"My name is Scott Cody.  And I hate the Oscars."  That is what I used to say at the beginning of my monthly Oscar-Hater meetings.  But not anymore.  I am a reformed Oscar-Hater.  I have seen the light.

The Oscar-Haters are a minority in this country, but their views are so strong, so offensive, so un- American that there should be a law against them.  Why, I myself used to stand before groups of then like-minded individuals and ignorantly proclaim that the Oscars were sheer hype, nothing but a marketing scheme developed by the corporate behavior-manipulators in Hollywood to sell their products. Our club would literally spend hours lambasting the Academy for choices that I once thought questionable, such as the English Patient, or Braveheart.

But not any more.  I have changed my evil ways.  My reformation was inspired by something that my 10 year old neighbor said to me.  "Life is like a box of chocolates," he said. I thought about that phrase.  And I realized he was correct.  Life is like a box of chocolates, in so many ways!  Why, I liked that phrase so much, that I asked his parents whether that was their wisdom, or if it was a lesson his grandmother taught him, or if he learned it in school.  "No," they said, "Forest Gump said that."

Forest Gump?  The movie?

This made me think.  If a ten year old can boy learn such valuable life skills from a movie, maybe I was wrong about the movie industry altogether.  Maybe they are not just corporate profit hounds out to sell every piece of junk they can squeeze off their assembly lines.  Maybe they are actually warm- hearted individuals who see our children's future as the most important investment they can make.

I investigated.  I talked with as many children as I could find.  I asked them questions about history, literature, family values and English and I discovered that they were learning about all of these topics, but not from their parents, and not from their teachers.  Their knowledge of physics and geography and how a bill becomes a law was not coming from our public schools, into which we, as American Citizens, pour billions of dollars each year.  Rather, all of their knowledge was coming from eight dollar and fifty cent movies!  It started to become apparent to me that those "Hollywood profit- hounds" I once derided were actually taking the lead in educating our children.

I visited a local classroom and witnessed a so-called "teacher" fail to control her fifty students.  Disorder was the norm.  And at lunch, the kids were more intent on throwing their fish sticks than eating them.  Then I visited a local theater and witnessed fifty other kids devote their full attention to the screen and consume their nutrients, not throw them.  It was evident which environment was more conducive to learning.

I was outraged at myself for having falsely accused the movie industry of being heartless for so many years.  But I was even more outraged at our public schools for stealing our hard earned money and then taking the credit for something the movies did.  And I found it bitterly ironic that our children were forced to turn to the movies to learn the combat skills necessary to protect themselves from the violence that they experience in the schools that we pay for!

So it is as such that I came to change my views and embrace the movies as our educational tool of the future. To wit, look at the list of this year's Academy Award nominees for best picture -- it reads like the curricula for the sophomore year of a top-notch private learning academy.  There is Titanic, which teaches social studies, LA Confidential, which provides a detailed lesson about an important period of our nation's history, Good Will Hunting, which doth profess the importance of mathematics, As Good As It Gets, which, with its obsessive compulsive leading man, provides a strong introduction into psychology, and finally, The Full Monty, which provides viewers with a lesson in economics that highlights the theories of such great thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Meynard Keynes, but without subjecting the viewers to all that tedious and unnecessary reading.

So to all you unreformed Oscar-Haters out there, I implore you take another look at the teachers and leaders in Hollywood that you have been so quick to judge.  And to the rest of you citizens, I say lets stop wasting our money on those old, outmoded, superfluous dinosaurs we call public schools!  Lets lower property taxes across the nation and allow good parents to re-invest that money in the eight dollar and fifty cent classes that are now showing at a theater near you.