Friendo of friendo with HE edits and add-ons: “Worst-ever year for movies produces worst-ever Oscar results, although it’s not as if they didn’t have better options to vote for.

“After years of spreading their awards around, the Academy has showered a piece of multiverse Marvel mulch with seven (7) Oscars…the membership changes of recent years are also now showing a different motivation among the members. Fraser, Yeoh, Curtis and even Ke Huy Quan are all the beneficiaries of DEI sentimentality and general emotional cappuccino froth over real coffee and perceptive judgment.”

HE hat-tip for “conkirk” epitaph (with minor edits): “The more I think about it, the more I laugh. Top Gun: Maverick was really normie heaven, and represented everything that made most people feel good about movies. The oldsters loved the genteel (except for the bloody finger stubs) and traditional Banshees. The younger generation loves Elvis. (Rght?) Cineastes are obsessed with Tar, and plebs anxious about World War 3 are gripped by All Quiet on Western Front.

“So the rubes tune in and watch their favorite films lose as they listen to some director extolling the virtues of drag shows for children, and all of their suspicions about Hollywood and the Oscars were confirmed. This was the last straw for normies and mainstream audiences, I suspect. They will completely give up.

As someone said, this is not an event with any relationship to us, or even worthy of attention anymore. It exists in its own realm, for an insular, shrinking group. The ratings in future years will stay in the cellar region, as award shows get smaller and smaller.”

11:43 pm: It’s been suggested that instead of reporting the truth (i.e., internet outage) that I say I turned off the Oscars 20 minutes before they ended in a state of anger and disgust. Which I didn’t do, although it kinda sounds good. All is lost. Nothing but pain, lethargy, despair and all of that good downer stuff. Academy voters are the Bubble People — the actual reality of things, the real state of cinema and how real-world people regard it, is a whole ‘nother thing.

11:26 pm: Strange as this may seem, the cable has blanked out and I have nothing but Twitter and the trades to rely upon for news of the final Oscar outcome. But a filmmaker friend has just written me: “The death of cinema.” The EEAAO baddies have stormed the Bastille. “Because I used to love her, but it’s all over now.” Identity, narrative, sentiment. Except for All Quiet on the Western Front, true quality took a back seat.

10:55 pm: M. M. Keeravani, RRR‘s music composer (otherwise known to rubes as the bald, fat, bearded, happy guy) singing the Carpenters’ “Top of the World” as part of his acceptance speech for the Best Song Oscar…a very special moment. I mean this. I felt glad for him, for everyone.

10:46 pm: “Anyone who wants Robert Blake to be included in the ‘In Memoriam’ segment, text your assent.” Or words to that effect.

10:38 pm: The Daniels (Kwan, Scheinert) have won Best Original Screenplay for EEAAO. Bad sign, dark omen, clouds forming. And Women Talking wins for Best Adapted Screenplay — predicted and presumed by nearly everyone. Friendo: “With EEAAO winning Best Original Screenplay, I’m afraid it’s over, Jeff. FUCK FUCK FUCK…Martin McDonaugh should’ve won for Best Original.”

10:25 pm: The Cocaine Bear promotion (two appearances) is very strange considering that the film is utterly silly….a low-grade exploitation film if I ever saw one. And it gets a big friendly push from the Oscars, allegedly a celebration of movie excellence?

10:14 pm: Friendo: “All Quiet winning yet another tech Oscar is a good sign. If it wins Best Adapted Screenplay, it could win Best Picture.”

10:08 pm: All Quiet wins the Best Production Design Oscar.

9:59 pm: Lady Gaga (zero makeup, torn jeans) singing the nominated Top Gun: Maverick song was the second best moment of the telecast.

9:54 pm: The show is now two hours old, and here’s the one thing I haven’t yet posted: “The makeup / Best Actor Oscars often go together, so Brendan Fraser takes the Best Actor Oscar.”

9:41 pm: As expected, Edward Berger‘s All Quiet on the Western Front takes Best Int’l Feature Oscar. Fine, deserved…but I would’ve voted for Lukas Dhont‘s Close.

9:34 pm: Hands down, the RRR musical dance number (“Naatu Naatu”) was the single best moment of the show so far.

9:27 pm: Best Costume Oscar goes to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever? Really? Why?

9:18 pm: Brendan Fraser‘s fat suit wins the Best Makeup Oscar. First-rate work, deeply unpleasant to contemplate.

9:05 pm: All Quiet on the Western Front wins Best Cinematography Oscar. Good call. No issues. Well deserved.

8:35 pm: EEAAO‘s Jamie Lee Curtis wins for Best Supporting Actress? Congrats, I guess, but this, for me, is the worst possible outcome in this category. JLC was overbearing and over-everything in EEAAO, and for me no fun at all. Loud, broad, bold caps. I get it, I get it…this is a career tribute award, but she hasn’t been in a decent film in decades…not since True Lies. This award has nothing to do with quality of performance. Nothing to do wit “standards,” as most people understand and respect them.

8:30 pm: EEAAO‘s Ke Huy Quan wins Best Supporting Actor…huge non-surprise. Congrats but calm down, dude…stop crying…you knew this was locked for several weeks. Everyone did.

8:10 pm: Excellent Nicole Kidman held hostage by AMC joke, Jimmy. James Cameron, “the Avatar guy who hasn’t been mominated for a Best Director Oscar” or words to that effect….what do they think he is, a woman?” Great Will Smith vs. crisis team joke!

8:48 pm: Another Brad Pitt DeLonghi commercial…nice paycheck, I’m sure:

5:15 Pacific: Said it earlier; repeating for emphasis — Hollywood Elsewhere wants (a) the Everything Everywhere All At Once wins kept to a minimum and (b) at least one HE fave (Kerry Condon, say) to win in their category.

Otherwise this is going to be a bit of a misery slog for me, and for people burdened with classic taste in movies. (We are legion!) The show hasn’t even begun and I’m already drowning in weltschmerz. For me the happiest Oscar show was 20 years ago when Roman Polanski‘s The Pianist starting whipping Chicago‘s ass. Tonight is going to be mostly awful for me…just awful. What do you want me to do, lie?

Posted on 8.6.22:

I can only hope that later today somebody on the Oscar champagne carpet will say something like this.

I for one feel nothing but love and respect for those relatively few columnists and award-season bloggers who seem to enjoy friendliness for its own sake, and who behave in a relatively humane manner for the most part and who tend to hold back on the backstabbing accusations — Sasha Stone of Awards Daily (annual winner of HE’s Human Being Award), World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy, THR‘s Scott Feinberg, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Above The Line‘s Jeff Sneider, Manhattan get-around humorist and gadfly Bill McCuddy, BlackFilm&TV’s Wilson Morales, director and ex-critic Rod Lurie, former Entertainment Weekly and L.A. Calendar colleague Pat Broeske.

There are actually several dozen human beings in this racket if you count certain working critics plus the various producers, directors, screenwriters, managers and agents whom you might call or run into from time to time. Several dozen among thousands.

I’ve spoken from time to time about my love for British kitchen-sink films. Actually only once or twice, the first time being 15 years ago. Raw, sometimes rowdy, grimly realistic black-and-white films…late ’50s to early ’60s…youngish working-class fellows plus Leslie Caron and Rita Tushingham…grappling with despair, too much alcohol, bum paychecks, sullen attitudes and a sense of entrapment or even panic.

There were only eight or nine of merit — Look Back in Anger (’59), Room at the Top (’59), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (’60), A Taste of Honey (’61), A Kind of Loving (’62), The L-Shaped Room (’62), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (’62), This Sporting Life (’63) and Billy Liar (’63).

The leading-light directors were Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Bryan Forbes, John Schlesinger, Jack Clayton. The principal actors were Albert Finney, Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay, Tushingham, Rachel Roberts, Richard Harris, Caron, Colin Blakely, Norman Rossington, etc.

I’m mentioning this because I have a confession: until last night I’d never actually watched Saturday Night and Sunday Morning…costarring the blazing, incandescent Finney and Roberts, directed by Reisz, produced by Richardson and written by Alan Sillitoe, based on his own 1958 novel.

The usual kitchen sink dynamic, of course…the 23 year-old Finney as Arthur, a cynical, blunt-spoken machinist (technically a teddy boy but not a rocker) doing a lot of drinking and partying while simultaneously having it off with a 30ish married woman (Roberts) and romancing a pretty 22 year old (Shirley Anne Field).

Finney is so fierce and nervy, which of course is an act that hides his despair and depression over eventually becoming just another factory-working bloke with kids and a wife and too many bills to pay…stuck for the rest of his life.

It just feels so lean and vaguely miserable and pared to the bone…there isn’t a line or a scene that doesn’t feel like a perfectly designed belt or bearing in a well-oiled engine, or a supporting character who doesn’t fit right in like a natural piece of a puzzle, although there isn’t a single aspect of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning that feels the least bit puzzling or vague or off the mark. No fat or fatuousness; no digressions. Most of it (but not all) is “lemme outta here,” and that’s the point.

To-die-for cinematography by the great Freddie Francis (Sons and Lovers, The Innocents, The Elephant Man, The French Lieutenant’s Woman).

I made this point a few years ago, but if someone were to remake Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as a 2023 tale of aimlessness and gathering desperation…a Zoomer or young Millennial character (man or woman) working at sone kind of underwhelming job, vaguely enraged, living with a boring roommate or an older brother or parents in suburban New Jersey, Maryland, New Mexico or northern Florida…I would watch it in a second.

Just leave out the superficial crap and just tell it plain and straight.

The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody has really, seriously, earnestly chosen David O. Russell‘s Amsterdam as one of the ten films he’d like to see nominated for the Best Picture Oscar of 2023. Russell’s film sent me into a pit of depression and confusion…it struck me as so damn infuriating and unsatisfying that I nearly wept.

But I also admire Brody’s choosing James Gray‘s Armageddon Time for the same honor. I admire his sand.

I’ve had a problematic relationship with Todd Field‘s Tar since first catching it six and a half months ago in Telluride, but I would vastly prefer it winning the Best Picture Oscar over the infuriating EEAAO. Because it’s a much richer and far more interesting package, for one thing. Anyone with any standards understands this.

But of course, Tar was never a serious Best Picture contender because Field refused — bravely or admirably, you could say — to make a film that was semi-accessible to your average none-too-bright or mental lazybones.

Field had a choice between making a film for the popcorn munchers or one that would delight Martin Scorsese and/or your typical Criterion Channel subscriber, and he obviously went for the latter.

Posted on 10.6.22: TAR is such a brilliant, odd-duck, upper-stratosphere thing — elliptical and elusive, neither here nor there but at the same time alluring and fearless — that it makes insider types feel like outsiders.

It’s more about aroma than actual taste, and it refuses to come to you. And for a while that’s a turn-on…”piece by piece I’m putting it together,” you tell yourself during the first hour, “and eventually all the strands will cohere…all will be revealed and known.”

Field is saying “no, you come to the film…it’ll require work on your part and maybe some feelings of uncertainty or frustration even, but when you finally get there you’ll feel sated and satisfied.”

Except that never happens. Not really. A certain itchy feeling builds up as it goes along, and although TAR tantalizes and intrigues as it feeds you little hints of information and motivation (it’s basically about a brilliant Berlin-based conductor getting #Me-Too’ed to death) but without any of the meat-and-potatoes, Adrian Lyne-ish plot points and shock revealings that would tie it all together, at least for the dumb people in the room.

That’s what I didn’t like about TAR — it made me feel like a dumb-ass. I had to ask friends what had actually happened (or had seemed to happen) and even now I still don’t really get it. That’s why I want to see it for a third time, crazy as that might sound. Plus the fact that I love the cushy affluence of it all. The scarves, the great apartments, the five-star restaurants, the sublime lighting, etc. I wanted to move into TAR and never leave.

The term “love affair” has long signified a sexual relationship cemented by deep profound feelings. But not so much lately, it seems.

Leo McCarey‘s original Love Affair (’37) captured what an affair really feels like. Ditto the hot-and-heavy between Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak, both married to other people, in Richard Quine‘s Strangers When We Meet (’60), or the thing between Albert Finney and the married Rachel Roberts in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (also released in ’60).

Edward Dmytryk‘s The End of the Affair (’55), based on Graham Greene’s 1951 novel of the same name, was partly about a sexual affair between Van Johnson and Deborah Kerr during the London blitz, but primarily about emotional resentments. McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (’57) wasn’t about a sexual thing between Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, but was certainly about an emotional entanglement that seeped deep inside.

Affairs are sometimes (often?) more intense and deeply felt than relationships that result in marriage. Glenn Ford has a years-long thing with Rita Hayworth, and from what I’ve read it mattered a great deal to both of them for many years.

I had an affair with a married journalist that lasted nearly three years (early ’98 to late ’00), and that, trust me, was the most painful thing I’ve ever been involved with. If it’s real, it hurts.

All to say that the word “affair” has been cheapened over the last couple of decades.

Time and again I’ve read about an “affair” between JFK and Marilyn Monroe, when most reliable biographers say they got together exactly twice — once at Bing Crosby‘s place in the desert, another time at Peter Lawford‘s beach house in Santa Monica. (And some biographers are unsure about the Lawford thing.) Two boinks does not an affair make. An affair has to involve at least four or five boinks, and even that is only scratching the surface. (I actually shouldn’t use the term “boink” — erotic minglings or spiritual mergings is better.)

Over the last few years the thing between Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels, which was described by Daniels as a one-off, has been routinely described as an “affair”. A total no-go. Even a brief affair involves a few furtive encounters. Three or four, I suppose, but somehow that doesn’t feel sufficent. A classic affair involves a sexual-emotional relationship that goes on for weeks, months, perhaps years.

BTW: Yesterday’s ruling from District Judge Lewis Kaplan in the E. Jean Carroll rape defamation case was bad for Donald Trump, which is good for everyone else. Kaplan ruled that the infamous Access Hollywood tape (“grab ’em by the pussy”) and the testimony of two other women who have accused former President Trump of sexual assault (Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Leeds) can be used as evidence at the trial.

Roughly 50 years ago Marlon Brando and Sacheen Littlefeather were the first to inject a social justice warrior ethos into the annual Oscar telecast, which had been purely entertaining (i.e., unsullied by political opinion) since its inception in the late 1920s.

Their attempt to redirect Oscar attention from the Italian-American, amber-lighted legend of Don Corleone to the plight of struggling Native Americans was a ground-floor cultural ignition moment that, as Bill Maher put it last night, “transformed the Oscar telecast into what it is today — a four-hour lecture on how bad most people have it, by the people who have it the best.”

It was basically an acknowledgment of how progressive improvements always take a while to be adopted. It never happens with a snap of the fingers. Important people and powerful organizations are always late to dinner when a new dish is being served.

On the other hand Maher’s “Oscars, No White” rant, which focused on the announcement of Oscar representation and inclusion standards two and 1/3 years ago, had a little more bite.

Key quote: “Art and coercion is a bad combination. People don’t want to be hired because they filled the quota. They want to be hired because they’re good, and [many] of them are.”

Critical Drinker, three weeks ago:

“From a sensible center perspective, woke is a divisive and destructive ideology that aggressively pushes hardcore leftwing agendas into all aspects of entertainment while demonizing anyone who happens to be straight, white and male…undermining western cultural values, hijacking and destroying long-established characters and franchises and generally chipping away at everything that our culture is built on

“Raising awareness of social, cultural and environmental issues [obviously] isn’t a bad thing. Neither is encouraging people to look at the world for various perspectives. Or giving historically underrepresented groups a bit more visibility and attention. But pushing all of this stuff too hard, too aggressively or with ill intentions is having a damaging effect on modern entertainment…instead of encouraging people to broaden their minds and consider new perspectives, woke is basically about lecturing and browbeating them into making them think the way their creators want them to think…replacing one form of arrogant narrow-mindedness with a different one…instead of elevating marginalized groups, it’s insulting and demonizing everyone else….socio–political indoctrination with a thin veneer of entertainment wrapped around it.”

Please, God…please make something go horribly wrong on Sunday evening. Anything will do. As long as it upsets the applecart.