Before this evening I’d never attended the Brooklyn-based Broadcast Film Critics Documentary awards. It was well-organized, briskly paced — by any measure an agreeable, fraternal family affair. Thanks to Joey Berlin and John DeSimio for making it easy to attend.

The big winners were Morgan Neville‘s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (Best Documentary, Best Director ands Best Editing) and Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi‘s Free Solo (Best Sports Documentary, Best Innovative Documentary, and Best Cinematography). Michael Moore (whose Fahrenheit 11/9 lost the Best Political Doc award to RBG) was handed the Critics’ Choice Lifetime Achievement Award. It was presented to Moore by Robert De Niro.

The Best Limited Documentary Series trophy went to Judd Apatow’s The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling — the only BFCA win that I was seriously enthused about. The Best Ongoing Documentary Series award went to Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.

I couldn’t find Maggie May on Facebook, but she’s right. Allow me to blend mine with hers. Yesterday’s Viggo Mortensen pile-on was a “meaningless” expression of “progress-hindering semantic” crap by a bunch of p.c. nellies. Viggo was making “a very good point.” Whiteys “said the word back then while perpetrating racism…now they do the same racist shit while avoiding the word, playing at being non-racist because the slur isn’t uttered.” Viggo has been duly scolded but that’ll do for now. Everyone needs to ease up and stop shouting long enough to consider how gentle he’s always been and what he actually meant. And if that’s not enough, remind yourself that everyone makes mistakes.

I’ll be R-training to Brooklyn later today for the 2018 Broadcast Film Critics Association Documentary Awards. (Here’s a recent post about it). But I’ve wanted to explore that Velvet Underground exhibit I’ve been reading about for the last few weeks so what the hell, right?

It’s irksome that they’re charging $25 admission — $50 if you don’t want to wait in line. It’s also pointless to talk about the Grand Canyon-sized chasm between the raggedy, real-deal experience of Lou Reed, Nico, John Cale, Andy Warhol, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker and the presumably soothing corporate representation I’ll be submitting to in a few hours.

Update: The VU exhibit is not a soother but an immersive, highly intelligent, atmospheric and educational sink-in supreme. I was wrong to suspect otherwise.

“It was just ’66 and the first half of ’67…that’s all it was.”

This morning I read Brooks Barnes‘ 11.9 N.Y. Times piece about the anxieties and convulsions that have seized Hollywood culture (“A Year After #MeToo, Hollywood’s Got a Malaise Money Can’t Cure“). And honestly? The thing that really moved me — the only element that didn’t pass along feelings of despondency — was the L.A. nightscape photo by Hunter Kerhart.

Takeaway #1: Behind closed doors, older entrenched white guys ** are furious and depressed and taking sedatives. Yeah, I know — poor babies, right?

Takeaway #2: Apart from the flush salaries and perks, Hollywood has become a miserable, hellish place in which to work — contentious, combative, paranoid, Stalinoid, progressive but quota-driven, polluted with downmarket crap (superheroes, sequel-itis, horror films) and seemingly devoid of any semblance of pride, joy, comfort or (are you joking?) ’70s-style creative swagger.

Takeaway #3: Everyone “supports” #MeToo, diversity and representation in the ranks — forward into the future, etc. But at the same time the knives and clubs are out. It’s I Am Legend out there. And poor Viggo Mortensen, bruised and bloody on the floor, is wondering how he could have been so clumsy or stupid for a single second in the billions of seconds that have comprised his life. And the fires of hell (probably sparked by a campfire that some asshole forgot to douse) are consuming everything west of the 405.

N.Y. Times photo by Hunter Kerhart.

And on top of all this the vast majority of Americans — the flyover audience Hollywood is looking to simultaneously fleece and entertain and in rare moments emotionally seduce — hates politically correct culture.

If there’s one overriding conviction out there in Bumblefuckland it’s that the p.c. comintern is about fickle sensitivity, arch finger-pointing and instant Twitter lynchings. So much so that Average Joes not only felt sorry for the repulsive Brett Kavanaugh but doubled-down on their loathing of coastal elites by electing some seriously toxic righties a few days ago. Urban libtards are so despised that a sizable chunk of America supports Trumpian Mussolini culture as a bulwark against progressive upheaval. And yet Hollywood decision-makers, forced or obliged or seriously committed to accommodating themselves to p.c. changes, are ironically tasked with creating diversionary dreamscapes for people who despise the very ground they walk upon. Or something like that.

Dictator checklist: “You’re a narcissist who likes to see his name and face on buildings. You appoint family members to positions of power. You hold rallies when you’re not running, and they’re scary. You talk about jailing the press and political opponents. You want to hold military parades and muse openly about being president for life. You use your office for personal financial gain. You love other dictators. You lie so freely your supporters don’t know what the truth is any more, and don’t care. For a coup to work, it is first necessary for truth itself to be destroyed. As well as the people who try to report it. We now have state TV in this country — an actual propaganda channel with reporters that openly endorse the leader. And we have people who openly oversee the elections they are running in. Truth isn’t truth, the press is the enemy of the people, there are ‘alternative facts’, ‘there’s no proof of anything,’ ‘what you’re seeing and reading isn’t what’s happening’,” etc.