I’m not saying Oppenheimer‘s Robert Downey, Jr. doesn’t deserve to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar on 3.10.24…he almost certainly will. HE congratulates him in advance, etc. I would be a tiny bit more pleased if American Fiction‘s Sterling K. Brown were to win, but of course that won’t happen.
I feel obliged to mention three sartorial errors that Downey committed last night. One, he wore a maroon or burgundy or wine-colored suit…a strict HE no-no. Two, he wore a black, low-cut, chest-baring (almost tit-baring) T-shirt…the same kind of T-shirt worn by All Of Us StrangersAndrew Scott a while back. And three, his burgundy suit pants were baggy and bell-bottomed. Super-flared dress slacks began to catch on the fall of ’21 — (a) “Nightmare Bell Bottoms,” 10.8.21, and (b) “Bellbottoms Must Be Stopped,” 11.10.21.
SBIFF’s Bradley Cooper tribute happened on Thursday night:
A gay third-grade teacher, Tiger Craven-Neeley, has been put on indefinite leave by the Hayward Unified School District because he’s criticized Woke Kindergarten, an actual organized cirriculum offered by Glassbrook Elementary School.
Glassbrook is a low performer in the realm of educational basis (readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic), partly, one presumes, because a basic education is seen as racist in progressive circles and because Glassbrook places a higher value on instructing students how to identity and fight against white supremacy and racial oppression.
Greeley reportedly balked at the educational idea of “disrupting whiteness”, and was temporarily banned from the training sessions. The teacher also said he was told the sessions were “not a place to express white guilt.”
The Woke Kindergarten website proclaims a commitment to “abolitionist early education and pro-black and queer and trans liberation.”
Woke Kindergarten is reportedly paid with federal funds — money from a federal program meant to help boost test scores for the country’s lowest-performing schools. Glassbrook has apparently been using Woke Kindergarten for two years of a three-year contract.
It’s only February 9th! There’s plenty of time for Joe Biden to collapse his re-election campaign and for the political system to cough up another Democratic candidate for President.
Consider what happened over a six-month period in 1968 — (a) President Lyndon Johnson, the presumptive Democratic candidate for re-election, barely out-points antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire Democratic primary (3.12.68); (b) New York Senator Bobby Kennedy enters the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination (3.16.68); (c) Johnson quits in March, (d) Martin Luther King Jr. is murdered at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis (4.4.68); (e) RFK is shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles (6.4.68); and (f) Humphrey is nominated as Chicago cops wallop demonstrators during the Democratic Convention (8.22 to 8.30).
The withered-old-man thing is obviously a huge and quite possibly fatal problem for Biden. Do we really want the country to be once again roiled and besieged by ludicrous MAGA turbulence, and allow this to happen over asingleman’sobstinaterefusaltofacerealityandstepasideforthegeneralgood?
Biden is clearly declining and a much more frail and muttering fellow than he was evenfouryearsago, and he wants to serve again until January ’29, whenhe’llbe86?
Yes, it’s possible that a majority of voters might decide it’s better to send an obviously toxic, deranged and foam-at-the-mouth reprehensible authoritarian back to the White House rather than give Gavin Newsom a try, but I seriously doubt this would happen at the end of the day.
But dishonesty is even worse, and I’ve really come to believe in not skirting or ducking whatever’s happening of a significant nature as long as it connects or reflects on some level. No icky stuff, of course. This has always been a movie-related column but sometimes an occasional random confession is in order.
I’m just going to blurt this out. The results of this morning’s medical exam gave me pause. All my life I’ve enjoyed excellent health, and right now I feel robust and bulletproof. I feel like I’m 37. But an element of doubt or at the very least uncertainty has crept into the room. I’m not feeling spooked as much as…I don’t know, somber or something.
Nobody of any age is ever assured of blue skies and fair weather. We’re all playing it one day at a time, etc. Who knows what lies around the corner? I’ll leave it there, I think. Right now it’s all tuttobene. I just can’t figure a way to write this daily fucking column (“let it all hang out”) without at least acknowledging this. Curtly.
Did you know there was a 2014 Alzheimer’s movie called Still Alice, written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, and that no one has rewatched it since and yet Julianne Moore not only won the Best Actress Oscar that year but her win that was locked in tight from the very beginning of the 2014 Oscar season? The fix was totally in, and no one said “wait…do we have to give it to Moore?”
The answer was yes, they had to because her Best Actress competitors simply weren’t that formidable — Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night, Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything, Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl and Reese Witherspoon in Wild.
HE to Kumail Nanjiani: You’ve smart, funny-witty and appealing every which way. Everyone hated The Eternals but that was Chloe Zhao‘s fault, not yours. You did nothing wrong. You were well paid, right? And you became slightly more famous because of the promotion? Let it go, move on, you’re fine.
…about the melting of the Charles Melton award-season bandwagon, which was basically a touchy-squishy thing from the get-go (South Korean identity plus symbolic empathy for victims of sexual abuse)…the sensitives tried to slip this in and were shut down by the sensibles. Another indication that woke insanity is gradually losing its hold? I’d certainly like to think so.
An excellent article about great casting feats was posted four years ago (1.14.20) on passionweiss,com. The title was “Creating and Awarding the Last 20 Years of ‘Best Casting Director’ Oscars”, and the author was Abe Beame (no relation to the New York City mayor of the mid ’70s).
Beame says one of the best-ever jobs of casting was Gail Levin‘s casting of Almost Famous. Levin is a Cameron Crowe homie from way back (We Bought a Zoo, Elizabethtown, Mean Girls, Vanilla Sky, Jerry Maguire, Empire Records, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape).
…to the version that began to peek out 20 years ago…Birth (’04), Under the Skin (’13) and The Zone of Interest (’23).
Eight days ago my heart sank when it was announced that Justin Chang, a Millennial wokester with a particular focus on ethnic representation, will be elbowing aside New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, a young boomer whose writings have never seemed to follow woke doctrine.
I almost wept this morning when I re-read Lane’s 23-year-old review of Jonathan Glazer‘s Sexy Beast. It’s very sad to consider that this kind of writing (aloof wit, verve, panache) is, in a sense, being put out to pasture, at least within The New Yorker‘s movie realm…I just feel gutted.
Lane‘s “Exiles,” posted on 6.19.21: “You will be relieved to learn that the title of Jonathan Glazer‘s Sexy Beast is dripping with irony. How could it be otherwise, given that the movie hails from England? Take Gal (Ray Winstone), charring himself like a fat salmon beside his Spanish pool. Gal used to be a London crook, and his wife, Deedee (Amanda Redman), used to be big in porno. These days, they have nothing to do but drink and dine with their good friends Aitch (Cavan Kendall) and Jackie (Julianne White), who share the leathery look of those who have weathered enough for one lifetime.
“But here comes trouble, in a neat, fast package: Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a man whose mere name, like that of Keyser Söze, is enough to bring any civilized company to a lurching halt.
“Don wants Gal to return to London for the sake of one more job. You would think that the heist itself, a raid on a safe-deposit vault, would be the core of the plot. Not so. What rouses Sexy Beast, against all expectations, is the central, Iago-like act of persuasion: one scene after another, in which Don sits or stalks around Gal’s villa and rails away at him, as if to show not that Gal’s defenses are breachable but that they were hardly defenses in the first place…just patches of softness, the pressure points of a sad slacker. The trailer now showing in theatres presents Sexy Beast as a thriller, which means that moviegoers may be heading for a surprise; what they are about to witness resembles nothing so much as Harold Pinter in a really foul mood.