Russell Crowe Receives Oscar Nod for Role in Ben Gay Commercial

n a move destined to boil the blood of the fourteen Americans who still associate the Oscars with outstanding achievement in film, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences announced Tuesday that it has added a supplemental Best Actor nomination to the field for this year's awards.

The additional nomination was given to Australian actor Russell Crowe for his performance in a 30-second Ben Gay commercial from 1991, which featured Crowe touting the virtues of the medicated ointment from a locker room after a taxing squash workout.

Reaction has been swift and fast from film critics and movie buffs alike, who suggest that the Academy's butt-kissing of Crowe has reached an unprecedented level now that they have run out of film performances for which to nominate the actor.

Some feel that the academy jumped the gun when it nominated Crowe for the low-budget Aussie children's fantasy Roadblock and Wanker last year, arguing that they should have saved the film, which features the voice talents of a 16 year-old Crowe, in case he went a year without making a feature film in the future. Others point out that Crowe was already nominated in the same category this year for A Beautiful Mind, and that the commercial in question came out in 1991, technically making it ineligible for this year's awards. And even if it were, it wouldn't be since it was a commercial and the Oscars tend to be reserved for feature films. Many others feel that this level of praise is unreasonable for an actor who's basically Clint Eastwood with an accent.

The Academy had already come under fire in recent months for its controversial creation of the Kevin Spacey Perpetual Award, which honors American actor Kevin Spacey on a yearly basis. But even the harshest critics of that move suggest that it made a lot more sense than the Academy's constant sucking up to Crowe, who many feel represents a "cool, slightly-dangerous older brother" figure to Academy voters.

"Of course it's a controversial nomination," stated Academy spokesperson Emeril Juanna. "Everyone knows that, and don't think for a second that there aren't members of the Academy who think Russell's work in that 'Fast Actin Tinactin' ad he did in 1990 was the superior performance. But we made our choice and we could only choose one Russell Crowe commercial. This year, anyway."

Nominees for Best Actor are decided by the acting arm of the Academy, which consists of several-hundred industry people who have claimed to be actors at parties or when filling out product registration cards. Academy member and unemployed soap opera actor Kenny Middle attempts to explain the reasoning behind the Academy's unprecedented move:

"Well, I think you know how the ladies on the committee voted, so there's no need to go into that. And as for us guys, I don't know, you know? I think maybe there's a little part of each of us that thinks it would be pretty cool if one day we got to hang out with Russell, and his band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. Maybe sit in on bass or something, you know? Maybe bum a cigarette and just hang loose. That's a factor that can't be denied. And really, at the heart of it all, wouldn't it just be awesome as hell to be Russell Crowe for a while? To have the famous chicks all over you like bimbos on a Kennedy? Getting fat paychecks and awards left and right just for mumbling your way through movies? And how about that roguish charm? Plus you'd get to cash in on the whole 'foreign guy' angle, which is huge with the ladies, without having to ever live in a mud hut or eat English food or anything like that. Instead, you run your own sheep farm or some bullshit like that and come off sounding like a real badass. And you look white as anybody else, so no problems there; you just get a cool accent and the credentials to back it up. Talk about sweet. So anyway, when you take all of that into consideration I don't think it's at all surprising that Russell got nominated again. We're all big fans."

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I for one miss the good old days when you could go to the store and know what the hell you were buying. Back then, there were two brands of everything: the kind you bought and the kind your no-class neighbors from Philly would buy because they didn't know any better. They'd save two cents and end up with garbage bags that were water soluble and dog food that was made from lawn clippings.

In those days, it was always easy to tell which brand was which. The good stuff had some smiling white guy with a butchwax haircut on the box. Nice. The other one always had a genie or some shit on it, a laughing monkey. And the crap products always had dead give-away names like Chintz or Uncle Otto's Screwjob.

Nowadays, you don't know what to buy. There are over 800 different kinds of crackers alone. I just want something to put in my mouth, I don't know if I want it stone-ground or not. And half the boxes have Catdog on them, whatever the hell that is. I don't know if that's the modern-day equivalent of the laughing monkey or not. They should've at least kept the butchwax guy on the good crackers, so we'd at least be able to tell what a Catdog means.

You can forget about buying cereal, too, unless you fancy pulling out your eyeballs through your own ass right there in the grocery aisle. Half the boxes aren't even cereal, they're boobytraps filled with leprechauns and all kinds of silly horseshit. At least the bad ones are easy to avoid, as I've never felt comfortable buying cereal from the Irish.

When I was a boy, there were two different kinds of pop: brown pop and water. And if you knew what the hell you were doing, you ordered the brown pop. Water was for the stupid kids who didn't know the difference, they gave that out so as not to waste the brown pop on idiots.

Nowadays you can go into a restaurant and just make up the name of a pop, and chances are they'll have something called that. I haven't been stumped yet, though I do enjoy the challenge. Words to the wise: steer clear of Anal Route Soda and Crampman's Best, those two colas are particularly vile.

And what in the hell is "Sierra Mist" anyway? It sounds like a bad camping euphemism for when a raccoon pisses on your car.

"Shit, it looks like a couple of jellyfish fucked all over the hood of my Omni!"

"No way dude, that's just the Sierra Mist."

"Fuck you, Kenny, next time we're taking your car."

If things keep up at this pace, in a few years we'll each have our own line of products that we're obligated to buy. That may sound like fun to you, but with my luck they'd assign me a cereal with raisins in it. And I hate raisins. Even more so than grapes.

If that's the future, you can have it.

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Few things in life are more annoying than sports fans who think they're cursed. That is unless they think they're individually cursed, which can be hilarious. If all their breakfast cereal turns into locusts or they gain weight no matter what they eat, I can listen to that stuff all day. But nobody can stand listening to some sorry loser complaining that the Curse of Cheops kept his sad-sack team from winning the big one, and how the gimpy harem of mama's boys deserved better. In ancient times, men were killed for less, usually by fans of more-successful teams.

Baseball fans in Chicago and Boston have gone to great lengths to lament and preserve their teams' curses, and the commune staff has not been spared their pain. This very column is an effort to try and end the "Curse of the commune," which involves having to hear commune reporter and former Cubs pitcher Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown explain the Curse of the Cubs every time somebody makes a comment about baseball, goats, mummies, bears or Chicago-style deep dish pizza.

The Curse of the Cubs, also known at "The Billy Goat Curse" and "Loser's Excuse #42" dates back to the World Series of 1945. Local Chicago tavern owner William "Billy Goat" Sianis wanted to take his goat to see World Series game four, ostensibly because he couldn't find a babysitter. His real reasons were thankfully kept private.

Sianas had been the owner of the Lincoln Tavern for years, and one day a goat fell off the back of a passing truck and wandered into his bar, looking for a place to drop off a batch of road apples. Sianas had the annoying habit of taking nearly everything that happened to him as a sign from God, and in keeping with this quirk he promptly grew a goatee, renamed his bar the Billy Goat Tavern, and began taking the goat along with him wherever he went, to promote his now disagreeably-themed establishment.

Sianas managed to get through the turnstiles at Wrigley Field that day in 1945, after telling the ticket-taker that the goat was his adopted Malaysian son. Thanks to Chicago's admittedly small Malaysian population at the time, the ruse was successful. The goat probably would have been left to enjoy the game in peace if not for the fact that it had just eaten twenty-seven caramel apples during the half-hour immediately preceding the game, and the panicked look in the goat's eyes made all the fans seated nearby extremely nervous. Sianas and his goat were soon ejected, after which the goat promptly ruined a convertible parked outside the stadium.

While he was searching around for a fire hose to clean up after his goat, Sianas cursed the Cubs to eternal postseason futility by announcing "Never again will World Series be played in Wrigley Field!" His pronouncement was met with raucous laughter from Cubs fans, who noticed that the goat had eaten Sianas's pants while he was cursing. Upon discovering his pantsless state, Sianas began to curse in doubletime, most of which was not suitable for historical documentation. It was noted, however, that during his tirade Sianas did pronounce that a goat would never win the Kentucky Derby, a curse that has remained eerily true to this day.

The Cubs went on to lose that World Series, and have never been back because they suck. They did make it back to the playoffs in 1984, 1989, 1998 and 2003, but each year Lady Luck stepped on the Cubs' balls in the most humiliating way possible. Baseballs were dropped, pooches were screwed and somebody ate a cat. Cubs fans love to blame the goat curse for their team's lack of success, but this holds little water for fans in other cities also cursed with teams that suck but are short on rank barnyard animals to blame.

The Boston Red Sox have their own curse, "The Curse of the Bambino," which is just as famous as Chicago's curse but told in a different funny accent. It has also been known as "The Curse of the Big Fat Hot Dog Eating Machine," but is usually shortened to "The Curse of the Bambino." In 1920, Red Sox accountants discovered that team profits were down for the third straight year because star outfielder Babe Ruth was eating the team out of house and hot dogs. The accountants took their plight to tight-fisted owner Harry Frazee, who promptly traded Ruth to the Yankees for a case of beer and a St. Bernard named Lucky. The Yankees went on to win 26 World Championships, while for the Red Sox the trade was a wash because Lucky loved hot dogs almost as much as Ruth.

What lesson is there to be learned from these two infamous baseball curses? In a nutshell, the universal lesson here is this: Don't hire the long-dead pitcher from a team that hasn't won the World Series since he played for it in 1908 to be a reporter for your Internet news site, unless you want to hear a lot of long, boring baseball stories. Amen.

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