Almost Surprise-less

I started this blog six years ago on another Oscar night, when Crash won Best Picture, surprising some who thought Brokeback Mountain had it in the bag. So without any further adieu, here's my notes on tonights Academy Awards.

If there were any surprises at this year's Oscar ceremony, they were:

(1) The Artist did not sweep all it's nominated categories, losing a number to Hugo (while retaining the big ones)

(2) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo won two of it's categories, in both Film and Sound Editing, not too shabby

(3) While not a 100% surprise, I think after the SAG Award win by Viola Davis for Best Female Actor (The Help) there was some expectation that this fine actress would finally be rewarded with Oscar gold, especially since her movie has a Best Picture nomination and that of the victor did not. However, Meryl Streep finally won again 30 years after her previous win for Sophie's Choice and I think it was due to five factors.

• Most importantly, she played a significant historical figure convincingly and aged tremendously in the role as well. That's pretty much a recipe for an acting Oscar.

• Second, the 17 nominations have been touted heavily this year, pushed by producer Harvey Weinstein and his p.r. machine, so it's a bit of a career award as well.

• Third, The Help has taken some hits from the left tarred as being too Civil Right-light. I think this is unfair considering how Hollywood traditionally makes serious "issue" movies, but it could not have helped.

• Fourth, some thought Viola Davis' role was not large enough to be Best Female Actor and more of a supporting role, although that view is really only supported by the trailer for the movie, which over-emphasizes Emma Stone's crusading white girl character, while the movie is clearly Viola's story in the main plot, giving her the V.O., the beginning and the end.

• Finally, the Academy is generally old, male and white...and Meryl is a lot closer to their demographic than Viola. One can only hope her .

At this point I find it hard to get up in arms about any Oscar slights. My three favorite films of last year, in rough order, were:

1. The Tree of Life
2. Shame
3. Bridesmaids

So there were a few nominations in the bunch, but no wins. But I still got to enjoy these movies and I expect to see them again long before I rematch The Artist, which I did enjoy, albeit not at the same level as these three.

As the director and lead actor of The Artist (both Oscar winners tonight) might say:

C'est la vie.

Split Decision

The 69th Annual Golden Globes were held tonight in Los Angeles and in an odd year that's produced a number of very good films and great performances without producing an obvious frontrunner for the big Oscar crown (although The Artist has had that buzz for awhile), the Hollywood Foreign Press delivered a rather tantalizing split decision.

In my mind, the eventual Oscar for Best Picture could go to The Artist, The Help, The Descendants or Hugo. For awhile -- before it was released -- there was a general feeling that Steven Spielberg's The War Horse was built for the prize, but it's not had the reviews, word of mouth or box office needed to make that a reality, and recently was left off of some key guild award lists.

For the record, here's the top-tier award winners tonight:

• Best Motion Picture — Drama: “The Descendants”
• Best Motion Picture — Comedy or Musical: “The Artist”
• Best Director — Motion Picture: Martin Scorsese, “Hugo”
• Best Actress — Drama: Meryl Streep, “The Iron Lady”
• Best Actor — Drama: George Clooney, “The Descendants”
• Best Actress — Comedy or Musical: Michelle Williams, “My Week With Marilyn”
• Best Actor — Comedy or musical: Jean Dujardin, “The Artist
• Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, “The Help”
• Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, “Beginners”
• Best Screenplay: Woody Allen, “Midnight in Paris”

Is The Descendants the timeless classic its producer thought it was in his speech tonight? Is Harvey Weinstein unstoppable this year with The Artist, a crowd-pleaser, if not doing Descendants type box office? Can Martin Scorsese's Hugo, also with the weaker box office, sneak in there (it really feels like a classic) and take the prize?

Then there's The Help. Classic Hollywood middlebrow take on an important historical moment, filled with fine performances and a rare female-dominated cast for a picture this size. Could Viola Davis break past Meryl Streep and Michelle Williams in their pitch-perfect historical recreations and, with Octavia Spencer looking like a frontrunner now for Best Supporting, lead the team to victory, even without a Best Director nomination?

Which one is that most compelling combination of spectacle and sentiment that makes a "Most Picture?"

Working Help

The movie version of The Help, so to speak, works, which is both surprise and a relief. It's the best kind of Hollywood common reader movie, a.k.a. "middlebrow" entertainment designed to enlighten as well as, ultimately, uplift and delight. In the tradition's best movies -- say, The Best Years of Our Lives, To Kill a Mockingbird, there's enough complexity that we accept the movie as a truthful reflection of a problematic real world era.

We accept the flattening of historical complexities into good guys and bad guys in return for the superior performances of actors like Viola Davis, who holds the movie together as focused voice and biggest journey, the journey of self-respect that was the foundation of the Civil Rights Era and resonates in the ongoing struggle today.

While being fairly labelled as Civil Rights light, it's effective in bringing painful questions back, including what led up to the era.

Slavery, America's original sin, was about the complete denial of a human being's identity, the person as property, that identity to be bought and sold no matter how many times it breaks up a slave family. The uneasy truce that followed the Civil War for 100 years was essentially a recodification of the old system, with personhood still denied by an epithet, by the devilish nerve to kidnap young men and women in the night and hang them from trees.

The biggest historical news moment in The Help is the shooting of African-American rights activist, Medger Evers, happening in the very town of Jackson where the movie's set. Considering the tripling of death threats against the President when Obama took office, there's something palpable about the film for our time, a safe place to think about a time when America was not as fair, in law or custom, as it is now. As the film has a comedic heart, its irony is more ultimately more positive than negative, but it's an emotional experience throughout, in large part due to the exemplary cast of women.

Viola Davis' Abiline is given the main voice, not Emma Stone's Skeeter although the trailer would have you fooled into thinking it's all through the white chick's eyes. Davis, 41, has won two Tony's and was nominated for an Oscar for Doubt, so I think the only question is whether she gets nominated in the Best Actress category or the more likely chance of dominating as Supporting Actress. There's an argument to be made that it's an ensemble piece, but you can't submit Stone as Best Actress without betraying the story. I haven't read the book, but saw that it uses three voices -- Abiline, Skeeter and Minny -- which the filmmakers wisely consolidated into Abiline.

Davis is the lead, with Stone close behind and the terrific Octavia Spencer as the rebel, Minny. I loved seeing Jessica Chastain playing the opposite of her idealized mother figure in The Tree of Life, Allison Janney is great as Skeeter's mom, Sissy Spacek and Cicely Tyson are welcome anchors at the senior end, and Stone does come out of this a leading lady who can act, is naturally attractive in an interestingly non-bombshell way, and may just be the current smart it girl of her young generation.

I don't want to post the trailer because it's both misleading and spoiler-filled. Just trust me that you don't have to feel guilty going to see it. Even white Liberal guilt.

Someday, it'll probably be a musical.

Hoo-ray for Ho-ho-hollywood

After having lived through Apocalypse Now losing to Kramer vs. Kramer and Raging Bull losing to Ordinary People so many years ago, I find it hard to get worked up over Oscar grievances. It's more a pleasant surprise when a movie like No Country for Old Men or The Hurt Locker or even The Departed win, although I'd say Unforgiven is more of a Best Picture-perfect choice than any of the others. While I expected the very solid The King's Speech to win the big prize, it was a little disconsoling to have the repeatedly brilliant David Fincher lose to first-timer Tom Hooper. Like Scorsese to Redford or Scorsese to Costner, but I've heard that older Academy members found The Social Network confusing and had one gush to me about The King's Speech, so there's the answer for anyone who felt aesthetically gypped on that score.

Those older Academy members were home watching with friends, not in the room, so you could tell that the air went out of the Kodak Theater when Fincher lost. Nothing against Hooper, who did a fine job and made a success out of unlikely material, but it was reassuring vs. hip, and hip lost. I have yet to view The Social Network a second time, enjoyed it plenty the first, just wondering if it is as deep as all that, but then again, what was? Maybe Winter's Bone? (Now that would have been an admirable upset.)

The best time I had at the movies last year, engaging for my mind and emotions, was Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop. I have yet to see Inside Job but hear it is the real deal, great stuff, loved the mention in the winner's speech about how not a single financial exec has gone to jail, so bravo. If only Banksy had been one of the ten Best Picture nominees. Alas.

As for the telecast, lackluster is the most I can summon. The hosts were non-entities, much better in their movies. The lack of any historical movie montage seems to have drained the evening of substance. The use of the final speech from The King's Speech under the Best Pic nominee montage seems like a calculated insult of all the others, a way to bolster the stature of the all-but-crowned winner in advance. Kirk Douglas was the ghost of celebrity future, god love him, Billy Crystal showed how it's supposed to be done and Bob Hope (in clips the Academy has run waaaay too many times) seemed like yet another way to show-up the current hosts, as if the producers had challenged each other to come up with better more far-reaching disses.

With so many of the winners having given speeches on other awards shows leading up to Oscar night, this round was anticlimactic. Christian Bale in particular was much more interesting at the Golden Globes. So I give Natalie Portman credit for (to my mind) the best speech of the night. It wasn't a rehash of her earlier speeches, it seemed completely sincere, she thanked back the first director to have hired her (Luc Besson) and gave proper tribute to her Black Swan director, Darren Aronofsky. Best presenters were Robert Downey Jr. with a surprisingly fun Jude Law.

So all in all it was a bummer Oscars. No great Best Song or even mediocre but by an electrifying star. No great long-time cult heroes winning big for the first time. Another post-cinema Oscars, with the main redeeming quality being the ten Best Picture nominee number, now in its second year, which at least lent legitimacy to pix like 127 Hours, The Kids Are Alright, Winter's Bone and even Inception which, since Christopher Nolan was stiffed out of a Best Director nomination, evidently might have been left off a five-title limited list.

Other than that, the fizz had drained out of the champagne long before the foregone conclusion was announced.

On to 2012.

The Producer

There's a great interview by Mike Fleming with top dog movie producer Scott Rudin in Deadline: Hollywood that is not to be missed. He's won the 2008 Best Picture Oscar (the statuette that goes to the Producer/s) for No Country for Old Men and this year he has The Social Network and now True Grit headed for nominations galore, both great at the box office as well -- as Rudin notes, might have been low-budget indies in years past.

Rudin has an infamous reputation for working and firing assistants brutally, although I haven't heard if he's mellow in old age, but years ago I heard this same story from an interview comments post:

A good friend, Peter Hrisko (RIP), worked as an assistant to Rudin several years ago. He met Rudin at LAX one afternoon to pick him up after a flight. During the drive back, after Peter respectfully tendered his resignation and gave his two weeks notice to pursue his own writing career, Rudin asked him to pull over, then kicked him out of the car and made Peter walk home. This became a legendary story for a while. Still, even Hrisko himself maintained respect for Rudin’s skill and tenacity at his work and could laugh about the immature shit. Says something I guess that even he couldn’t badmouth Rudin.

What's obvious is that high-quality, bold directors want to work with him because he gets the dough they need and protects their vision. What makes a creative producer rise above the financial/executive producer is how he helps the writer and director develop their vision, keeping the whole schema of the movie ecosystem in mind:

DEADLINE: These are two very different projects. How did you support each as producer?
RUDIN: They needed very different things. In the case of True Grit, it has always been, pulling together the financing, pulling together the cast, running the marketing, giving them what they need. They need no help of any kind making the movie. They don’t want it, and I wouldn’t presume there was anything I could tell them about the making of a movie. We worked great together because we know what we each do and that’s a very comfortable place. There are aspects of the movie they’re very happy to run on their own, and aspects they are happy for me to run alone. We got that very clear and right the very first time we worked together on Raising Arizona, so I go back with the guys basically to the very beginning of their careers.

DEADLINE: Will they take a script note from you?
RUDIN: Yes. I have done that, and I do. We did a lot of work on the script of No Country, and on True Grit. There are big differences between Charles Portis’ book and this movie, and some of the best things in No Country are their invention. They are so brilliant at the calibration of moment to moment narrative that they can break down material better than almost anybody I’ve ever worked with. Most of the things we talk about on the script have to do with the math of the story. Is this clear? Is the context clear? Have we set something up as well as we need to? One of the big challenges in True Grit was getting the bookend idea to work. That wasn’t in the first movie. A lot of equity went into making sure we had done that right. That end narration got rewritten several times in post.

DEADLINE: And your role on The Social Network?
RUDIN: I worked very close with Aaron Sorkin on the script. A lot of the really good thinking about how to tell it out of the litigation, the big structural ideas, came out of those conversations. David Fincher needs no help in making a movie. He’s a brilliant filmmaker who has more mental calibration available to him than any human being I’ve ever met. The way he handled the anthropology of the movie was extraordinary. He really got so brilliantly underneath the culture that the movie was describing. He knows what it’s like to be 19 and come up with something and have somebody older and more monied try to take it away from you. Things he didn’t know, like the Harvard and Palo Alto parts, he learned. He’s recreating a very specific time and place and doing it with an unbelievable level of detail, confidence and skill, in service of Aaron’s script. I’m most proud of the unlikely marriage of those two collaborators. But it worked out so that it feels completely inevitable.

It's that combination of taste, financial leadership and showmanship that makes a great movie Producer. Read the whole thing, the best film interview I've read in awhile.

Congrats to Mr. Ruden, the passionate guy.

Losers and Winner

The funniest line of the night might have been Steve Martin's about Meryl Streep's 16 nominations meaning she's actually a big loser. The biggest losers of the night were:

• Avatar, which I'd pegged for Most Picture, possibly due to the 10-nominee preferential voting system that made 2nd choices as powerful as 1st choices assuming none of the 10 received 50%+1 on the 1st choice round

• Up in the Air, which I was not alone in believing had a lock on the Best Adapted Screenplay statuette but lost to Precious, a surprising show of strength for the film and, I believe, rewarded the more gritty story -- which emerged as the theme of the night

• Inglourious Basterds, which was a sudden Best Picture spoiler due to winning the big ensemble prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and had a very good shot at Best Original Screenplay, but at least had a mortal lock on the Best Supporting Actor statuette

• Honorary Oscar winners who had to settle for giving their thanks at an awards dinner a month or so ago, losing out on the big platform

• Best Song nominees who didn't get to perform -- something of a blessing for the audience, since there's usually, at best, only one song by a major recording artist that anyone really wants to see performed live (Isaac Hayes, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, etc.)

• Oscar viewers expecting more comic genius from the pairing of Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin -- their jokes seemed perfunctory, more inside than outside, very corporate in a sense that you didn't get from Jon Stewart, Chris Rock (who went too far the other way), even Whoopi Goldberg; and the material for the presenters seemed lamer than usual as well

While I did enjoy the use of actors who had worked previously with directors of the Best Pic nominees introducing the clips, and I was prepared to like the similar experience with the five for Best Actor and Best Actress intros, only a few of the stories were good (Michelle Pfeiffer on Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins on Morgan Freeman were standouts) and there was a level of embarrassment being out there for those who'd been nominated before but lost, particularly Julianne Moore, who didn't seem to have worked more than three days with Colin Firth and is far too overdue for a win (which I would have loved to have seen for Far from Heaven).

And there's no excuse for that dance number.

I have to admit it, I have a little problem with Barbara Streisand. While we're not very far off politically, did she have to make it all about a woman winning Best Director? After several months of Kathryn Bigelow saying she'd like to be treated as a filmmaker rather than a special case? It kind of took the wind out of the announcement of Bigelow's win for me, but maybe it plays well as an historic quote.

In any case, there was one clear winner of the night, that excellent movie that vacuumed up six awards, making it a bit weird to read of a "split night" in one place on the Web. The acting awards went every which way, and it was the acting nomination for Jeremy Renner that first made me suspect that The Hurt Locker could win the big prize, and then there's evidently 79 years of Academy Award history saying that you can't win Best Picture without an acting or writing nomination. Even if you are the highest-grossing movie of all time.

So of all the losers, Avatar lost the least. My wife asked, "How do you think James Cameron is feeling right now?" to which I could only respond, "Rich." Crying for Cameron losing the big prizes is like complaining that George Lucas was ripped off when Star Wars lost, or when E.T. didn't take home big prizes. Sometimes the work is its own reward. Especially when it turns out to be more lucrative than any movie that preceded it.

Congrats to Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal and Summit Entertainment et al for the victories tonight, especially Most Picture. The Hurt Locker stands a great chance now of being the defining War movie for the Iraq War, kind of the Platoon for our time. There's no The Deer Hunter for our time, of course, no big budget picture combining wartime grit with epic sweep for an artistic, poetic statement on our current national character.

Because our major motion picture studios don't finance films like that any more.

Quick Hits

Just before the Oscars, some awesomely funny poster re-do's from College Humor.

Oscar Winning Predictions 2009

I haven't seen all these films, but here's what I'm expecting as winners:

Best Picture
Avatar

Best Actor
Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

Best Actress
Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side

Best Supporting Actor
Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Best Supporting Actress
Mo'Nique, Precious

Best Director
Katherine Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Best Original Screenplay
Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker

Best Adapted Screenplay
Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air

Best Animated Feature
Up

Best Actress is the only one where I have some conflicting thoughts. The play here would be Bullock in a new signature role, a la Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, rewarding both someone popular in town (helping with Crash etc.) who's had a great box office year for an older actress, and also giving a nod to those non-coastal states which came out in droves for this movie.

On the flip side, the picture is not seen as very sophisticated, and may not impress the Hollywood crowd, particularly actors. That opens it up for Carey Mulligan in An Education or Meryl Streep in Julia & Julie. While the Academy loves to reward ingenues, it is usually in the Supporting Actress category, and while Mulligan is certainly good, she doesn't give a real powerhouse performance and has zero track record besides this movie. Nor is her face as yet as memorable as, say, a young Audrey Hepburn to whom she has been compared. A few more good roles and she may win, but I'm doubtful this movie will be rewarded with such a big award.

As for Ms. Streep, she could win by default, sort of a late career achievement award for being a box office sensation at age 60. The role is Oscar bait inasmuch as she's playing a real life character, with bonus points for playing someone we've seen on TV so much (back then) so well that you forget the original. The strike against her is that since she's only half the movie, isn't it like giving the heftiest acting Oscar for half a performance?

Choosing Bullock solves a lot of problems. And Meryl may have another great one left in her. Who would doubt it? Or more than one great one -- half a dozen. And in more Oscar-worthy fare.

In any case, I always find it useful to make the picks long before the nominations are announced and my opinion can be swayed. The Oscars work by tried and true rules: Jeff Bridges wins in an underwatched picture because he's overdue and the only real competition, Clooney, has won recently, albeit in a Supporting role, but a weightier one. Waltz is the nod to Tarantino and the Weinsteins and is the way Oscar likes to dole out rewards to guests from around the world in witty, standout performances. Mo'Nique gives Precious it's gold, acknowledging the power and importance of that rather smaller picture, Bigelow wins the first female Directing Oscar for her profoundly suspenseful yet grounded in a big, salient reality work. Reitman's movie gets the indie attitude Best Picture consolation prize (as did his Juno), Boal gets the only other major double for his suspenseful yet grounded in a big, salient reality screenplay. Up beats Fantastic Mr. Fox because it's bigger of heart and more soaring of vision, and because it may get a Best Picture nomination (with 10 slots this weird year).

Which brings us to Avatar. As longtime readers of Nettertainment may recall, Best Picture is a misnomer, as the Academy instead bestows their top prize on "Most Picture" -- the movie that best combines huge spectacle with huge emotion. When there's no film that bridges that divide you find smaller movies winning, as Big Heart beats Big Empty Spectacle every time.

From what I hear about Avatar, it has a heart, kind of a liberal one as well, and since it's a game-changer on the technical/visionary front, it is now the front runner for Most Picture. The split with Best Director will come from the impression that it may be a bigger technical than emotional achievement -- i.e. just enough emotion to win the big prize, not enough to get the Directing award. In addition, you have a first-time-ever story of ex-spouses up against each other, with Cameron's ex-wife Bigelow a perfect choice to split producing (Best Picture) and directing honors with her ex-husband, everybody wins.

Plus it'd be nice to see a woman win that award FOR THE FIRST TIME IN OSCAR HISTORY.

There you have it; you read it here first.

Early Oscars

While it seems to be a huge slap in the face to the winners of honorary Oscars that they will not be receiving them in front of the millions of TV viewers around the world in February, bumped off the schedule by the now infamous decision to nominate ten movies for Best Picture rather than the usual five, it seems that the party last night was kind of a blast. The relaxed setting amongst friends may have been great consolation for honorees Lauren Bacall, Roger Corman and Gordon Willis. John Calley, admired studio chief who won the Irving Thalberg Award, was too ill to attend.

Bacall, of course, is the great actress who's career began in the 1940's under the tutelage of the great director, Howard Hawks, working with Humphrey Bogart who became her husband until his death from throat cancer in 1957. Corman, the perpetual low-budget filmmaker and studio owner, is responsible for launching the careers of Oscar winners Jack Nicholson, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, Ron Howard (as director) and many others.

Gordon Willis is the best cinematographer never to win a competitive Oscar. As in, The Godfather (I & II), All the President's Men, Manhattan...the list goes on. He invented a form of long-shadow lighting (using his own custom light box) now used as the standard of crime dramas and NYC filmmaking. Here's a great post with some representative scenes from great movies.

Meanwhile, one has to ask, what ten pictures are worth nominating? Is this meant to provide a place at the table for such box office draws as Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen?

My bet: ratings continue to fall. Hooray for Hollywood!

Oscarversary

Tonight's Academy Awards ceremony marks the third-count 'em-third anniversary of Nettertainment's nightly (with few exceptions) postings. Much thanks to a long-time loyal reader for reminding me. So it is in that spirit that I can offer a few random thoughts on the night's results.

First off, I should always stick to the predictions I make back in December, before I get swayed by the late-breaking memes. Just Friday I made two big switcheroos in the office pool, picking Mickey Rourke over Sean Penn and Viola Davis over Penelope Cruz. Both of which I had right (along with the other top seven awards), but feet of clay, baby. Same thing happened the year that Alan Arkin won Best Supporting Actor for Little Miss Sunshine -- I had switched close to Oscar time thinking Eddie Murphy might pull it off.

The mistake is to think emotionally in making predictions, because the Academy is so much more geriatric than, say, even the General Electorate, that emotion is slowed down anyway. Or maybe there's a long view. But the Oscars are all about how Hollywood wants to be perceived by the world, and Mickey Rourke just ain't that, not yet. Not with a skanky blonde hairweave and half a dozen staples in his back.

Sean Penn won because Milk was nominated for both Best Picture and Best Director, and because Penn brilliantly brought to life a respected, if controversial in his time, historical figure. And, on the emotional side, Hollywood was shocked by the passage of Prop. 8 last year, and the film contains an admonishment to the equality side that they should have shown their face, not hid in the closet. So bravo to Penn and Gus Van Sant for creating the breakthrough gay biopic, and the Academy is approving the mainstreaming of gay cinema (the unabashed sensibility that's so refreshing about a movie coming from a studio), which is kind of the Academy's job.

Rourke has had plenty of opportunities to make speechs -- the Golden Globes and, more entertainingly, the BAFTA's last week and the Spirit Awards yesterday. I mean, these are classic:





And on Charlie Rose, all in all probably enough.

I have yet to see The Reader (is it like reading, maybe a "chore"?) as parodied in the opening number, but I do think Kate Winslet is winning for her other values, not just the role or the movie. It's not just her body of work but it's her work ethic, how she makes the journals and inhabits the characters, hitting different notes with every role and all of them good. When I think about her in Eternal Sunshine of the la-di-da I just smile. Yes I do.

It was the innovative presentation of the acting awards tonight that reinforced the notion of Oscar as club, elite. One imagines it won't be repeated every year -- would they end up running out of 5-a-pop presenters and have to start in with repeat appearances? But it worked as a soulful way to congratulate each nominee no matter their chances. And it made it seem like a very warm and accepting club -- once you're membership worthy.

The only real upset was that Waltz with Bashir lost not to The Class but to Departures, a Japanese pic that nobody has seen, except for 80-odd Academy members who see all five Best Foreign Picture nominees, meaning that a winner might have only 20 votes. I have no idea if the deserving film won, and maybe the two favorites split the vote, but I doubt it has successfully invented a new genre in such a timely fashion as Ari Folman.

As for Slumdoggie Zillionaire, I'm all for it. The best story of all the nominated pix, well executed and full of life. The Academy, like our new President and Secretary of State, got a great opportunity to go global this year, An Inconvenient Truth-type Best Picture for our new era, migrated into the light.

Like the song says:



Jai ho.

Actor Chat

Oscar time coming up again, and Newsweek with the actor round table. They shoot these in advance of the nominations and invariably there's an actor in the group who doesn't get a nod, some might say they get robbed. This time it's Sally Hawkins who won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Music for Happy-Go-Lucky. But the conversation is almost 100% interesting, an insight into process and camaraderie.

Besides Ms. Hawkins the participants are Frank Langella, Brad Pitt, Anne Hathaway, Robert Downey Jr., and Mr. Mickey Rourke.

The article has a few passages not in the accompanying clips, but most of it is on video. Here's a taste:

Anniversary

It's the two year anniversary of the start of Nettertainment, not to the day but to the event. Thanks to several friends I called moments after Crash was announced as the Oscar winner for Best Picture, an award I've gone on to describe as "Most Picture", I was compelled to write my very first post, "Crash?"

Since then I've posted every day and hopefully the writing has gotten better for it. But I have to say Nettertainment hit something of a milestone today, with a record 10 comments on last night's post.

There are only two ways I feel I can justify the time it takes to research and write every night. One is just for the release, so I don't have to keep my opinions trapped inside or inflicted on different friends over the course of a day. The other is to join the public discussion, hopefully in a responsible way, hopefully not shackled to a reverential way.

Maybe it's the time in my life, but I think it's really what's happening in the public sphere. That sphere has expanded with the opening up of the Internet, to where my voice is but one in a zillion. At the heart of this expansion, not necessarily limited to the political blogs and comments, is our innate civic-mindedness. And the fuel these past eight years has been an arguably stolen Presidential election and the hell-on-earth Administration that has made its bitter mark on our world since then.

So your comments are manna for Nettertainment. I believe the responsible public discussion of our public affairs is crucial to our future as a nation, society and planet. This blog is just one corner of the agora in ancient Athens, one broadsheet during the American Revolution, and I thank you, valued reader, for taking a look and for those of you who find yourselves compelled to participate.

Oh, and here's another reason why, even if I'm not a Hillary hater, I do hold her campaign in contempt:

“Now I could stand up here and say, let’s get everybody together, let’s get unified, the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing,” she said, reportedly drawing giggles. “And everyone will know we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect.

“But I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be. You are not going to wave a magic wand and make the special interests disappear.”

No, Hillary, you're fine with special interests. How would I infer that your anti-special interests position were anything more than rhetoric, if your Chief Strategist, Mark Penn, has lobbying subsidiary run by the man who is also John McCain's top advisor?

Any wonder why she and McCain seem to have been tag-teaming the same messages against Barack Obama since Super Tuesday?

Any wonder Obama continues to look more and more impressive, as he takes on enemies attacking from all sides?