Day: February 22, 2009

For me tonight’s Oscar show was defined by an agreeably classy vibe, nice but less than historic production numbers, and a couple of big shockers — the defeat of The Wrestler‘s Mickey Rourke by Milk‘s Sean Penn in the Best Actor race, and Departure‘s defeat of Waltz With Bashir and The Class to take the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

And the utter predictability of just about everything else.

The best innovation by producers Bill Condon and Larry Mark was having five Oscar-winning actors of the past come out as a group and praise each of the five nominees. Nice tough — classy, gracious, communal. Keep it.

The biggest non-shock of the evening came when Slumdog Millionaire took the Best Picture Oscar — a triumph that had been predicted for many months. Watching the entire happy Slumdog family together on-stage was certainly a moment. The difference was that “we had a script that inspired mad love,” said a smiling producer, and “we had a shared love for Mumbai, the city where we made the movie,” and “we had passion for the movie itself.”

It was a pleasant-enough Oscar show, but the wild voltage just didn’t happen. What voltage could have happened? It wasn’t in the films, not really, and the show itself, while very crisp and professional and agreeably slick in many respects, felt almost too smooth. No missteps, no bad moves except for the awarding of Departures, nothing gauche or excessive, no streakers, no Sasheen Littlefeather, no Jack Palance push-up jokes…nothing.

Judd Apatow‘s short film costarring the great Seth Rogen and James Franco and Janusz Kaminsky was easily the best thing on the show. Hilarious. Laughed out loud often. Rogen and Franco should have hosted the show with their dopey-sharp-brilliant Pineapple repartee. Would’ve been great.

The shocker of the night finally (if not all that welcomely) came when Sean Penn won the Best Actor Oscar for his work in Milk, and Mickey Rourke, whom everyone was picking to win based on the momentum of the last two or three weeks, didn’t. But no shame on the vote or the choice. Penn did very, very well by Harvey Milk in Milk. He found his inner gay man and made him smile and sing out.

Kate Winslet won for Best Actress, and good for that. Many of us are convinced that this award is really for her work in Revolutionary Road, which is a far, far better film than The Reader.

Slumdog Millionaire‘s Danny Boyle won the Best Director Oscar. There was a realistic choice?

Penelope Cruz won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. As expected and predicted by everyone in the world except for David Carr, a.k.a., “the Bagger,” who wrote that the great Viola Davis (Doubt) would take it. It would have been great indeed if she had, but Davis got a serious career bump and that’s what counts.

The opening number aside, I wasn’t getting a lot of personality from the show in the early stages. It felt a little like the Tony’s, a little bit like the Broadcast Film Critics People’s Choice Awards, a little bit like the WGA Awards, a little bit like the 1937 Oscar Awards, etc. It moved along quickly enough but…well, there’s no winning, is there? It looked good all through, I felt a distinct lack of jolt and nerve.

The opener was okay. Hugh Jackman was relaxed and into it as far as it went. We were all watching an Oscar ceremony at the Ambassador Hotel in 1937. Where’s Fredric March? Jackman sang a bit of a hokey medley song, okay, but the silly-foolish energy appealed. Anne Hathaway, I felt, did herself proud. Chummy, loose, felt fine.

Departures, reportedly a nice, good-enough drama, shocked much of the civilized world (with the exception of Kris Tapley, who predicted that it might win) by taking the Best Foreign Language Oscar. Israel is weeping and stamping its feet over the loss suffered by Waltz With Bashir, which is incontestably one of the most original and searing films of the year.

Kim Ledger, Kate Ledger and Sally Bell accepting Heath’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

It’s a crime that this happened. Those infuriating foreign language people! To go by Tapley’s recent description, Departures is a kind of Japanese Salieri film. Decent, heartfelt, respectable — and not even close to Bashir‘s calibre.

A sense of boredom was manifest due to the predictability. Every award except for Best Actor and Best Foreign Language feature fell right into line.

Ben Stiller‘s Joaquin Pheonix routine was, for me, quite funny. The first time I laughed out loud as opposed to chortling or chuckling or just smiling.

Slumdog Millionaire‘s A.R. Rahman won — not very surprisingly, almost disappointingly — the Best Musical Score Oscar. Rahman’s “Jai Ho” also won the Best Song Oscar.

The Best Original Screenplay Oscar went to Dustin Lance Black for political reasons. Politics and political point- making as it affects the here-and-now — particularly the bruising that was Prop 8 — always matters. Black’s thank you was eloquent and very emotional. “Thank God for giving us Harvey Milk.”

The first Benjamin Button tech Oscar was for Best Art Direction. The Costume Design Oscar always goes to the movie set in a ruffly and exotic time period, so naturally the winner was the 18th Century The Duchess. Button has also won the Best Makeup Oscar.

Slumdog Millionaire‘s Anthony Dod Mantle won the Best Cinematography Oscar…naturally.

Congratulations to Toyland for winning the Best Live-Action Short Oscar.

The Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar went to Slumdog Millionaire‘s Simon Beaufoy as an expression of the general sweep mentality surrounding and supporting this film.

“The man who wrote that is now dead…every blank page was once a tree.” Steve Martin‘s Oscar podium material (which I presume he’s written himself) always plays better than the material in his films.

Andrew Stanton‘s WALL*E won the Best Animated Feature Oscar…shocker. Kumio Kato‘s La Maison en Petits Cubes has won the Best Animated Short.

The Dark Knight‘s Heath Ledger, of course, took the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Ledger’s dad, mom and sister accepted. “An original and enduring legacy” indeed. A feeling of sadness, solemnity, finality. “On behalf of your beautiful Matilda….thank you.”

Bill Maher‘s introductory remarks for the awarding of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar contained, naturally, a slight plug for Religulous . The Oscar, of course, was won by Man on Wire and director James Marsh. Phillipe Petit ‘s coin trick and Oscar nose-balancing was exquisite. And congratulations to Megan Mylan and Smile Pinki for winning Best Doc Short.

Visual Effects Oscar went to Benjamin Button. Naturally.

The Dark Knight‘s Richard King took the Best Sound Editing Oscar. And the Best Sound Mixing Oscar went to the sweeping Slumdog.

Jerry Lewis accepted his Oscar with dignity, brevity, graciousness. Not a trace of snip or caustic wit, even. Short and sweet, in and out, thank you from the bottom of my heart, etc.

I would have gone the traditional old-school smoothie route if I’d been Rourke. Played against the knockabout persona. Worn a plain black, perfectly tailored tux. Less is more, modest restraint, etc. Instead he decks himself out like a punk from Venice Boulevard who doesn’t know any better.

Regrets and salutations for Defamer‘s Seth Abramovitch, Stu VanAirsdale and Kyle Buchanan, who’ve gotten the axe. Why was this announced today? It’s not as if everyone’s ignoring it, although I suppose it helps to minimize coverage.

It sure feels terrific not watching or thinking about, much less commenting upon, red-carpet crap in front of the Kodak. As Klaus Kinski said near the beginning of Act Two of Dr. Zhivago, “I am the only free man on this train!”

I happened upon this Roddy McDowall speech from the godforsaken, all-but-unwatchable Cleopatra earlier today. I’m posting this now because McDowall’s performance as Ceasar Augustus Octavian was probably the best in this otherwise leaden film (along with Rex Harrison‘s, I suppose), and because McDowall, excellent as he was, might have nabbed a Best Supporting Actor Oscar if a clerical error on the part of 20th Century-Fox hadn’t screwed him.

No decent captures of McDowall in Cleopatra/Octavian gear are findable online.

Fox incorrectly listed McDowall’s Octavian as a leading rather than supporting role. When the studio asked the Academy to fix the error (late in the game, apparently), Academy officials said no dice because the ballots had already gone to the printer, or something like that.

The IMDB says that Fox “then published an open letter in the trade papers, apologizing to McDowall: “We feel that it is important that the industry realize that your electric performance as Octavian in ‘Cleopatra,’ which was unanimously singled out by the critics as one of the best supporting performances by an actor this year, is not eligible for an Academy Award nomination in that category…due to a regrettable error on the part of 20th Century-Fox.”.

The crinkly smiles of those elderly ladies in that Atlantic City hotel, as it were, still give me the willies. When was the last time a camera did a 360 on a dense crowded set and changed half of the set (but not the actors) while the camera was otherwise engaged? Few sequences have better explained the axiom that “simple is beautiful.” Or that the best way of portraying a state of psychological delusion inside a character’s head is to play it straight and banal.

“Man! Man on the street is never easy but lemme tell ya. Gettting people to admit they’re going to watch the Oscars, have opinions on them? Tough sleddin’ out here. Good luck with the ratings, guys. It’s dark out here. It’s been ‘no’ after ‘no’ after ‘no’.” — from David Carr‘s final video report from 42nd Street, posted two days ago.

About to drive back to NY/NJ in the bone-chilling cold and rain. Back on the case when the Oscars begin, perhaps a little before that.

Route 7 in Ridgefield, Connecticut — Sunday, 2.22, 11:13 am.

Nikki Finke wrote an Oscar-disconnect piece yesterday afternoon (i.e., the gorillas aren’t watching). And, a friend writes, “the Drudge Report played it up, and every right-wing booster left a comment complaining about the movie business. Read all these comments and you will see how 47% of America feels about Hollywood and the movies. Incredible insights, very depressing, but if you’re interested in movies they’re an absolute must-read.”

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis knows her Jerry Lewis, all right. The remarks that Lewis will speak on tonight’s Oscar show aren’t going to bite the hand. He’s a politician, in his 80s, knows it’s his last moment in the sun. The real Lewis comes out in private, and it’s usually a humdinger. Ask Shawn Levy.

I sat down with Jerry Lewis at the ’95 Sundance Film Festival to talk about Funny Bones. The interview happened at the Stein-Erickson. Right away you could feel the testy fear-factor vibe, but I enjoy that as it sharpens your game. Several people (publicists, etc.) were sitting and standing around us in a semi-circle; it was almost like we were performing together.

A year or two earlier I’d read and enjoyed Nick Tosches‘ Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, so I asked Lewis if he’d read it. He had, he said, and I knew right away I’d stepped in it. The book was hurtful to a friend, he said, and that was the end of it. “Ask me something else,” he said, steam literally hissing out of his head like a radiator, “before I get pissed.” Before?

But I liked Lewis overall. He’s tough, shrewd, funny, been around, done it all, seen it all.

I’ll be live blogging the Oscars along with everyone else. After it’s all over I’ll condense all the posts into one piece and then move on. I’m very much looking forward to the good old March-April blahs at this stage.

“Like everything else in the world, Oscar season is diminished these days,” producer Lynda Obst wrote a couple of days ago on the Atlantic site. “[And] this year’s Academy Awards are grim for a whole different set of reasons. We have no money [and] this year’s Oscar narrative offers us no clear direction out of this mess.

“Usually we clone our Best Pictures. So even though Slumdog turned out to be a major success — costing only $15 million and pulling in $88 million domestic and nearly $100 million international (and that’s before it wins best picture!) — that doesn’t mean that every studio can simply start making small, torture-meets-dance, director-oriented movies based in foreign capitals in order to turn a profit. This kind of movie’s success is just too hard to predict.

“A movie that would be perfect to model is The Dark Knight, the fabulously successful sequel to the fabulously successful Batman Returns — the second highest-grossing movie in history after Titanic, a four-quadrant blockbuster, more than $500 million domestic [and] $400 million international, a picture with real artistic merit.

“But in an apparent act of masochism, we in the Academy didn’t see fit to nominate the picture — or its enormously gifted director. What were we thinking? Did we want no one to watch the Oscar telecast? As a business that depends on the availability of credit, and that suffers as more and more bootleg copies of our DVDs are being sold for $5 on the street corners of Flatbush and Beijing, we are at the precipice of an apocalypse. The Oscar telecast is the industry’s biggest promotional opportunity of the year. But the show’s viewership depends on the audience’s familiarity with the pictures. (The Oscars got their biggest ratings ever the year that Titanic swept).

“I ask you, do we really expect to draw a crowd with The Reader? Did anyone in, say, Peoria see The Reader? Did it even open there?”

Here’s why: Earlier this week I saw three New York stage plays — Moises Kaufman‘s 33 Variations with Jane Fonda, William Shakespeare‘s A Winter’s Tale at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and You’re Welcome, America, the George Bush satire-spoof with Will Ferrell. The first two were “theatre” and the Ferrell-Bush was Vegas. Now, there’s nothing wrong with the people who’ve been paying to see the Ferrell show (it’s a huge success) but I was there at the Cort theatre and laughing along with everyone else and — I’m just being straight about this — the people at You’re Welcome, America were a different species than the ones who paid to see 33 Variations, and they live in an entirely different hemisphere than the ones who saw Will’s world at BAM’s Harvey theatre.

We all require our measures of dignity, but everyone understands Planet of the Apes shorthand so we all understand when I say that the Ferrell audience was mostly made up of gorillas, the Fonda fans were largely chimps and the Winter’s Tale fans were mostly orangutans. There were no gorillas there, I can tell you that.

I’ve said this so many times and for so many years it’s coming out of my ears, but life is finally not worth living and movies are finally not worth seeing with any regularity if you’re going to confine yourself to a gorilla realm. (Okay, sometimes, yes — not everything has to be for the 10% of the audience with taste. I can roll with that. Sometimes plain and simple and true are okay, or even nourishing.)

90% of America doesn’t get (and doesn’t want to get) quality-level movies that are about being what they are and standing their ground regardless of how many tickets they sell. Most commercial movies are obviously about trying to reach average Americans where they live. Obviously the realms overlap from time to time, but you can’t be a creative person by reaching down. Ask anyone who’s created anything good and lasting in any realm, and I don’t mean Gallagher.

People hate elitism but it’s a stone fact that most people out there are focused on love and kids and survival and living in the rough and tumble, and therefore not into ars gratia artis. That tends to translate into a kind of laziness — not venal or punishable but real. A national mainstream populace that’s at least somewhat uncouth, poorly read in terms of hardbacks and trade paperbacks and upscale sites, insufficiently travelled, coarse, unrefined, lacking in worldliness and sophistication, uneducated in many realms. (As I certainly am.)

People of all stripes and moods have enjoyed Fargo and No Country for Old Men and The Departed and other culture-bridging films but most of them will never see, much less enjoy or cherish, the really good rarified stuff that people who’ve been to Rome and Belize and know what a good bottle of wine tastes like or know how to play good guitar tend to prefer. And I don’t mean Ballast.

You can make movies for the popcorn crowd in the right way (i.e., profitably and respectably) but without the 10% of America that gets and embraces the truly transformative, less-than-100%-commercial realms, life in America would be a desert. It would a horror.

It would have made political sense, obviously, to nominate The Dark Knight for Best Picture because it’s a very entertaining and accomplished people movie, but it just wasn’t good enough — it was a slog to sit through, it was finally too Bush-Cheney in its political thinking, and it lasted way too long. It’s one of the best superhero movies ever (superhero flicks being their own realm and arena) but it was basically a high-end gorilla thing. And Best Picture nominees are supposed to be at least chimp-level. Everyone knows that.

I was really excited when I bought the Dark Knight Blu-ray. And then I took it home and popped it in and it just wouldn’t play. Except for the Heath Ledger scenes I began to feel a little bit bored around the one-hour mark, and I wound up giving up and going back to writing. I know for a fact that a movie that doesn’t play well a second time has a Really Big Problem. Face it.

The Oscars are probably going to gradually get smaller and smaller because most of the people who genuinely care about making (or voting for) movies with a semblance of real quality know that it’s a chimp and orangutan game out there. Gorilla values are fine in their place and in the right proportion (I eat at Jack in the Box, ride a motorcycle, etc.) but they will take us down into the pit if we let them set the tone. And everyone knows this, including Lynda Obst.

Let the Oscars settle down to the cultural strata where they belong, and let them draw the audience they finally deserve to draw. You can’t make life stay the same. Money and values shift around. Live with that.