Actors

So Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, the famed and celebrated Bonnie and Clyde themselves, capped off the Oscars ceremony by announcing the wrong winner in the Best Picture category — surely a greater theft than any perpetrated by their real-life bank-robbing counterparts.  And yet my biggest takeaway from the biggest television fiasco since Nipplegate at Super Bowl XXXVIII is … I don’t care.

Does this make me think less of the average actor’s ability to identify obvious problems and come up with creative solutions on the fly?  No.  Does this make me more inclined to think awards shows on television are a waste of four perfectly hours?  No.  Does it make me more inclined to watch next year, thinking perhaps Kanye West will trip Jennifer Lawrence on her way up to decline Jack Nicholson’s lifetime achievement award out of respect to war victims in Afghanistan?  Take a wild guess.

Actors are irrelevant in my life.  I watch less and less of their work as time goes by — and count myself blessed in so doing.  Their opinions (and they have plenty of them) don’t mean less to me because they never meant anything.  If my lifestyle doesn’t mesh with theirs — and theirs is, pretty much by definition, defined by selfish pursuit of money, fame and hedonism — maybe that’s not so bad.

Judge away, Hollywood (1 Corinthians 4:3).  Keep thinking of yourselves as heroic. I’ll keep ignoring you as part of my quest for “a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity” (1 Timothy 2:2).

Now, if you don’t mind, Made for Each Other is on. Starring James Stewart and Carole Lombard.  Two real American heroes.