Category: the state of things

On the theory that the “academy” likes to be broad-minded and internationally-inclined, I would take as longshots Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo from Hotel Rwanda. particularly Okonedo since it is better to be broad-minded in a major but lesser category. Nobody’s seen it, but you know when genocide’s in the air, that great ACTING can’t be far behind. At 33-1 I am taking Winslet over Swank, since all the others are….er, foreign or something. Finding Neverland is 100 to 1 for Best Picture. nice odds but the academy takes a resolute and brave position against pedophilia. will the academy heal the wound between movies and TV by granting Alan Alda a best supporting actor? tantalizing, but he would have to beat both a black man in a heart-tugging role and a “breakout” actor in a little indie hit, two formidably ideological choices for the academy. The Incredibles is a lock. If I could afford to bet $10,000, I could make a nice $700 or so. plus I have a weird crush on Elasti-Girl. The Aviator will win both best picture and best director…finally “making it up” to martin scorsese for Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Gangs of New York. the topic is “safer”–no wife-beating, greasy Italians, funny- horrific violence or people saying “tuppenny fuck” and slicing up dead pigs–and it’s an epic treatment of a hollywood figure (for extra academy “self-regard” points). I expect a cut, if you take any of my recommendations. but, of course, I had expected to make a killing off Queen Latifah in Chicago when that overstuffed couch Zeta-Jones won best supporting actress! damn her and her creepy husband Lee Majors! any side bets on “Most Embarrasing Speech” or “Nearly Dead but Acclaimed Foreign Director Who Will Win Lifetime Achievement Award after Being Snubbed for Four Decades?” Will the academy have a sense of humor and give “Best Make-Up” to Passion of the Christ? it’s interesting how the Jews killed Our Lord and founded Hollywood. Discuss.

Continue reading Oscar Odds Update

Oscars are coming up, don’t forget. Shall we take another stab at looking at the trends in this year’s nominations and discussing what folks can expect at the ceremony? Arnab started us with a few ideas. He’s under the assumption that because Scorsese has never won he’s bound to win this year. Is he using projection data? That is, is there something built into this whole process that makes it more or less predictable? Or is this a guessing game? Take, for instance, the documentary short nominee “Autism is a World.” Although I have not seen the film, I am quite confident it will win because autism has been in the news a lot lately. A cause celbre. Another example: I think Thomas Haden Church will win for best supporting actor. Although I saw “Sideways” and liked his performance very much, I am instead basing my prediction on the fact that Paul Giamatti didn’t get the nomination for best actor. The Academy likes to try and clean up after itself as much as possible by offering “concession” awards, so the nod will go to Church. Does the Academy try to distinguish itself from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association? If that’s what you think, you probably expect that Hilary Swank will not win Best Actress, and that Jamie Foxx will not win Best Actor. Any thoughts? Any timeless trends worth pointing out? Joan Rivers scares me.

Okay. A student just wrote me an impassioned defense of Eastwood’s “Million $ Baby,” deploring how its complex character study has been turned into mere politics. He makes a reasonable case, but I wrote him back a rant about disabilities on film and… well, I am curious how others might respond.

I’m too lazy to change much about my email to him, so cut/pasted:

Continue reading Million $ Dead Baby — or, Disabilities on Parade

Whenever I read Film Comment magazine, as I’m doing now, I feel particularly stupid. First it is unlikely that I will see the new retrospective of whatever at Lincoln Center, and second, I rarely know the celebrated Turkish, Georgian or Finnish directors who apparently have been turning out masterpiece after masterpiece during the last decade, while I struggle to catch up with the episodes of Futurama that I’ve missed. This experience leads to melancholy thoughts regarding “film culture” and “netflix:” what happened to seeing films “publically”–now it is only consistently possible in New York City and in some rare other locations (say San Francisco/Berkely where they have a major Film Archive or Minneapolis which has the Walker Art Center) to see a movie in a well-designed theater or even to see a movie in a theater at all. do people really wish to stay at home so goddamm much? on one hand, the bizarre corporate cineplex where I have to sit through a fucking half hour of TV commercials now (and then, like a bad freshman essay, they summarize what you’ve just seen–“we’ve taken a sneak peak at the big screen update of “Green Acres” and talked with its star Colin Farrell…) and on the other, the stupefaction of “home” where you can safely piss yourself while you slog through all 13 hours of Berlin Alexanderplatz. as peggy lee whispered to me during an amorous embrace, “baby, is that all there is?” To which I replied, “when the boundaries of public and private life are muddled, public life becomes the unsatisfactory adjunct of a private life that is nevertheless misshapen by “public” but inaccessible forces.” She slapped me and left with that cheap Sinatra-fake Jack Jones. I retaliated by copping a feel of Connie Francis, who had passed out over her most recent Gin Rickey.

we’ve barely watched any of the nominees in the major categories, but if “ray” is nominated for best picture it must mean it is a bad year. i’m currently going with “million dollar baby” as best picture and scorcese finally getting his best director. i think foxx will get best actor, thereby really pissing off both tom cruise and will smith. for best actress i think there will be an upset and the woman from the new mike leigh will win (and thereby assure herself a lifetime of roles in very un-mike leigh’ish quaint english movies made for the american arthouse circuit). the category that confuses me is best documentary feature as it appears, going entirely off of titles of nominees, that no holocaust or civil rights themed docs have been nominated (though i suppose “the story of the weeping camel” may yet turn out to be one or the other)–are we witnessing a paradigm shift in the academy’s approach to documentary award-giving?

but these are my current picks–as oscar night approaches i will doubtless fine-tune them before once again crushing all opponents in various online and offline pools.

nikki noted in a comment on “shaun of the dead” that the fact that they got it off netflix while it remains on “very long wait” status for me must mean they’re better than me. possibly, but what it definitely means is that you don’t rent very many dvd’s from netflix in a month. if you rent too many movies from netflix you will run into service issues. i’ve noticed of late that more movies i want remain longer on “very long wait” or “long wait” status. and very often movies get shipped the day after they receive the previous movie from me, even though my top choices are “available now”. i wrote to netflix customer service about this and this is their response (the more annoying bits are in bold):

Continue reading fucking netflix

michael mentioned 70s cinema in connection with “the osterman weekend”. a couple of years ago sunhee and i had quite the 70s festival via netflix: we watched “the parallax view”, “the conversation”, “dog day afternoon”, “network” etc. in quick succession. was this truly the last great decade of american film or are we remembering only the good stuff and glossing over all the dreck? after all, this is also the decade of the “airport” films. but it does seem like films were being made in the 70s within the studio system that were more thoughtful and which sidestepped the high/low art schema.

speaking of “dog day afternoon”: whatever happened to that al pacino?