When I buy cat food, I try to imagine what brands and flavors I’d want to eat if I were a cat. That means a lot of dry food — chicken-flavored pellets and cereal-like munchies. As far as “wet” foods are concerned, I decide based on how the various Fancy Feast servings smell when I dish them onto the cat plate. That automatically means no pate-like servings. I don’t like grilled cat dinners either. I only like the sliced and flaked kind.
Note: Anya, our two-year-old Siamese, eats a variety of fruits and vegetables — tomatoes, avocados, watermelon — as well as yogurt, cheese, toasted bread, sour cream. She doesn’t like bananas but she likes clam soup. And vanilla ice cream.
As I am in no way, shape or form a fantasy geek, I don’t give one infinitesimal fuck about the origins of J.R.R. Tolkien, or the story of how he came to imagine and then write about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and the other one. I’m really and truly sorry, in fact, that I’ve had to contend with Peter Jackson‘s adaptations of these epic tales. The hours I’ve spent watching these films are occasions for deep regret. I’ll never get those hours back. I hope this movie dies.
Best Film: Green Book Best Director: Pawel Pawlikowski, Cold War Best Actor: Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody Best Actress: Glenn Close, The Wife Best Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali, Green Book Best Supporting Actress: Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk Best Cinematography: Lukasz Zal, Cold War Best Foreign Language Feature: Cold War.
The rest (in Academy member’s shorthand):
Original script: The Favorite
Editor and Adapted Script: Black Klansman
Costume: Ruth Carter
Doc: Free Solo.
PD [production design] and Song: Black Panther
Score: Black Panther
VFX: Message garbled
Hair and makeup: Vice
My heart goes out to Variety‘s Kris Tapley. He was part of the overhype that helped kill AStarIsBorn‘s Oscar hopes (along with Sean Penn, Robert DeNiro and Warner Bros. publicity chiefs), and he naturally feels badly about that. I feel Tapley’s pain, and to some extent I even share in Bradley Cooper‘s “embarassed” reaction to not being nominated for Best Director. Actually, I don’t — fuck that noise — I just said that to try and be nice.
“Look, if the directors branch so desperately wanted to put the 44-year-old writer-director-producer-actor-songwriter in his place, fine. But, thankfully, his work in front of the camera was remembered, because here’s the thing: It’s the finest lead actor performance of the year. Go back and look at it.”
HE to Tapley: Malek will win, Cooper blew it, end of narrative.
Back to Tapley: “I know it’s sometimes difficult for you to take a performance seriously in the race unless it’s in some prestige biopic (due respect to Christian Bale and Rami Malek, both fine competitors), but Cooper built a character from the ground up and infused it with life. He took an ages-old role that has long been ineffective, because the character was just so damn petty and unlikable in previous versions — and gave it real warmth and dimension.”
HE to Academy: Cooper has learned his lesson. He’s learned how to handle N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine interviews. He’s learned not to sound pompous and self-inflating during Hollywood Reporter round-table videos. He’s learned how to behave in a less dickish way at industry functions. He’s learned to discourage guys like Sean Penn from doubling down on their support with Deadline essays. He’s learned how to take it like a man and not talk about how “embarassed” he is at not being nominated.
So when he comes back with his Leonard Bernstein biopic, give him another shot. As Best Director and Best Actor.
A few days ago I watched Rayka Zehtabchi‘s Period. End if Sentence. — a 26-minute short about women in a small Indian village learning to make and sell sanitary pads to other women in their region. Which is a big deal because for centuries India’s patriarchal culture has enforced a belief that women’s menstrual cycles are shameful and must be kept “out of sight, out of mind.” Especially in the rural regions.
Yes, Virginia — India is a grotesque medieval country in some respects. And local women have paid the price for this ignorance for generations.
Roughly 19 years ago Arunachalam Muruganantham (aka “India’s menstruation man’) invented a low-cost machine that allows locals to manufacture first-rate sanitary pads. Muruganantham’s device is priced at only $950 while imported machines cost over $500,000. Zehtabchi’s doc is about rural women using this invention to take charge of their natural lives.
Essentially Period. End of Sentence. is about a quiet revolution in the minds of women who reside in Indian backwaters. (The village in question is a suburb of Delhi.) High school girls in California (led by exec producer Helen Yenser) raised the initial money for the machine and began a non-profit called “The Pad Project.”
For weeks I’ve been referring to this doc as “Lisa Taback’s Indian film” because she’s one of the producers (her daughter Claire Sliney is an exec producer), and because Lisa and Claire went to India last year to assist in the filming. Many others were involved, but I’ve known Lisa for years as the Queen of Oscar strategists (currently exclusive to Netflix) and so she’s my reference point.
Here’s a current New Yorker piece, titled The Oscar-Nominated Doc About a Pad Machine,” by Dana Goodyear.
Incidentally: Tatyana informs that many Russian women who belong to the Russian Orthodox church culture are urged not to attend church services while they are menstruating. Liberal Orthodox churches allow menstruating women to attend services, but they can’t touch anything or talk with the priest or receive Holy Communion. Astonishing!
Has any human being, male or female, ever worn an uglier tuxedo than the one worn by Godfather producer Al Ruddy during the 45th Academy Award ceremony, which was held on Tuesday, 3.27.73?
The show’s producer was Howard W. Koch. There were four co-hosts that night — Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, Charlton Heston and Rock Hudson. The show aired on NBC, and the duration — hold on to your hats — was two hours and 38 minutes. Amazingly, they managed to keep it to this length while at the same time handing out Oscars for Best Cinematography, Film Editing, Live-Action Short, etc. (A friend reminds that the Makeup/Hairstyling category hadn’t been created at that point.)
Ruddy represented the heavy-hitter non-creatives behind The Godfather — himself, Robert Evans, Peter Bart, Charles Bluhdorn, Frank Yablans — but in various ways these guys made things hugely difficult for director Francis Coppola. Okay, maybe not Bart but certainly Evans and Bluhdorn, and to some extent Ruddy.
Five years ago a YouTube commenter wrote, “The Godfather producers were a bunch of assholes. They were against casting Brando and Pacino. They were against Nino Rota‘s score. They were against Gordon Willis‘ dark photography. They tried to have Coppola fired several times. If The Godfather is one of the best movies ever made, it is in spite of its producers, not thanks to them.”
There was more to it than just that, but the commenter is not wholly wrong.
According to Mark Seals‘ “The Godfather Wars” (Vanity Fair, March 2009), when Coppola announced that The Godfather “should not be a film about organized crime but a family chronicle, a metaphor for capitalism in America,” Evans’ reaction was “Is he nuts?”
On the other hand one of Evans’ earliest demands was that The Godfather would have to feel east-coast authentic, that audiences would be able to “smell the spaghetti.” And he did, according to some accounts, upbraid Coppola for initially submitting a shorter cut that lacked that spaghetti aroma, that de-emphasized the family stuff.
You can’t watch Cold War and not fall in love with how it looks. If you have the slightest respect for what goes into exquisite composition, you can’t help but succumb. Those gleaming, whistle-clean silvery tones, Łukasz Żal‘s somewhat unusual bottom-heavy framings, that feeling of being in a repressive but exotic realm. It’s easily one of the most beautifully crafted films of the 21st Century, and yet it never feels ponderous or self-inflating or anything less than perfectly centered.
And now, 12 days before Oscar night, the winds seem to be favoring Cold War. Apparently. Seemingly.
The fact that Żal’s lensing took the top prize at last weekend’s ASC (American Society of Cinematographers) awards is highly significant. Think of it…a Polish-made, black-and-white, boxy-shaped smarthouse film beat the commanding palettes of Roma, A Star is Born, First Man and The Favourite.
Call it a late-inning surge, and I’m starting to think Cold War‘s momentum may spill over into the foreign language realm. Maybe.
