The Academy Awards, UFO style
3/31/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
Hollywood. They're afraid they'll miss shaking hands with someone important. The announcer was heard about 20 times in a panic-stricken voice saying, "PLEASE SIT DOWN NOW, TAKE YOUR SEATS, THE SHOW IS ABOUT TO BEGIN IN ONE MINUTE AND THIRTY SECONDS!" Does that get anyone to sit down? Don't bet on it.
Now we come to the UFO part of the Academy Awards, which all of you missed because you weren't paying enough attention. Billy Crystal begins with film clips that show him in over one hundred famous Hollywood movies. By now, people actually have taken their seats. One of the clips SHOWS BILLY CRYSTAL AS SPIELBERG'S E.T. Remember E.T. flying through the sky in the basket of young Elliot's bicycle? He looked down at the Shrine Auditorium, where thousands milled around. From the basket of that bicycle, wrapped in a blanket, Billy Crystal commented on all the cleavage he saw down there. Then he fell out of the bicycle, landing not at the Oscars, but in New York's West Side. The Jet gang of WEST SIDE STORY approached him singing "The Jets are going to have their way TONIGHT!"
What is the ufological lesson in THAT? Well folks, this was a paltry year for extraterrestrials at the Academy Awards, so let's take a stretch. Remember the movie MARS NEEDS WOMEN? Maybe you don't. It's an old B-flick. Well, there was Billy Crystal, posing as E.T., lusting after women. Then he falls (Remember Adam and Eve's fall from grace in the Garden of Eden? And man's fall from the Tower of Babel in the Bible? This is full of reverent symbolism, Pat Robertson will love it.). And where does he land? In a gangland of violence and sin: New York's West Side. The moral? Either fly with E.T. (and stay in the bicycle) or fall to the lowest possible level of human degradation where you will end up at a Puerto Rican Rumble.
Okay, you don't buy it. You don't see the hidden significance. Well, then, scraping the bottom of the barrel, the following are the only other UFO-related references I could find at the Academy Awards.
First, there was the plight of STAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACE. It was the only film nominated for anything that actually had aliens and spaceships in it. It was nominated for Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Special Effects. It went zero for two. THE MATRIX mauled it on both counts.
Next, consider TOY STORY 2. It wasn't nominated for anything except Best Song (WHEN SOMEBODY LOVES YOU). And it lost out on the song award to TARZAN and Phil Collins. But the champion spaceman from TOY STORY 2, BUZZ LIGHTYEAR, showed up as a presenter in the category of Best Short Animated Film. Buzz was depicted as a moron. Woody asked him for the envelope, but Buzz forgot it. When Woody's horse, Bullseye, rode up, they got the envelope and announced the winner: THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. Buzz never even had a chance to discuss aliens he knew and loved (or hated).
The very last alien-related aspect of the Academy Awards this year forgot to mention the aliens. I am speaking, of course, of Robin Williams leading that terrific chorus of dancers in the fabulous song and dance number from SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER, AND UNCUT. The song was the terrific little ditty that they just love in Montreal and Toronto, called BLAME CANADA. SOUTH PARK fans know that a MAJOR theme of the show is Cartman's frequent ALIEN ABDUCTIONS, that leave him with an ANAL PROBE sticking out of his South Pole. The anal probe generally has lots of antennas. But in BLAME CANADA, there's no mention of Cartman and his alien abduction problem. Canada absorbs the blame for producing such dubious talent as fictional actors Terence and Philip. But shouldn't Canada be blamed for the lack of UFO films produced in 1999, and the fact that none of them were nominated? Duh! I DON'T THINK SO. In that case, they could have renamed the song: BLAME HOLLYWOOD!
Which brings us to the climax of this spellbinding article, and leads us through the back door to our central point. After the Academy Awards, those of us with $500 tickets to the Governor's Ball stepped out of the auditorium. Just past the restrooms, we entered a vast room with hundreds of tables set for a sumptuous feast. Don't ask me about which trash can I found my $500 ticket in -- it was the same one where they found the stolen Oscars. The point is, I got in and made the rounds. There was one award recipient whom I REALLY wanted to meet, and that was Warren Beatty.
Warren won the Irving Thalberg award, and he was honored up the wazoo by dozens of fellow celebrities who lavished praise on his COURAGE!! And by gum, if you needed any proof of Warren's COURAGE, you didn't have to look any further than his latest film, BULWORTH. In that film, he plays the role of a political candidate with a "devil may care" attitude, ALWAYS willing to speak THE TRUTH. Don't forget that that's the purpose of this column, FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD! Every week, from Hollywood Boulevard and beyond, I set out in search of THE TRUTH (or part of it).
I knew that Warren Beatty came within a whisker's sneeze of running for President as a Democrat (or maybe as a Reform Party candidate) and he only backed down after his exploratory committee didn't bring him the best of news from the hinterlands. Some think he was railroaded out of the race by the lampoons in DOONESBURY, but I knew better. After all, he is a man of courage. I figured that of ALL the candidates in the race (if he had thrown his hat into the ring), he would have been the ONE candidate who would have busted the UFO coverup wide open.
I wanted to confirm my hunch about Warren. After all, if you think that George W. Bush will end the Cosmic Watergate of the UFO coverup, you have a screw loose! Bush is the prime candidate of JERRY FALWELL and PAT ROBERTSON. Now, if you've forgotten Pat Robertson's attitude on UFOs, you didn't read the first few paragraphs of this column carefully enough. If you're one of the folks who voted in the recent AlienZoo poll stating your belief that George "Dubbya" Bush will disclose the facts on UFOs, you have been praying at the wrong church with an upside down Bible in your hands. Duck, before you get stoned, and don't ever get caught visiting AlienZoo again!
Now if you think Democrat Al Gore will disclose the TRUTH about UFOs, you've got another screw loose in your brain. Vice-President Gore had eight years to convince President Bill Clinton to say something about aliens that doesn't include the phrase "crash dummies" or "Project Mogul." The farthest he got was to hold behind the scenes meetings about the grand implications of a four billion-year-old bacteria fossil found on a meteorite from Mars. With that news in hand, he summoned a group of ministers, priests and rabbis for a conference about the meaning of the discovery of ET life. Al Gore is to be applauded for that. His heart may be in the right place.
But judging by the speed of the Administration's acclimation program on extraterrestrial life, what can we expect from an Al Gore presidency? I predict that by January 2009, when Al Gore leaves office after two terms, he will have conceded that SOME Martian bacteria died TWO billion years ago instead of FOUR. Also, that some were four- or five-celled organisms rather than single-cell creatures. This will move up the fears of the alien threat by some two billion years. It will further show that Martians were within 500 million years of evolving to the complexity of fruit flies when they all died off.
We won't even discuss Pat Buchanan. He wrote half of Nixon's speeches and never mentioned the phrase "space aliens" ONCE, even though every ufologist worth his salt knows Nixon once took actor Jackie Gleason to see the Roswell alien corpses at Homestead Air Force Base after a golf game. Why didn't THAT get into one of Buchanan's Nixon speeches? Can you tell me that?
So folks, that leaves us with dear old Warren Beatty as our one and only hope. At the Governor's Ball, I went up to him and made nice chitchat. My wife was involved with the premiere of BUGSY, and did he remember? Yes. Yes, he remembered. We exchanged a few tidbits about BONNIE AND CLYDE and DICK TRACY and then I said that I had just one more question I was burning to ask him. If he had run for President and had been elected, would he have opened up the secret UFO files? Well, he said nothing. NOTHING!!!! Do you know what he did? HE ROLLED HIS EYES AT ME! It wasn't just a little roll of the eyeballs. His eyes tipped so high in his head that they nearly POPPED OUT!
And then, since the question seemed to have offended or threatened him so deeply (Could you imagine if he were actually QUOTED on that subject?) he turned his back to me. There I was, staring at his back as he started up some chitchat with somebody else. So much for BULWORTH'S COURAGE. I'd had about 500 illusions shattered already in one night, and I hadn't even recovered from Kevin Spacey beating out Denzel Washington for Best Actor. I mean, I thought they were supposed to take ACTING into consideration when they decided on BEST ACTOR.
Actually, come to think of it, we shouldn't go out on a limb to be TOO hard on Warren "Bulworth" Beatty, because we have to remember that Shirley MacLaine is his SISTER! It's true! They grew up together in Virginia. Wouldn't life with Shirley make ANYONE a skeptic after awhile? Maybe that's why Warren rolled his eyes, because he's had a lifetime of Shirley on the brain. It would happen to anyone. No matter, when Warren does take the White House, Shirley MacLaine will twist his arm to appoint her head of the CIA, and then it's "Hasta la vista, Baby" for the UFO coverup, for sure!
This is AlienZoo's Hollywood reporter saying OVER AND OUT! And don't forget to log on to AlienZoo next Friday for the following installment of FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD!