By John Beifuss (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-02-26 07:28

Before the 80th annual Academy Awards fell on Sunday night (local time), all anyone in Memphis wanted to talk about was who would win.

Of course, the competition that gripped the city had nothing to do with adaptations of Ian McEwan, interpretations of Edith Piaf, female impersonations of Bob Dylan or an enigma in a ? and the Mysterians haircut shooting bolts into travelers' foreheads with a pneumatic cattle gun.

No, Memphians were focused on Saturday night's basketball clash between the beloved top-ranked University of Memphis Tigers and the hated No 2, the University of Tennessee Volunteers.

Even Elvis' widow, Priscilla Presley, was supposedly going to be at the game. Match that for entertainment royalty, Kodak Theater.

Does "Oscar fever" really exist, except among the nominees in their free designer gowns and tuxedos?

On the coasts, maybe. In the resentful fantasies of my flyover state obscurity, I imagine my film-reviewing colleagues in New York and Los Angeles spending much of this past week pontificating and prognosticating, churning out think pieces and offering up sound-bite analyses.

Me, I spoke last week to the women of the Junior League of Memphis, for what was billed as Popcorn Night. Proving you can't judge a book by its cover, a matronly charmer named Elsie, who brought chocolate chip cookies, told me her favorite movie was Motel Hell. She said she hadn't seen any of the best picture nominees.

When I was invited to discuss the Oscars on a local morning sports-talk radio program, I admitted on air that I cared much more about the basketball game. We ended up rehashing childhood memories of the great Memphis hoops teams of the 1970s before I remembered to squeeze in a few references to Julie Christie and Michael Clayton.

Although I'm the lone daily newspaper movie reviewer in Memphis, such "expert" appearances are infrequent. More typical was how I spent on Thursday night, post-Junior League. Surrounded by the precarious towers of stacked DVDs that make my "TV room" a minefield of film history, I watched - for reasons unknown even to myself - a 1978 TV movie called Devil Dog: The Hound From Hell, in which a possessed puppy threatens Richard Crenna and Yvette Mimieux. Thoughts of Oscar were far away.

As they are for most people. The city where Saw III and Phat Girlz played for months without interruption welcomed best animated film contender Persepolis just one week ago, and after a month in the art house, There Will Be Blood, nominated for eight Oscars, has "widened" to four screens. Meanwhile, Witless Protection starring Larry the Cable Guy opened this weekend on 10. You will find comparable figures in most cities.

Memphis, perhaps, should be more Oscar-conscious than it is. The city calls itself the home of the blues and the birthplace of rock 'n' roll, but its less storied movie history is notable for a pretty high production-to-Oscar ratio.

King Vidor shot much of his 1929 black-cast astonishment Hallelujah here, and earned a best director nomination.

Made-in-Memphis movies The Firm, The Client, The People vs. Larry Flynt and 21 Grams all earned major nominations. Walk the Line made Reese Witherspoon a best actress, and Hustle & Flow provided the Oscar telecast with a memorable moment and America with a malleable catchphrase when Three 6 Mafia claimed best song for It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp.

That victory captured the city's - and the country's - imagination. This year, producers of the Oscar telecast are worried they won't even capture all that many viewers.

Well, I may grouse about the Oscars, but I'll be watching. I've watched the show ever since I was a movie-loving kid, when clips from such nominees as Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces offered a glimpse into a world of adult films that I otherwise knew only from their Mad magazine satires.

Nowadays, I know that the satires are sometimes more worthwhile than the movies, and the term "best picture" is all but meaningless. But I stayed up late Sunday night, watching, feeling somehow grateful, and then went back to work Monday. And Tuesday, I'll head to my next scheduled critic's screening: Will Ferrell in Semi-Pro.

The author is the film critic of The Commercial Appeal The New York Times Syndicate

(China Daily 02/26/2008 page9)