Academy Awards

Sunday will be the 77th annual Academy awards where they give out the Oscars.
Beer has been a part of many movies and it is often portrayed as the drink of choice for working class stiffs and is viewed often as being somewhat low class and comical. Think about it, this year the movie "Sideways" gets nominated for an Academy award and it is about a couple of guys doing wine tasting. Why didn't they make a more realistic movie about guys going out beer tasting? Because if they did they wouldn't have been nominated for any awards. The movies almost never ever portray beer as the great tasting beverage that it really is.

If I had to hand out Oscars for beer and the movies I would have to give the Oscar for Best Actor to John Belushi for his portrayal of Bluto in Animal House. That movie wouldn't have been the same without John Belushi in that role. And yes, my top beer movie of all time would have to be Animal House. Can you think of any other movies that were responsible for creating a party trend around the country just by using two words? "Toga, Toga." Animal House is the pinnacle of beer drinking movies in my opinion but Strange Brew would have to be a close second. Any movie that can make jelly donuts and beer work together has to be a classic and who can forget such lines as "Take off Hoser." I can guarantee you that the movie "Sideways" won't ever have such an effect on our culture as those movies did.

The movies also always portray beer as a man's drink and not a woman's. That is just so sexist and false. Take Christian Slater in "Heathers", “This is Ohio. If you don’t have a brewski in your hand, you might as well be wearing a dress.” Beer itself has no gender and historically it was women who were predominately the brewers in ancient times.

The last movie to really portray beer in a positive light had to be a John Wayne film back in the 50's called "The Quiet Man". In one scene an Irishman is handed a glass of champagne at a wedding and promptly spits it out and looks sick until someone gets him a pint of beer. Classic. Oh, and if any Hollywood movie producers read this, "The Quiet Man" did win a couple of Academy awards.

Prost, Ron