I like to watch.

I love Movies, and by capitalizing the word, I mean the entire viewing experience. I love buying candy at the drugstore before I go in, because I can’t afford the inflated prices at the theater. I love sitting in the intimacy of the semi-dark, waiting for the movie to start, gossiping with my friends and catching up on what’s happening in their lives. I love the feeling of anticipation when the lights dim down all the way. I love to spend a couple of hours inside the story of someone else’s life; the same reason, incidentally, that I became an actor.

But I also love movies; that is the individual films, themselves. I have several friends who seem to have placed me, on a continuum of how much I like a movie, somewhere in the vicinity of Amy Adams character in Enchanted, or Liking Everything. A Lot. I think it’s just a matter of perspective: even the crappiest movie out there usually has some redeeming quality to it—whether it’s a performance, the script, or even just the way the heroine wears her hair—and that is what I choose to focus on. I am willing, for instance, to overlook the sentimental schmaltz that is Message in a Bottle, because it was filmed at the cottage next door to the one my family always rents in Maine. I mean, the money has been spent, the time has been committed. So I’d rather spend my energy on finding something worth the twelve dollars and two hours of my life, because I’m not going to get them back. Revolutionary Road, despite fundamentally angering me with the premise that suburbia and family MUST equal stagnation of intellect and creative death—not to mention some of the worst dialogue I’ve heard in years—still had a remarkable performance by Kate Winslet, and so although there were times while I was watching the movie that I seriously considered turning it off, I’d like to give credit where credit is due. (Note: Leo, this does not include you.)

So, as part of my usual run-up to the Oscars, I’ve been trying to watch as many of the Oscar-nominated movies as I can. I’d seen Encounters at the End of the World, Rachel Getting Married, Iron Man and Slumdog Millionaire before the nominations came out, and over the last several weeks I’ve watched The Dark Knight, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Visitor, In Bruges, Tropic Thunder, WALL-E, Doubt and Kung-fu Panda, and I still desperately want to see Frost/Nixon, Milk and The Wrestler. But last Tuesday, when Frozen River arrived in the mail, I realized…I just couldn’t face it any more. I’ve heard remarkable things about Melissa Leo’s performance. The plot of the film interests me. And yet, the disc has sat on top of my TV for the entire week, and I just cannot bring myself to pop it in the DVD player. Or motivate myself out of the apartment and over to a theater some night to see Mickey Rourke, who captivated me just watching the trailers two months ago. Suffocating under my own Must Watch list, and pressured by the increasingly brief period between the announcement of the nominations and the ceremony itself, it’s as if my eyes and brain are still willing, but my heart has finally given up.

What, then, to do? The answer, counter-intuitively, was to go back to the movies. Only last night, instead of something on my list, a group of my friends and I went to see Confessions of a Shopaholic. If you’ll remember my post about Bachelor Boys, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how excited I was about this movie. Which is to say, not at all. (And the reviews I’d seen didn’t help.) What I was excited about was the chance to get together with a group of friends, to laugh and make fun, and for a couple of hours to share the delight and horror and disgust of watching a movie—just for fun—with them. What I was missing, with all my movie watching, was the communal experience of sitting in the dark with a bunch of other people, laughing and crying with a group of others brought together for the same reason, even if only for two hours. The movie was terrible, and it was completely worth it.