homos was. Yet even the nelliest civilian could have told them (in exchange, we hope, for a little buzz-cut face action).

She was, of course, our Judy. The gal who fell from a star called Kansas. So tenderly young in The Wizard of Oz, yet already empowered by that penetrating cry in her voice.

We need only hear her tearful call of Toto! Toto! as her terrier is being bicycled away in the clutches of Miss Gulch to get that old chill, the heartachy twang of childhood injustice. (read the full article)

What is this? What does it mean? We don’t know. We don’t really care.

As one commonsensical Youtube commenter put it: “remove your underwear please…… it’s time for a strip search.”

“…unfortunately he was in the six-nine position — so this dude’s ass was in Eminem’s face or mouth area.”