RANSOM US FROM BRAVEHEART

Vacuous. Base. Shallow. Egotistical. Hypocritical. Offensive. Oscar-winning.

Mel Gibson is all this and more. Anyone who saw Mel's "speech" in Sanders Tuesday was witness to one of the more surreal and embarrassing exchanges to take place on this campus since Gina Grant was admitted to the College. He began by admitting he had absolutely nothing to say, and then launched into a pitiful Yale joke and a long, rambling story about a carrot. It got worse from there.

At first I thought he was drunk. Then I figured he was mentally ill. Maybe it was just stage fright.

But no, the problem ran deeper. Mel just didn't seem to care about us, or about anything, for that matter. When asked what advice he would give ninth-graders, the gist of his response was, "I really hated school." On the contribution of the arts to education: "I'm sure it's vast."

The problem--in addition to inane questions from the crowd--was hubris; "I'm rich," Mel declared flatly at one point. Yes, he's rich and famous, but that doesn't give him license to stand in front of us without anything intelligent to say. Some of us had to enter a lottery to get tickets to see this man; we would even have settled for movie star cliches. Instead, we got a painful hour of immature jokes and empty phrases that reinforced stereotypes about airhead celebrities making it on luck and sex appeal.

I have nothing against Mel as an actor, and perhaps deep down he is a decent human being. Apparently, his appearance earlier Tuesday with Dusan Makavajev's film class was great--sources say he was charming, witty and personable. So how come he melted down when he got to Sanders? Perhaps he was flustered by the bright lights and the pressure to perform, sort of like my On Thin Ice audition.

But this wasn't an audition, and it wasn't an Oscar speech. It was an address to a university which in some circles is something to take seriously. Do your homework next time, Mel, or don't waste our time.