Day: March 14, 2021

Just before 5 pm Sunday afternoon Tatiana and I visited the famous Double Indemnity house. Described as a “Glendale” home in the film, it’s actually located at 6301 Quebec Drive, west of No. Beachwood Drive in the Beachwood Canyon area.

Talk about a home cursed with blood and deceit. Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and her crabby, barking-voiced husband (Tom Powers) lived in this classic Spanish-style home. It’s also where insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) first met Phyllis and became smitten, and where he tricked her husband into signing a life insurance policy without knowing it. And it’s where he snuck into the garage and hid in the back seat of the Dietrichson’s car on the night of the murder. It’s also where Phyllis shot and seriously wounded Neff in Act Three, and where Neff shot Phyllis right back, point blank and killing her cold.

I was gratified that the house looks mostly as it does in the film, which Billy Wilder directed between 76 and 77 years ago.

The garage isn’t the same. Someone destroyed the twin arched carport entrances — now it’s just one big rectangular door. The front yard palm trees are gone, replaced by three cypress tree and some large bushes. A few 21st Century cars parked nearby kind of kill the mood; ditto a pair of big plastic garbage bins. The place just doesn’t feel quite as mythic in real life as it does in the film. But the fact that it’s 90% unchanged is cool.

We all have the same assumptions about tomorrow morning’s Oscar nomination announcements. So what might surprise us? Who or what might be snubbed? Put another way, which potential nominees are likely to cause the most chatter if they don’t receive a nomination? I’m not sensing any potential earthquakes of any kind.

Will ten (10) Best Picture nominations be announced, or will it be the usual seven or eight? I can’t dissect the whole rundown because…well, I’m a little fatigued by it all. Plus as it’s just after 3 pm and I’d really like to get some hiking in before dark.

But I’ll ask this: Given the across-the-board respect and admiration for Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7, why isn’t Sorkin turning up on more lists of potential Best Director nominees? I’m presuming that he’ll be nominated and that Promising Young Woman‘s Emerald Fennell might not be, but what do I knopw? I’d really like to see Darius Marder‘s Sound of Metal score a Best Pic nom, and I’ll be deeply disappointed if The Father doesn’t make the cut. Let’s leave it at that.

I’ll be up at 5:00 am like everyone else, and I probably won’t file anything until 7 or 7:30 am Pacific. One thing that’s fair to say about the ’20 and ’21 pandemic Oscar race, and that’s that there’s not a huge amount of passion in any corner. There are no hate campaigns a la the 2018 attempt to kill Green Book, no takedown attempts to speak of. Okay, I’ve heard about one but it never manifested.

Actor-producer Priyanka Chopra Jonas (The White Tiger) and singer, songwriter and actor Nick Jonas (Kingdom) will announce the 93rd Oscars Nominations in all 23 Academy Award® categories in a two-part live presentation on Monday, March 15 at 5:19 a.m. Pacific.

Why oh why would Academy honchos be seriously considering staging the 93rd Academy Awards at Union Station, the deco moderne-ish, not-all-that-cavernous railway station** in downtown Los Angeles? Especially when they could do the show from the soon-to-open Academy museum, which could use the promotion and has all kinds of indoor and outdoor spaces (300,000 square feet!) to fool around with…c’mon!

What, seriously, is so damn great about Union Station apart from the appealing early 20th Century design and the fact that many films have used it for period atmosphere?

Funded in 1926, built during the 1930s and opened in May 1939, Union Station is probably the most storied and nostalgic public access structure in all of Los Angeles. To me it’s a Fred MacMurray environment. I was down there three or four months ago, catching an early morning train to San Diego, and everything I saw, sat on, heard, touched and smelled said “Fred MacMurray, Fred MacMurray, Fred MacMurray.”

I understand the Academy’s affection for the MacMurray atmosphere, but at the same time they surely must realize that Millennials and Zoomers, viewers that the Oscar telecast needs in order to remain viable in the future, don’t give a damn about the guy.

It would be one thing if MacMurray mattered in the ’80s, which most Millennials and Zoomers have at least some vague recollection of (even though they mostly regard the Age of Reagan in the same light as the Dead Sea Scrolls), but he stopped being part of the cultural conversation when My Three Sons was cancelled in the mid ’60s.

Academy CEO Dawn Hudson to Millennials, Zoomers: “It’s not just that Fred MacMurray’s career was peaking when Union Station opened, but the fact that we all need to bring a little Fred MacMurray back into their lives in this, a time of continuing Covid depression and lethargy. We need that droll speaking voice, that overfed look, that hat, those baggy pants, that corrupted Walter Neff vibe.”

Is the Academy museum, slated to open on 9.30.21, still being worked on? Does it still have scaffolding and tarps and whatnot? Fine! Use that still-not-finished atmosphere for a sense of realism and a basis for jokes.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming, posted five days ago: “Nothing is set yet, but sources [are saying] that Union Station is the venue AMPAS and ABC favor at the moment.”

Killer Fleming quote: “Will stars need to wear masks, even if they are properly distanced? Maybe not. It would be a far more visually appealing if masks weren’t part of the fashion.”

“If you don’t get the joke here, then you’re stupid. You don’t get subtlety, you don’t get humor, you don’t get perspective. And if you do and yet pretending that you don’t, just so you can have something to be pissed off at, then you’re….both ways you’re gross.” [to Larry Wilmore] “It’s an ad, that’s the point…it got your attention.” — Bill Maher during last night’s [3.12.21] Real Time.

Pivot‘s Scott Galloway: “[Ads like this] should be taken with the intent with which they’re given, and this [ad] was meant to highlight sexism. Unfortunately what we have and my industry is guilty of this, but we’ve created an industrial shaming culture. In which there’s money in dunking on people…making [a] caricature of comments, and then using that to extract an ugly place so you can get virtue points.

“Because the moment that you’re offended in our country, it means you’re right.”