Day: March 11, 2024

Episode #3 of “The Misfits” features Jeffrey Wells, Glenn Kenny (“The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface“), Jeff Sneider (i.e., Hollywood’s most fearless journalist”) & “Talking Movies” co-host Bill McCuddy (recorded on Monday, 3.11, at 1 pm).

Profuse apologies for being too much of a klutz to have correctly posted the pod early last evening.

I’m not a total idiot with this stuff — I did manage to organize and record the Zoom video and then down-convert via Handbrake (with help from Glenn Kenny) and then incorrectly post it on Substack. So I’m getting there. But I’ll never be a whiz kid at this stuff.

Enormous thanks to the great Sasha Stone for helping me correct my errors.

During the pod I mentioned the likelihood that John Cena wore a “sock” during his nude moment at the Oscars.  Nobody bit (one or two of my colleagues vaguely shuddered) so the subject fell by the wayside.  But The Hollywood Reporter‘s Beatrice Verhoeven has done the reporting.  

Just like my having also mentioned the advisability of Lily Gladstone returning to the way she looked three years ago while filming Killers of the Flower Moon. (She looks different today.) Lily will never be Emma Stone, but elemental logic tells us she’d be more suitable for a wider range of parts if she could adopt a somewhat leaner profile. But no — only a “bad” person (and I mean someone deserving of condemnation if not a Julius Caesar-like stabbing) would bring this up in casual conversation.

Does anyone think Amy Schumer could have played the lead in Trainwreck at her current proportions?  

Directors, casting agents and casting directors don’t tiptoe around this topic (or dodge it) when they talk turkey with each other.  Tom Hanks didn’t dodge it when he mentioned a few years back that some actors have diminished their careers by bulking up.  Everyone understands that Brendan Fraser lost his star luminosity when he became the “new” version of himself.  Just saying.

Again, the link.

Everyone in the blogosphere (critics, columnists, YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagramers) was too chicken to say what I began saying early last fall — that Lily Gladstone was out of her depth as a Best Actress contender, and that she was relying entirely on an identity campaign. Nobody else had HE’s cast-iron cojones in this regard.

The Apple geniuses decided to ignore the reality of Gladstone’s respectable-but-not-great performance and play the political-cultural orchestra by running an identity campaign.

If they really wanted a gold-dipped statuette they would have run her in supporting, but Lily wanted the emphasis to be on celebrating Native American culture and offering voters a potential history-making Best Actress win.

Alas, it was a campaign that was almost all wokey-wokey as her Mollie Burkhart character was obviously not a lead (roughly 50-something minutes out of a 206 minute length) and she wasn’t allowed to bring much in the way of exceptional craft and passion (she mainly glared at the ugly white baddies and lay poisoned in bed during the film’s second half).

But Lily enjoyed a huge promotional ride for herself and boosted Native American profiles in the bargain — a ride that lasted for many, many months. Her life and career were transformed, reaching all the way back to last May’s KOTFM debut in Cannes.

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It was much too baroque and Fellini Satyricon-ish and Terry Gilliam-esque for that. A friend, however, believes that it won because of the sexual stuff.

Here’s a summary, translated into Wellsspeak:

Do horny old Academy guys like watching a toddler shove fruit inside her for an orgasm? Do they think women are sexualized from birth? That it’s fun watching Emma Stone get fucked from behind, or have an orgasm with another woman, or have sex with Mark Ruffalo?

The impact of her performance was about the sex, and there’s no getting around that. I don’t actually care about the sex. What bothered mer was the blend of Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Big. Major sex with the kid, the baby brain. I’m hardly alone in this — that’s all people joked about.

But never get between a dude and his splooge. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about Oscar preference of male Academy members, it’s that

I’m not saying Stone didn’t deliver a great performance — she did. But for me the intense focus on sex tainted the movie as well as her performance.

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In all fairness, Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (’93) won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, and otherwise managed four other nominations — Winona Ryder for Best Supprting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score and Best Art Direction.

In my opinion the only Scorsese historical drama that felt like a grand slam was The Last Temptation of Christ (’88). Scorsese snagged a Best Director Oscar nomination. Barbara Hershey won a Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe award, and Peter Gabriel‘s excellent soundtrack music won a Golden Globe for Best Original Score.