The Mumpsimus

The only Oscars ceremony that had a specific effect on my life happened thirty years ago, when I was six years old. It was the 54th Academy Awards , and On Golden Pond  was our local hero, having mostly been filmed about ten miles away from my house. Everybody I knew seemed to have at least a little connection to it somehow, or claimed to. At six years old, I didn't really understand what any of it meant, but I knew how much the adults seemed to care, and how special the moment seemed to them. The movie immediately became an indelible part of my life. If that had been it, I'd look back on the 1982 Oscar ceremony with the sort of gauzy nostalgia that fills the movie. But Ernest Thompson won an Oscar that night for adapting his play into a screenplay, and I've known Ernest now for an amount of years neither of us will admit to, and worked with him on numerous local projects. We have really different aesthetics, and I love that — he's been at times the ideal teacher...

I went to see The Artist  yesterday, and since a friend this morning asked me some questions about it, I thought I'd take a moment here to record a few thoughts, and, more importantly, link to people who have more interesting things to say about it than I do. It's a nice little movie. I really have trouble coming up with more than that. Its clear frontrunner status in many categories going into the Oscars is a bit baffling, but not inexplicable. I can think of three major reasons it's such awards bait, and I'm sure there are more: 1.) it's different enough from other movies released last year to stand out from the crowd, but not different enough to alienate any crowd; 2.) if you know things about movies and you like movies, it makes you feel good for being you; 3.) Harvey Weinstein is distributing it, and Harvey Weinstein is one of the most successful people in the history of the motion picture industry at getting awards attention for his movies. Also, it...

Posting is likely to continue to be sparse-to-nonexistent here for at least another week, but that really shouldn't cause you any sadness, because you've got a whole big series of tubes out there to explore.  You'll survive without me for a little while longer, I'm sure.  I have faith in you, dear reader. One of the things you should certainly read is the great Steve Shaviro's marvelous post about Kathryn Bigelow , who last night became, as y'all know by now, the first woman ever to win a Best Director Oscar.  I'm all for it, even if the whole situation, like The Hurt Locker itself , is complex in its meanings and implications . The Oscar show itself was pretty awful, but that's part of the fun of watching.  Every year, we get to say, "Wow, it's even worse than last year!"  A decade or two from now, I expect it all to be broadcast via the future equivalent of the Wii and to require all presenters to make fart jokes. I don't ...

Manohla Dargis may be my favorite mainstream film reviewer -- it's not just that she's got great perception of cinema as an artform of its own (too many reviewers treat movies like they're illustrated novels), but she's also an extraordinarily talented writer, one of the few film reviewers I'm happy to read simply for her sense of language and prose structure within the newspaper review form. Plenty of writers' expressive abilities have been deadened by the demands of writing multiple 800-1000-word reviews week after week, but Dargis still turns in more energetic and thoughtful reviews than not, and it's an impressive feat. In a recent issue of the Times , Dargis wrote an essay about women in Hollywood . The commercial American film industry remains an astoundingly sexist enterprise, and the sexism is systemic, as Dargis shows. Even if you think you know how bad the situation is, the statistics are breathtaking: Only a handful of female directors picked ...

It's the time of year for me to be utterly torn -- torn by my knowledge that the Oscars are a ridiculous ritual and by my fascination with them. They are, as somebody (I don't remember who) once said, the Superbowl for gay people, and I have often dreamed of tailgating the ceremony whilst wearing my pink feather boa. (Or maybe Tayari Jones's coat . Except I think I somehow look like Rudy Giuliani in that picture.) And yet I also agree with a lot of what A.O. Scott said about them : "The Oscars themselves may be harmless fun, but the idea that they matter is as dangerous as it is ridiculous." So I'm going to give up on matter for the moment, and instead indulge in harmless fun by offering unsolicited and utterly useless opinions on films I have seen and not seen. (Do note, though, that last year I lost on Oscar betting to Ms. McCarron .) Here we go, with the help of the official list : Actor: Consensus seems to be that Daniel Day-Lewis will win, and that ...