Day: November 17, 2018

All through the season the Gold Derby no-accounts have refused to include Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed, easily and absolutely one of the year’s ten-best, on their Best Picture spitball lists. Worse, they’ve also declined to list Ethan Hawke‘s landmark performance as a projected Best Actor nominee. Both for the perfectly idiotic reason of isolating any film that opened before Labor Day as a non-starter.

And now their cavalier, herd-following way of thinking has been embraced by the 2018 Spirit Awards nominations with four or five nominations having gone to First Reformed. Which of course seals its Oscar fate.

From here on guild and Academy members will be saying to each other, “Yeah, Schrader’s film is obviously striking and quite the career comeback and Hawke may have delivered his career-best performance, agreed, but First Reformed is a Spirit Awards thing….not in our realm.”

Shame on the Gold Derby-ites for ghetto-izing this great Bressonian film and kicking it downstairs.

In case some Academy members haven’t noticed, mainstream theatrical fare has severely devolved over the past 15 years. Almost everything made by the big studios is aimed at families and submentals, and almost all adult material (except during Oscar season) has been shunted off to cable and streaming. So out of this desert comes (among other streaming companies) Netflix, which believes in backing ambitious, adult-level features…hooray!

Netflix has recently even caved on its standard financial scheme of streaming films right off the bat from day #1, to the extent that it won’t be streaming its prize Oscar pony, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, until it’s played in select theatres for a couple of weeks. I’m sorry but that’s a highly significant concession for a company like this.

And some people are giving Netflix shit over this? Somebody actually accused their willingness to go theatrical of being a “con” because they’ll be four-walling?

Netflix is investing in real movies, for God’s sake. They’ve produced the latest Coen brothers film, which at the very least is diverting and handsome as hell to look at. They backed that problematic Orson Welles film, The Other Side of the Wind, and Morgan Neville‘s They”ll Love Me When I’m Dead. They may not be the most theatrical-minded people in the industry, okay, but we’re living in a streaming world now, for God’s sake…wake up! There’s a distinct shortage of good-guy outfits in the business right now, and Netflix is certainly one of them

I was inspired to post this by two recent irritating articles — Erich Schwartzel‘s 11.17 Wall Street Journal piece, “Netflix Sees Oscar Gold in Roma, but Hollywood Isn’t So Sure,” and Rebecca Keegan‘s 11.14 Hollywood Reporter essay, “How the Oscar Race Became a Referendum on Netflix.”

The across-the-board worshipping of the late Stan Lee and the corresponding corporate Marvel-ization of mainstream motion picture fare cannot be separated. Deny it or not, but these two things have happened due to an outgrowth of mass infantilization and the increasing influence of fanboy culture, which has been happening since the explosion of wide-release, teenage-catering entertainments (Jaws, Star Wars) in the mid ’70s.

It is therefore allowable for Bill Maher to have written what he wrote this morning about the Stan Lee effect. Just shut up and take it. We’re supposed to be be okay with differing opinions in our country so act that way.

“The guy who created Spider-Man and the Hulk has died, and America is in mourning,” Maher wrote. “Deep, deep mourning for a man who inspired millions to, I don’t know, watch a movie, I guess.

“Someone on Reddit posted, ‘I’m so incredibly grateful I lived in a world that included Stan Lee.’ Personally, I’m grateful I lived in a world that included oxygen and trees, but to each his own. Now, I have nothing against comic books — I read them now and then when I was a kid and I was all out of Hardy Boys. But the assumption everyone had back then, both the adults and the kids, was that comics were for kids, and when you grew up you moved on to big-boy books without the pictures.

“But then twenty years or so ago, something happened — adults decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff. And so they pretended comic books were actually sophisticated literature. And because America has over 4,500 colleges — which means we need more professors than we have smart people — some dumb people got to be professors by writing theses with titles like ‘Otherness and Heterodoxy in the Silver Surfer‘. And now when adults are forced to do grown-up things like buy auto insurance, they call it ‘adulting’ and act like it’s some giant struggle.

“I’m not saying we’ve necessarily gotten stupider. The average Joe is smarter in a lot of ways than he was in, say, the 1940s, when a big night out was a Three Stooges short and a Carmen Miranda musical. The problem is, we’re using our smarts on stupid stuff. I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to suggest that Donald Trump could only get elected in a country that thinks comic books are important.”

HE context entry #1: Remember what Watchmen creator Alan Moore said nine years ago, to wit: “The average age of the audience now for comics, and this has been the case since the late 1980s, probably is late thirties to early fifties — which tends to support the idea that these things are not being bought by children. They’re being bought in many cases by hopeless nostalgics or, putting the worst construction on it, perhaps cases of arrested development who are not prepared to let their childhoods go, no matter how trite the adventures of their various heroes and idols.”

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