I always remind people why The Oscars got started in 1928: It was an effort by the studios to suppress the unions. They started the Academy because all the screenwriters and directors and actors were unionizing, and they thought, "We'll have something that resembles a union, but that's completely controlled by the moneyed interests in Hollywood." That's what it's been all these years. It's something that reinforces Hollywood's image of itself. The Best Picture one year was Gandhi. Nobody watched Gandhi, but that's the kind of picture that always wins.

Everything changed in Bosnia, when General Wesley Clark proved that you could fight a war with high- level precision air strikes and a bare minimum of ground action.

If you hate what you're seeing, you call it sex and violence. If you like it, you call it "romance and adventure."

A universal draft is most often the instrument of Third World dictators.

They'll give you an Oscar if they think you're about to drop dead. The problem with The Oscars is, the average age of The Academy is 84. They wheel those people in from Palm Springs and hook up their IVs and they vote. The people that go to movies are under the age of 28, for the most part, so there's this total disconnect between what the Academy thinks is a great movie and what the audience actually wants to see.

Almost every venerable tradition at a men's club starts out as a joke.

As I've said many times, the single most oppressed class in America right now is the teenager.