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No. 1107: Gallusfield

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Gallusfield

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=1107

Strip by: Manyhills

{Jon is talking into the telephone}
Jon: Hello, Dr. White? Listen, uh, my friend thinks that she's a chicken.
Jon: Why don't I turn her in? Well, uh, I would-
{Irma appears, dressed as a chicken}
Irma: Bwaaak bwak bwak bwak!
Jon: But I need the eggs.

The author writes:

That's a line from near the end of Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall, widely considered his best. Woody Allen plays Alvy Singer, a neurotic Jewish comedian who accompanies the audience through a tour of his romance with the title character. Singer's obsessions and hangups - he can't watch a film if he's missed even a minute of the title sequence, he grumbles and moans whenever he's forced to leave Brooklyn - are perhaps exaggerated, but he still seems believable, likeable, human, and it's this empathy (he directly addresses the audience several times) which is key to the film's humour.

It's quiet, short, small, slow - in many ways the exact opposite of a sci-fi blockbuster like, say, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope*. It's an epic space opera, where lovable rogues and Chosen Ones do battle against evil forces with galaxy-shaking implications. Exciting, innovative, massive - and also released in 1977. So both films ended up nominated for Best Picture at the 50th Academy Awards. Both films were and are critically acclaimed - both are among Roger Ebert's "Great Films", for instance (Annie Hall, Star Wars) - but it is in the nature of humanity to rank, and on this particular occasion the Academy decided that Annie Hall was better.

I mention this all as background to a particularly risible TV Tropes lead paragraph, a favourite of mine:

Here on the internet, people usually think of the awards presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as "that thing where Billy Crystal does a musical medley, runs overtime and has even made a cliche of lampshading that fact, snubbed Citizen Kane, Star Wars, and Pulp Fiction for best picture, gave that award to only one of the The Lord of the Rings films, and thought TRON was 'cheating' by using CGI".
Yes, TV Tropes. When you mention "the Oscars" on the Internet, that is what people usually think of.

*It is necessary at this point for me to clarify that it was originally released as just Star Wars, because otherwise people will write in to correct me.

[[Original strips: 2003-10-31, 1988-09-17.]]

Original strips: 1988-09-17, 2003-10-31.