Seeing Double.

Though the Academy somewhat made up for last year's travesty of an Awards show by at least giving every award to a defensible candidate, and in most cases actually giving it to the most deserving film, the world is still feeling the shockwaves of last year's Oscar fiasco. I'm referring of course to the triple Oscar victory for Paul Haggis's overwrought crapfest Crash. For those that are unfamiliar with Paul Haggis and his long tradition of hackneyed, melodramatic schlock, I'll give you a little primer. Haggis got his start writing genre television for shows like The Love Boat, Diff'rent Strokes and thirtysomething. Then he became a hero to middle-aged rednecks everywhere when he created Walker, Texas Ranger. His debut film Crash shocked critics everywhere by becoming perhaps the most widely panned film to ever win a Best Picture Oscar. He then tried his hand at doing quarter-life crisis film (a la Garden State) and put out Last Kiss (the fact that he's well into his 50s and still feels the need to make this sort of crap speaks volumes about the maturity level we're dealing with here).

The most recent fallout from Haggis's inexplicable success comes in the form of NBC's recent attempt to find a one-hour drama to bump Studio 60 out of it's time slot while they decide whether or not to axe it for good. The show is called The Black Donnelys and it's everything we've come to expect from the master dramatist, with its erraticly-behaving, one-dimensional characters (which is not to be confused for genuine depth or complexity), whole plot lines that manage to build and resolve themselves in less than three scenes, and redundant voice-over narration that wants you to believe that it's much wittier than it actually is. Though the most annoying feature of the show, for me, is the way it grossly misrepresents the City of New York. The show is ostensibly set in Hell's Kitchen, which contrary to it's title is now a fairly tame, heavily gentrified neighborhood, so the idea that Hell's Kitchen is affordable real estate to a family of working-class orphans is just absurd. It's a show that desperately wants to exist in the hard, gritty version of New York that Scorsese made famous in the 70s, but in the Disneyfied post-Giuliani New York just rings disingenuous. The Irish economy is booming, and Little Italy only exists as a tourist attraction at this point, so why does Paul Haggis insist on trying to make me care about a family of whiny, self-entitled brats still clinging to ethnic conflicts that sputtered out decades ago. I don't have the energy to explain all of the ways in which this is the most obnoxious show on television, but if you're interested, this review spells it out pretty well.