Preparing for the Oscars is like a part time job. People spend night after night watching nominated movies, catch up on the discourse surrounding them and then must prepare an argument in case the person or movie they like doesn’t win their rightful award. Unfortunately for Paul Leibert, he showed up to an Oscar party expecting to just have a good time with his friends.
“I loved 'Top Gun: Maverick,' but I haven’t really seen anything else that came out last year. Most of the time I watch a movie, it’s because I was flipping through channels and ended up settling on TBS. I’ve probably seen American Sniper three times already this year,” acknowledged Leibert.
This posed a problem when he was invited over to watch the most hotly debated award show of the season — worse yet, in a small apartment surrounded by 12 of his closest friends. Unfortunately, not much makes a problem worse like being completely unaware there was a problem in the first place.
The first hiccup arose as soon as Leibert set down his contribution for the evening — a slow cooker full of cocktail weenies.
“Rachel saw that I’d brought those mini hot dog things and told me it was 'Angela Bassett’s year.' She sounded mad at me, but I really don’t know why. Is Angela Bassett a vocal vegetarian or something?” wondered Leibert.
This was only the beginning of Leibert’s missteps. He took so many, in fact, that he probably would’ve been better off staying put.
“My buddy Sean was saying that he wasn’t so sure how he felt about ‘Women Talking.’ Obviously, I was like ‘Dude, that’s not a cool thing to say. Women deserve to have their say just as much as you or me. You voted for Hillary. Where is this coming from?’” remembered Leibert.
Though the response was brushed off, Leibert didn’t realize where he’d gone wrong until he saw the nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay.
“‘Women Talking’ is a movie, turns out. I stand by what I said earlier about women talking in general, but I don’t think I want to watch a whole movie on it — that seems like an obvious marketing flaw. It seemed really unfair to them to put it up against ‘Top Gun,’ but I went to the bathroom before the winner was announced, so at least I avoided that awkwardness,” he chuckled.
In fairness, Leibert found himself in a tricky situation. Though he himself is a software engineer, he’s a software engineer who lives near Burbank, California. Consequently, all of his friends either work in the industry or know someone who does, which is close enough.
“I didn’t really understand the room tone joke, but my buddy is a production assistant and he laughed. I like Kimmel, so I just trusted it was good and went along with it.” In fact, the 32-year-old man clung to the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host throughout the evening — figuratively, at least.
“Nothing was clicking for me — I was so out of the loop. Again, I really want to make it clear that I loved ‘Top Gun,’ but I kept it to myself for the most part because some of my friends have tricky relationships with Scientology,” said Leibert. “But when Kimmel said he changed his suit jacket because he got guacamole on it, I really understood.”
With that, it seems that Leibert ultimately found peace in who he is — a simple man who likes to eat chips and guac alone on the couch and believes that the award for Best Visual Effects should go to whichever movie has the coolest explosions.
Photo courtesy of massdistraction via Creative Commons
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