"It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again."

The Academy Awards are this Sunday. Big deal. Mandy wasn't nominated for anything. The Academy is wrong. They're always wrong. They never give horror movies a fair shot. The Exorcist lost to The Sting.

That's fine with me. The movies I like don't need a seal of approval from a bunch of Hollywood squares. Jason Voorhees would look weird in a tuxedo. The beauty of horror movies is they're designed to repulse the delicate sensibilities of frou-frous who want to know who Lady Gaga is wearing.

Speaking of wearing meat, this week's Thursday Thriller is The Silence of the Lambs.

This 1991 Jonathan Demme film represents the only time in 91 years the Oscars got it right.

In 1992 it won Best Picture. Demme won Best Director. Screenwriter Ted Tally won Best Writing for a Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published, which was of course the novel by Thomas Harris.

Jodie Foster got an Oscar for her portrayal of Clarice Starling, an FBI academy cadet who gets sent on an errand to interview the psychopathic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Anthony Hopkins got an Oscar for playing Lecter, a serial killer famous for eating his victims.

The FBI is having trouble turning up clues on the identity of an at-large serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill because he skins his victims. He tends to go after thick girls. The agency sends Starling to talk to Lecter because though he is a psychotic cannibal, he is also brilliant psychiatrist with Sherlock Holmes-like powers of observation. The hope is he can help build a psychological profile of Buffalo Bill. It takes a killer to catch a killer -- that old saw.

In return, Lecter wants a cell with a window.

Starling is warned to be on her guard when talking to Lecter, as he has a habit of toying with people until they cry or commit suicide or both, in the case of the jizz-flinging mental patient in the next cell.

Lecter is a great villain -- cold, calculating, darkly hilarious. In the role Hopkins reminded me of Vincent Price, but he said he based his performance on Katharine Hepburn, Truman Capote and HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For her part, Foster holds her own against Hopkins. That's what the good guys do in these situations -- hold their own.

As for Buffalo Bill, I don't want to spoil it.

The Silence of the Lambs is a classic thriller, as visceral as it is cerebral. If you haven't seen it, it's time and if you have, it's time to see it again. It streams on Netflix.