Hollywood award shows are my guilty pleasure, a dip into the world of gossip and glitz, like reading People magazine at the hair salon.

I know much of the real world is suffering while we sit there celebrating people who have no worry keeping their homes (plural) and likely have good health care. And I know that those gorgeous dresses and stunning baubles are likely borrowed for the evening. And a lot of these perfect bodies include fake parts and are enhanced by hair extensions and spray-on tans plus a Botox booster for the night. But I still like looking at them.

The man in my house avoids Hollywood award shows. He likes movies, fine, and pays some attention to who is nominated for what. And it’s not like he didn’t notice when Al Pacino started dying his hair.

But he really can’t stand the hoopla. He calls them cringers - garish and embarrassing. He’d rather watch a ball game or “The Pianist” on DVD for the fifth time. I point out that the Oscars are a healthy diversion from the news shows we watch every night and I’d rather hear Alec Baldwin tell dumb jokes than some of those actors in Washington who keep mouthing the same rehearsed rant. I bet even Rachel Maddow sneaks a peek at the Oscars.

But you don’t want to sit alone and feel guilty about indulging in three hours of Hollywood jabber, which is why someone invented Oscar parties. Restaurants and bars throw Academy Award events, encouraging participants to dress like their favorite star. I prefer the at-home parties at a friend’s house which is kind of a combination Super Bowl party and book club meeting. Food, drink, people talking over each other and yelling back at the television.

You can count on someone to have done her research and to intelligently debate, with references, the artistic relevance of “Avatar” versus “The Hurt Locker.” I’m not as intellectual. To me, the choice is simple. I’d much rather mingle with blue people than watch soldiers explode.

And can we talk about which guy over 50 in a hit film - Alec or Jeff -showed the bigger bare beer belly?

Movie award shows bring America together. Liberals and conservatives. Old and young. We all have different tastes, but we all watch movies. For one night MSNBC and Fox News types tune into the same channel. We might never agree on off-shore oil drilling but we might find common ground in Meryl Streep.

Another reason I like film award shows is because I know the players. I feel like I’m part of the culture. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t happen with music award shows which make me ask “who are these people?”

Plus you never know when actors are going to depart from the teleprompter and say something political or roll their eyes over the competition or forget to thank their mothers. And act like, you know, real folk.

The guy who doesn’t like the Oscars objects to the crude jokes, the silly talk about fashion, the extravagant display of wealth and celebrity.

I could remind him that George Clooney helps raise money for Darfur.

It was no surprise that a San Francisco audience for the play “A Round Heeled Woman” appeared to be mostly women of a certain age. Women old enough to remember when women didn’t talk about their sex lives. Old enough to remember when women were thought to give it up after oh, age 50 or so. And old enough to appreciate the difference between then and now.

We were also old enough to remember Sharon Gless as the clever, smart-talking, sometimes grumpy cop Christine Cagney in Cagney and Lacey. And now here she was on stage playing Jane Juska, the 66-year-old English teacher from Berkeley who went looking for sex in a personal ad in the New York Review of Books. It read: “Before I turn 67 –next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” Anthony Trollope being her favorite writer.

Juska wrote a best-seller sharing her results - she got over 60 replies from men as young as her son and older than her ex-husband and hooked up with a few. Some were cads, some near-creepy, some quite interesting who did, indeed, want to talk first.

The play, which premiered at Z Space theater in San Francisco in January, was adapted from her book of the same name. Early reviews of the play were not real positive and it closed in early February. But it had sell-out crowds and I hope it tours because there is definitely an audience ripe for the message that not only can the earth move at any age. But, more important, if you’re missing something in your life, stop waiting for it to knock on your door. Go get it.

I met Juska several years ago when she did an author reading at the Sonoma County Book Festival. There, too, her audience was Boomer women and beyond, who roundly cheered Juska’s bravado. One woman told Juska she as much envied her lively conversations with men as she did her orgasms.

Her book came out in 2003, before the cougar phenom. Before online dating became a routine way of meeting a life partner. And before nightly Viagra ads showed older couples chasing each other down the beach.

About that same time “Something’s Gotta Give” put Diane Keaton under the covers with Jack Nicholson and Hollywood started warming up to mature sex. Last year “It’s Complicated,” touted as a middle aged sex comedy, provided 60-year-old Meryl Streep with two lovers.

Ads for “The Last Station,” a movie based on the last year of Leo Tolstoy’s life show Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren romping in bed. More evidence that sex is not just for the young and nubile.

Sharon Gless was plenty nubile in her role as a passionate, vulnerable, complex woman and the audience gave her a standing ovation. As to what’s happened since then to the real Jane Juska, the woman sitting next to me had an answer. Juska, she’d read, had settled down happily with one man. But he’s married.

That was a surprise because in the play she vows to never go out with a married man or a Republican. Well, at least we can assume he knows his Trollope.

Photo of Sharon Gless in “A Round-Heeled Woman.”

With awards season upon us there are so many movies I vowed to see and they didn’t include “Precious.”

I had all the usual excuses for not going to a film about an illiterate, pregnant abused teenage girl. I knew from reading reviews that it was raw and relentless. And isn’t the news hard enough to endure without adding in extra cinematic suffering?
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We all have our limits on what we pay money to see. I avoid movies that involve torture, rape and sexual violence. I hate watching bodies being blown up and I don’t like war movies. I can’t stand to see people abusing children and sadistic killers.

Same with books. If a book starts out with the body of a murdered woman or a kidnapped child I usually stop right there. I even have a hard time with those nature movies where the grizzly bear stalks the baby buffalo and eats it, even though I know this is the natural way.

I would pass on “Precious,” I said. I didn’t want to spend time with that poor hopeless kid.

Then I sucked it up and went, mostly because I had two movie companions who know about the cruelty heaped on children – a friend who survived her own violent childhood and another woman I know professionally who directs a parenting program that works with abused kids.

If they could handle real life, I could handle a movie.

No one wants to watch abuse and suffering. In one of the more shocking scenes in “Precious” I threw my coat over my head. But maybe we need to see these things because if they don’t happen to us, they happen to others. It’s the same reason to see one more movie about the Holocaust, to not simply sit there and groan “how can people do this to each other,” but to bear witness so maybe those horrors won’t happen again.

Maybe after you watch a movie about a teenager who has every reason to scrawl “Why me?” on a piece of paper, you end up donating money to a safe house. Or you become a Big Brother or Big Sister, or work to keep social service programs alive. But you don’t leave untouched.

Let me back up to what I said about Precious being this poor hopeless kid. She isn’t hopeless.

I saw the movie when the Haiti earthquake disaster was in its second week. I heard a pediatrician cry on the radio about the children she watched die because medical help came too late. But I saw a man find his wife under a building, alive after days without water, food or daylight. And there were triumphant rescue workers on the TV, crawling out of the rubble with a 15-day old baby.

There’s hope in Haiti and there is more than a spark of life in Precious, even in that fierce face, scrunched up against a world which seems to deliver only misery.

Tough important movies are best watched in a matinee which gives you time to shut down the awful images before you sleep. We went to the movie on a wet afternoon when rain pounded the roof and thunder rattled the theater. When it was over we went for tea. We all needed to talk.

We talked about unloved children and the importance of intervention when families can’t do it themselves. We talked about the unlikely places people find friends. And praised the kind determination of overworked teachers. We talked about the need to keep art museums open and children writing.

No surprise, the woman who runs the parenting program said stories about children like Precious are not unique to Harlem. They happen right here in beautiful Wine Country.

Susan Swartz is an author and journalist in Sebastopol. You can also read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is susan@juicytomatoes.com

Photo courtesy of ingridspeak.wordpress.com