2005 Alternate Oscars

I have a friend — I'll call him "Domenic" because his name is Domenic — who is as big a fan of the Star Wars prequel trilogy as I am ... not.

He's of the opinion that Revenge of the Sith is the best of the Star Wars movies while I rank it somewhere ahead of The Phantom Menace and just behind every other movie ever made not starring Hayden Christensen, up to and including a student film I took part in when I was in college called Das Volkswagen.

But it's not like his perspective is out of the ordinary. A lot of people share his opinion (see, e.g., here, here and here).

So I'm thinking, what's the deal? How could one of us be so fundamentally wrong about something so unimportant, while I, as usual, am so right? And I puzzled and puzzed 'til my puzzler was sore, then I thought of something I hadn't thought of before — maybe Christmas, I thought, doesn't come from a store Domenic is half my age. And that actually makes a difference.

When I saw my first Star Wars movie, I was sixteen, it was the summer of 1977, and there was and only ever had been the one Star Wars movie, a standalone sci-fi action adventure flick playing in theaters for the first time that year. Han shot first, there was no Jabba the Hut sequence, the attack on the death star was half as long ...

And you also have to remember, there were no science fiction movies in those days. We had 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968, some B-pictures from the '50s, Star Trek and Lost in Space reruns on television — and that was it! No Aliens franchise, no Indiana Jones, no Terminator, no Blade Runner, no Predator, no Lord of the Rings, no Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not even a Superman movie!

No nothing, just Star Wars ... and it was like nothing anyone had ever seen before.

It was three years before the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back came out, and three more after that before the rather disappointing Muppets in Space, a.k.a. Return of the Jedi, finished off the trilogy.

And then there was nothing for seventeen years.

In the meantime, if you cared about such things, you had to work out Darth Vader's backstory in your own head. Me, I pictured him as a hero of the Clone Wars, a hot shot pilot who, in a moment of extreme peril for his family or friends or the Republic, turned to the dark side and in the process, lost his soul.

Basically, Michael Corleone in space.

Not that it mattered. The original trilogy was the story of Luke Skywalker. Darth Vader was not much more than the evil MacGuffin that kept the plot moving. How he turned out to be Luke's father, well, space pilots are a typically randy bunch, I figured, prone to picking up green hookers in space bars ... you know, it didn't really matter!

And then the prequel trilogy came along and, what the holy hell!, Darth Vader turned out to be a little boy who grew up to be a whiny, cockblocked teenager who took his revenge on the galaxy because he couldn't spend all his time mooning over Natalie Portman.

Talk about your letdowns!

But look at that story from Domenic's perspective. A child of the 1990s, he saw the first six Star Wars movies in the order George Lucas now intends them to be seen, starting with The Phantom Menace and ending with Return of the Jedi. And that series was never about Luke Skywalker, it was about Anakin Skywalker (the future Mr. Darth Vader to you, pal).

For Domenic, Star Wars only ever unfolded in one way. No opportunity to be disappointed, no reason to be.

The point being, no work of art is ever a pristine, unchanging monument to objective truth. You bring a lifetime of experiences and expectations and prejudices with you every time you walk into a theater or a museum and that colors your interpretation of what you see. There's not one Mona Lisa, there are seven billion, and yours is probably just as valid as mine.

Something to think about before you go yelling at the kids to get off your lawn.

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.