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.

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.

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

Faith is like a kernel of wheat.

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

There is no post-9/11. Everything from now until the end of time is post-9/11.

Discourse is fleeting, but junk mail is forever.