“Close call here. They ended ‘We are the World’ before I could jimmy open my gun closet and blow my brains out.” — Twitter message from N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr, a.k.a., ‘the Bagger.” Update: Carr’s Tweet was actually a re-Tweet — he was passing along an original thought from one Roland Hedley.
I attended a Barnes and Noble discussion early last evening with Night of the Gun author David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger“) and Beautiful Struggle author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
(l.) Beautiful Struggle author Ta-Nehisi Coates, (r.) Night of the Gun author David Carr at Barnes and Noble on East 86th Street — Monday, 7.6., 7:25 pm.
Here’s an mp4 (or rather, what used to be an mp4 before YouTube’s processor turned it into video ghoulash) of Carr reading a passage from his book about his father — a blunt, blustery, tough-love type.
I’m sorry for not having read Beautiful Struggle. It’s a growing-up-with-a-tough-dad story — growing up in a tough Baltimore neighborhood, the constant push-and-pull of temptations and admonitions, and his father being “steeped in race consciousness and willing to go to any lengths — including beatings — to keep his sons on the right path.”
Coates’ remarks last night told me he’s a frank and intelligent man of good and generous spirit. I’ll take the evidence of what I heard him read (on top of Carr’s praise) as a reliable indicator that his book is worth reading.
I reviewed Night of the Gun almost exactly a year ago (on 7.19).
“I love Carr’s voice,” I wrote, calling it “at once flip and candid and yet elegant and wise. But the book is also a gripping, dead honest and well-reported confessional. And at the same time — no mean feat — dryly entertaining.
“Night of the Gun is one of those ‘I did this and whoa…I’m not dead!’ books, but of a much higher calibre. Much. Carr is a man of immense steel balls to have written this, and particularly to have gone back into the damp muddy tunnels of the past and fact-checked everything for three years. He did some 60 interviews with the witnesses and participants. He pored over the depressing documents (arrest reports, medical sheets) that all drug-users accumulate sooner or later. It must have revived nightmares. But Carr went and did it and bravely wrote this book, and did a bang-up job of it. Hat off, head bowed.”
Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale has posted a smart summary of the evolving investigation into the recent death of David Carradine. Suspicions of foul play are growing (i.e., who bound Carradine’s hands?), Carradine’s family has hired lawyer Mark Geragos and superstar forensic pathologist Michael Baden to look into things on its behalf and the FBI has gotten involved.
“Thai investigators essentially ruled out the possibility of foul play after interviewing hotel staff and reviewing surveillance footage of the corridors near Carradine’s room,” Stu reports. But Extra‘s Jerry Penacoli said on a recent Larry King Show interview that he’s spoken to the director of the film Carradine was shooting in Thailand “at length” and that the director “said that he believes that there was foul play.
“And he said that no one else knows this but his family — Carradine’s family and friends and people closest to him, but David was very interested in investigating and disclosing secret societies.”
Secret societies?
“To me, David Carradine was the apogee of hipness: not my favorite actor, not even in the top 50, but my existential hero, and a man who looked like he got laid a lot — a sort of B-movie Jack Nicholson. His vaguely Asian physiognomy made him suited to kung-fu and Zen masters, and his acting had that same alert detachment. You rarely got the sense that his roles cost him emotionally: Unlike his brother, Keith, who has been known to take risks, David had an inviolable sphere of privacy. But he never condescended to his material, even when it was risible, and his amusement was contagious.” — from a eulogy piece by New York‘s David Edelstein, called “Ode to an Existential Hero.”
A rope “tied to [his] neck and genitals” suggests that poor David Carradine died from “accidental suffocation,” according to this news story. Yeah, okay, but the term is autoerotic asphyxiation. It refers to “intentionally cutting off oxygen to the brain for purposes of sexual arousal. It is also called asphyxiophilia, autoerotic asphyxia, scarfing or kotzwarraism. Colloquially, a person engaging in the activity is sometimes called a gasper.”
Updated: Former Entertainment Weekly writer Chris Willman has written a fascinating account of Wednesday night’s confrontation at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre between Bound for Glory‘s David Carradine, Ronny Cox and Haskell Wexler. I posted a brief description of this yesterday (along with an mp3 file). Willman’s version is better. Note: I’ve just pasted the article below the photo.
(l. to r.) Bound for Glory costar Ronny Cox, moderator Kevin Thomas, star David Carradine
Bound for Hell, or Glory, at the Cinematheque by Chris Willman
Today at 3:35pm
Not since I saw Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner go at each other in an excellent production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a couple of years ago have I experienced a night of live theater quite as riveting as the three-way cage match between David Carradine, Haskell Wexler, and the audience the other night following an American Cinematheque screening. I keep alluding to what a nerve-wracking, weird and wonderful night this was, and I’ve gotten asked to go into detail about how the proceedings unfolded, or unraveled. This is going to be way more exhaustive than most of you will want. But for the few who really wanted to hear about the whole thing, by request, here goes…
If there’s anything that doesn’t exactly seem to scream “fireworks!,” it’d be a panel discussion about the 1976 Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory, which at this date probably counts as one of the less remembered works of the late, great Hal Ashby. As much as I love Ashby, I’d never seen it, and I have a hard time forcing myself to watch slow-moving two-and-a-half hour movies unless I’ve committed myself to a seat in front of a big screen. So I just barely dragged myself out of the house for the 30-mile drive to the Aero. I knew there’d be a discussion afterward with Carradine, but my plan was to skip out on it and go from there to a late show of Watchmen in Westwood. (Two two-and-a-half-hour movies in a row, you say? Well, that’s just the kind of tough guy I am.) But, imperfect as Glory is, it does a fantastic job of plunging you into the (previous) Depression, and it’s so utterly and engagingly human that I feel like washing its taste out of my mouth with a comic-book extravaganza would be opening myself up to eternal damnation. So I stay for the discussion, and narrowly avert what might have been one of the great regrets of my life.
I should say that there has already been some weirdness during the screening itself. During a scene where a radio guy reminds Guthrie that he’s not allowed to sing any controversial or topical material on his program, somebody very loudly exclaims, “I hate guys like that!” It gets a big laugh from the audience. But soon the same guy is keeping up with a line of patter, which I can’t make out because he’s on the other side of the auditorium. As you’d expect in a repertory screening, very quickly there are cineastes yelling at the rube to shut the hell up, and some kind of verbal altercation seems to ensue for about a minute. Of course, as soon as the lights come up, Carradine is walking down the aisle with his acoustic guitar, already going off on some kind of rant before he gets to the stage, and everyone realizes he was the one providing live commentary for his movie. (As the late noir character actor Lawrence Tierney once drunkenly did, in this same theater, in a night that is beloved in Cinematheque lore.) At this point I sense people in the audience feeling embarrassed to realize that The Star Of The Show had been shouted down like a common heckler, though some of these sympathies are about to diminish…
The screening is part of a “Kevin Thomas’ Favorite Films” series, hosted by the former (and occasionally still) L.A. Times film critic, who I knew back in my own Times days. I don’t know what Kevin has been like as a moderator on the other nights, but during the ensuing 70 or 75 chaotic minutes, he seems to go into shock and utters all of about 50 words. The first nine of them being: “I understand Ronny Cox is in the audience tonight?” Indeed, Carradine’s costar, Cox, has shown up just to see the film, and, so bidden, walks toward the stage–joining another surprise guest, Haskell Wexler, one of the half-dozen or so most revered living cinematographers, and an Oscar winner for the movie. Carradine and Cox warmly embrace, the former enthusing about how he couldn’t have gotten through without the latter as his partner, and the lovefest begins!
Or the monologue, actually. For the first 20 minutes or so, Carradine does 98% of the talking–hell, maybe 99%–and it’s entertaining as all-get-out, in a had-too-many-highballs-before-dinner kind of way. As the star goes on with his anecdotes, Cox is probably thinking he could have stayed in his original seat, and Wexler keeps slinking further down in his chair, as those of us who know this particular d.p. does not suffer fools gladly wonder what kind of storm clouds might be forming in his head. Wexler, who actually knew Woody Guthrie, does pipe up to say how wonderful a sign of change it was that Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen got to sing the full, controversial version of “This Land is Your Land” at the White House recently, which prompts Carradine to sing his own version of the tune, with the aid of some lyrical assists from the crowd. He talks about how Barbara Hershey convinced him to call his agent; about how Richard Dreyfuss was originally cast as Guthrie, but a salary dispute got in the way, and he was able to talk his way into the role by convincing producers that “I AM Woody Guthrie!” He took on this bravado despite the fact that, by his own admission, “the only thing I knew about Woody Guthrie when I was cast was that he wrote ‘Goodnight Irene.'” The punchline to this remark is supposed to be “I was wrong,” but Wexler, thinking Carradine doesn’t realize the mistake, perks up and steps on the actor’s joke, half-disgustedly interrupting, “No, Leadbelly wrote it.” Anyway, so far, so benign.
Then the subject of unions arises… and everything goes gonzo, never to return. Carradine says that these are different times from the 1930s and unions no longer serve the purpose they once did, or words to that effect. Cox, who has barely said a word up until now, starts shaking his head and says, “That doesn’t sound like Woody Guthrie to me!” Carradine starts trying to explain himself, when a woman in the back starts shrieking at him about how nothing about unions’ importance has changed. Carradine starts shouting back, which might’ve been okay if he wasn’t yelling right into the microphone, and it doesn’t sound pretty. The woman doesn’t let up, either, so for about two minutes both of them are going at it at once. She’s the more obnoxious one, but because he’s five times as loud, he’s coming off as the bully. Some audience members are telling Union Lady to shut up while others angrily holler “Let her speak!” A couple guys in my vicinity start shouting “Let’s hear from Haskell Wexler !” About a dozen people get up and walk out in the midst of this–one of them, almost unnoticed, being Cox, who makes the smoothest getaway of all time.
At this point, Carradine reminds me of poor Tucker Carlson, standing in front of that conservative PAC a few weeks ago, realizing that, in defending the New York Times, he has lost the sympathies of his audience to the hecklers, desperately trying to backpedal. A woman in the front row, who we will later learn is Cinematheque publicist Margot Gerber, stands up, turns around, and twice yells that the union shouter should be thrown out. But no, Carradine says, dissent is great. “You’re not one of the people!” shouts the lady. “I am one of the people!” Carradine shouts back, saying that he’s had to cut back on the groceries he buys for his family, and because of SAG’s actions, he can’t get work. “I AM NOT A RICH PERSON!” he growls, seemingly genuinely enraged as well as just loud for the first time. He talks about how it’s a problem when workers in Tennessee making Toyotas make $10 an hour while GM workers in Detroit make $60 an hour–which makes Union Lady even more outraged, naturally. Carradine says that everything we know is out the window in this economy and every aspect of what we’re willing to pay or be paid in our daily lives has to be up for renegotiation. It’s actually a good, lucid point, or would be if he had any control over his tone. Someone yells “Let her have the mike!” So Carradine half-heartedly tosses the mike into the audience–bonking a woman in the front row in the head! Ironically, the woman he bonks is the Cinematheque’s Gerber, who’d just been defending him moments earlier. This may count as some weird karma for her, but fortunately for Carradine, she’s probably the person in the audience least likely to file an assault charge.
The head-strike was an accident, but a groan goes up from the audience, because I think some people think he deliberately intended to lash out at the crowd, as opposed to just having really shitty aim. Suddenly it strikes me that it would only take one more bit of weirdness for things to get completely out of hand. It’s a holy cow, anything could happen right now kind of pregnant moment. Fortunately, there is slightly more confusion than hostility afoot, so no brawl ensues. Union Lady and her entourage finally take their leave, with Carradine shouting after her that he loves her, even though he knows she hates him.
There’s a moment of calm. Since the presumptive moderator is just sitting there, smirking and stunned, an audience member takes it upon himself to shout out a question about the cinematography. Who knew this would be a more dangerous subject than unions? Wexler talks about color desaturation (“You’ll notice the movie gets more colorful when we get to California”) and gives some technical specs. Carradine breaks in and starts talking about crane shots and suitcase cameras. Wexler, visibly irritated, goes back to the specs. And this is the point at which Carradine really kind of goes off the rails, albeit it in a subdued, passive-aggressive kind of way. He uses the line–which he repeats at least two or three more times–about how Wexler “got an Academy Award for ruining my movie.” You can feel the audience sort of collectively holding its breath as Carradine says the film “looks like it was shot through a glass of milk.” When he explains what he wished the look of the film had been, which is grittier, again, it’s a lucid point, but the way he’s making it is either tone-deaf or just evil.
Then he tells the story of how Ashby, the director, hated the look of the film, too, and was insisting on firing Wexler during the making of the film. I’m pretty sure I hear gasps go up at this point. Carradine says he talked Ashby out of firing him, “because if you fire somebody, they just go out in the parking lot and steal your hubcaps.” I’m pretty sure that’s a metaphor, but the audience doesn’t know what to do with this image other than to nervously titter. There will be a lot more of that–oh, yes, there will.
(It’s now, about 20 minutes from the end, that I come out of my own Kevin Thomas-like state of shock and realize that I should have been recording this whole fracas on my iPhone recorder app. So the remainder of these quotes are verbatim…)
Naturally, Wexler is enraged by Carradine’s story. So he retorts: “I didn’t know that I was going to be confronted with a story which I don’t think is necessarily a public story. But since it is public, I have to say something. Hal Ashby sent somebody to fire me, and he said, you’re fired, okay? And then after I heard that and got the message, I went to Hal and I said ‘Hal, just take a minute and STOP SNIFFING THAT STUFF UP YOUR NOSE!’ And if David will tell me there wasn’t heavy duty doping on that film, and that that wasn’t the comradeship he was talking about… When I showed up the next day, I went to work, and I was the UNFIRED director of photography. Now, that’s the goddamned truth!”
Carradine (drolly): “Okay. I don’t think that changes my story at all. Except that Haskell is a little down on people who snort cocaine.” That gets a good, nervous audience laugh. He goes on to tell a story about visiting Ashby’s mammoth trailer, and picking up a copy of the L.A. Times, which he hadn’t seen during many weeks of location shooting . “Underneath it there were about six lines of cocaine. … Hal was looking at me and I said ‘Hal, do you do a lot of this stuff?’ And he said ‘As much as I can get.’ And I said ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ and I left the trailer. Because it’s not my thing. And yes, Hal was a great user of cocaine. It does not change the fact that he was… ” He goes for the superlatives. “Quentin Tarantino doesn’t beat Hal Ashby, and he’s one of my favorite directors. Quentin is incredible. And he’s a big cocaine freak, too!” Okay, you want to talk about nervous laughter… (Just for the record, and to cover my ass. I’m not sure you can tell for 100% certain from the tape whether Carradine says the present-tense “He’s a….” or, possibly, the past-tense “He was a…” But I digress.) Carradine continues: “But Hal was a fucking genius. I don’t like anybody to put him down and say the drugs got in the way or anything else, because they didn’t get in the way. They got in the way of him living longer, but they did not get in the way of his movies. There is not one movie he made that you cannot say it’s one of the best fucking movies that has ever been made…”
He continued: “Hal was a fucking genius.” Okay, we get that part. “And so is this guy! I happen to disagree with the way he felt about Bound for Glory, about the look. And it was beautiful, but it was not what I wanted. I wasn’t the boss, right? … This guy was out there working his fucking ass off, there’s no doubt about it, right? And he wasn’t doing exactly what I would have asked him to do. I would have said, turn up the contrast, show the grit under the fingernails, don’t make any beauty about it, make it fucking ugly. And you know what, if he’d done what I told him to do, he would probably have not gotten his Academy Award, because it wouldn’t have been pretty. So maybe he was right and I was wrong…Somebody will talk to me about Haskell and I’ll say ‘Oh yeah, he’s the guy who got an Academy Award for ruining my picture.’ It’s one of my favorite lines, and it gets a laugh. And then I see the picture and I just forget all that. Because the picture is just so fuckin’ great. That’s the thing that’s amazing to me, is a collaboration between a director and a cameraman and a star who absolutely disagree with each other on almost everything, and yet they make a movie that will be a permanent fucking classic. Is that okay. Haskell?”
Long pause. Wexler: “I just want to say that after Bound for Glory I made three or four pictures with Hal Ashby.”
Carradine: “And I didn’t get to make one!” At last, we all agree, and can laugh together! (Even though Wexler’s not laughing.) Hooray!
The harmony is short-lived. Carradine talks about how the homeless camps they set up for the film were “livable” and attracted people from out of state who actually resided in these tents for a time. Wexler makes faces at the audience, suggesting that everything Carradine is saying is cuckoo. (He also made a coke-snorting motion at one point, though I can’t remember when. It might have been when Carradine said that an entire day’s worth of work was unusable because too much dust in the Dust Bowl scenes made the shots impenetrably murky, which Wexler was not buying at all.) Setting the stage for the next battle, Carradine waxes enthusiastic over the use of a hidden “suitcase camera” that allowed the crew to get great takes of the extras in the camp scenes, unaware that they were being filmed. This is when Wexler really begins to take offense again, thinking that Carradine is trying to give the camera operators credit for his work.
Carradine: “We had this incredible guy… Do you remember the name of the guy that was the handheld camera guy, that used the suitcase camera?”
Wexler (rising to righteous indignation): “Do I remember it? How do you think it got in this film, David? Who do you think planned it? Who did the shots? Look it, David, you fuckin’…”
Carradine: “I’m not talking about credit, I’m just asking for the guy’s name.”
“Wait a second, David…”
“What did I do? I just asked for the guy’s name.”
“Do they know what a director of photography does… ” Wexler goes on to list all the collaborative relationships a cinematographer has with other crew key members. “Hearing David with his explanations about all these cameras and the suitcase camera… Where the hell did you get all this expertise?”
Carradine (drolly): “Uh, I was there. My only question was, what’s the name of that guy who operated the suitcase camera?
“YOU WERE IN THE TRAILER TILL YOU GOT CALLED OUT!”
“Do you know it?”
“I didn’t come here for combat,” Wexler announces, deliberately, “but I also didn’t come out here to be demeaned for what my contribution to that film is.”
“Okay, anyway, since he doesn’t know the name of the guy,” Carradine goes on, getting a dig in, “he had a suitcase that had a camera in it and he could push it and make it go… ” Haskell buries his face in his hands as Carradine goes on a bit more about the glories of the suddenly contentious suitcase camera, which was so brilliantly operated by whatsisname.
Wexler: “I’m gonna give up now. First of all, half the shots in [those scenes] were not from the suitcase…”
Carradine: “Half of ’em!”
Wexler: “David, I don’t know if I can take any more of this bull.”
There is a very pregnant silence. Then Carradine picks up his guitar and starts into a long rendition of Bound for Glory’s title song, urging the audience to join in. There is a bare minimum of singing and clapping, but the audience is a little too stunned, if not alienated, for a “Kumbaya” moment.
Carradine starts packing up his guitar, a process that mysteriously seems to go on for minutes as the actor tries to put a more gracious cap on the evening. “We never agreed, we’re sort of like enemies, but the fact is, I know his fuckin’ talent, and I know his drive and insistence on making the movie the way it was that got him his Academy Award…. I wish that I’d been able to work with you again. The fact that we don’t get along has nothing to do with it, nothing whatsoever. I got along great with your kid! I’m honored to be here. And anybody else that ever wants to do an event for Bound for Glory, I’ll be there.”
And I’m pretty sure Wexler and Cox won’t.
Just in time to send everyone home, Kevin Thomas finds his voice: “I must say, I’ve got some fresh insights into the collaborative effort of filmmaking.” It’s an arch comment, but it has some truth to it. As the audience stands to regain its collective existential bearings, Wexler turns to Carradine and says, “I knew you would not disappoint,” and (incredibly, after the passions that have just transpired) they briefly hug.
Outside on Montana Ave., clusters of attendees form. Metaphorically, or maybe literally, I think we’re all just trying to pat down the hair that’s been standing on end for the last hour. “Between the aggressive panelists and audience and a moderator who wouldn’t stop anything, it was a perfect storm,” announces one guy, gratefully, I think.
One stranger I catch up with on the corner says he found the entire experience to be a deeply uncomfortable immersion in unalloyed anxiety,; his friend counters that it was an exhilarating look past the usual curtain of Hollywood bullshit. Me, I have to go with… both. Either way, I suspect the 40 or 50 of us who stuck it out, like survivors of some massive accident, will be invisibly bonded in forever hereafter experiencing reality through a slightly different, somehow more knowing prism than the untraumatized loved ones to whom we return.
In his latest South by Southwest report, N.Y. Times columnist David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) writes that AT&T “apparently did not anticipate the onslaught [of concentrated iPhone users in Austin]. The sheer volume nearly pulled down the grid by Monday, with frustrated users screaming about outages on Twitter and elsewhere.
“‘It’s one thing for AT&T to drop random calls, but when it starts to put your hookup in jeopardy, well, that’s crossing the line,’ tweeted 7daysageek. AT&T responded to the hailstorm of complaints with a chastened news release and increased capacity on Monday.”
Oh, please! The same exact thing happened in Park City during Sundance two months ago. Too many iPhone users resulted in a frequent inability to websurf and grab e-mail, with AT&T reps saying uhm, gee, we didn’t anticipate, very sorry. Sure — in the same way your alcoholic younger brother borrows your car and says he’s sorry about getting into a fender bender. Not anticipating and preparing for usage overloads is AT&T’s raison d’etre. That is what they do. Indeed, it’s what theyr’e (in)famous for.
For me tonight’s Oscar show was defined by an agreeably classy vibe, nice but less than historic production numbers, and a couple of big shockers — the defeat of The Wrestler‘s Mickey Rourke by Milk‘s Sean Penn in the Best Actor race, and Departure‘s defeat of Waltz With Bashir and The Class to take the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
And the utter predictability of just about everything else.
The best innovation by producers Bill Condon and Larry Mark was having five Oscar-winning actors of the past come out as a group and praise each of the five nominees. Nice tough — classy, gracious, communal. Keep it.
The biggest non-shock of the evening came when Slumdog Millionaire took the Best Picture Oscar — a triumph that had been predicted for many months. Watching the entire happy Slumdog family together on-stage was certainly a moment. The difference was that “we had a script that inspired mad love,” said a smiling producer, and “we had a shared love for Mumbai, the city where we made the movie,” and “we had passion for the movie itself.”
It was a pleasant-enough Oscar show, but the wild voltage just didn’t happen. What voltage could have happened? It wasn’t in the films, not really, and the show itself, while very crisp and professional and agreeably slick in many respects, felt almost too smooth. No missteps, no bad moves except for the awarding of Departures, nothing gauche or excessive, no streakers, no Sasheen Littlefeather, no Jack Palance push-up jokes…nothing.
Judd Apatow‘s short film costarring the great Seth Rogen and James Franco and Janusz Kaminsky was easily the best thing on the show. Hilarious. Laughed out loud often. Rogen and Franco should have hosted the show with their dopey-sharp-brilliant Pineapple repartee. Would’ve been great.
The shocker of the night finally (if not all that welcomely) came when Sean Penn won the Best Actor Oscar for his work in Milk, and Mickey Rourke, whom everyone was picking to win based on the momentum of the last two or three weeks, didn’t. But no shame on the vote or the choice. Penn did very, very well by Harvey Milk in Milk. He found his inner gay man and made him smile and sing out.
Kate Winslet won for Best Actress, and good for that. Many of us are convinced that this award is really for her work in Revolutionary Road, which is a far, far better film than The Reader.
Slumdog Millionaire‘s Danny Boyle won the Best Director Oscar. There was a realistic choice?
Penelope Cruz won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. As expected and predicted by everyone in the world except for David Carr, a.k.a., “the Bagger,” who wrote that the great Viola Davis (Doubt) would take it. It would have been great indeed if she had, but Davis got a serious career bump and that’s what counts.
The opening number aside, I wasn’t getting a lot of personality from the show in the early stages. It felt a little like the Tony’s, a little bit like the Broadcast Film Critics People’s Choice Awards, a little bit like the WGA Awards, a little bit like the 1937 Oscar Awards, etc. It moved along quickly enough but…well, there’s no winning, is there? It looked good all through, I felt a distinct lack of jolt and nerve.
The opener was okay. Hugh Jackman was relaxed and into it as far as it went. We were all watching an Oscar ceremony at the Ambassador Hotel in 1937. Where’s Fredric March? Jackman sang a bit of a hokey medley song, okay, but the silly-foolish energy appealed. Anne Hathaway, I felt, did herself proud. Chummy, loose, felt fine.
Departures, reportedly a nice, good-enough drama, shocked much of the civilized world (with the exception of Kris Tapley, who predicted that it might win) by taking the Best Foreign Language Oscar. Israel is weeping and stamping its feet over the loss suffered by Waltz With Bashir, which is incontestably one of the most original and searing films of the year.
Kim Ledger, Kate Ledger and Sally Bell accepting Heath’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
It’s a crime that this happened. Those infuriating foreign language people! To go by Tapley’s recent description, Departures is a kind of Japanese Salieri film. Decent, heartfelt, respectable — and not even close to Bashir‘s calibre.
A sense of boredom was manifest due to the predictability. Every award except for Best Actor and Best Foreign Language feature fell right into line.
Ben Stiller‘s Joaquin Pheonix routine was, for me, quite funny. The first time I laughed out loud as opposed to chortling or chuckling or just smiling.
Slumdog Millionaire‘s A.R. Rahman won — not very surprisingly, almost disappointingly — the Best Musical Score Oscar. Rahman’s “Jai Ho” also won the Best Song Oscar.
The Best Original Screenplay Oscar went to Dustin Lance Black for political reasons. Politics and political point- making as it affects the here-and-now — particularly the bruising that was Prop 8 — always matters. Black’s thank you was eloquent and very emotional. “Thank God for giving us Harvey Milk.”
The first Benjamin Button tech Oscar was for Best Art Direction. The Costume Design Oscar always goes to the movie set in a ruffly and exotic time period, so naturally the winner was the 18th Century The Duchess. Button has also won the Best Makeup Oscar.
Slumdog Millionaire‘s Anthony Dod Mantle won the Best Cinematography Oscar…naturally.
Congratulations to Toyland for winning the Best Live-Action Short Oscar.
The Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar went to Slumdog Millionaire‘s Simon Beaufoy as an expression of the general sweep mentality surrounding and supporting this film.
“The man who wrote that is now dead…every blank page was once a tree.” Steve Martin‘s Oscar podium material (which I presume he’s written himself) always plays better than the material in his films.
Andrew Stanton‘s WALL*E won the Best Animated Feature Oscar…shocker. Kumio Kato‘s La Maison en Petits Cubes has won the Best Animated Short.
The Dark Knight‘s Heath Ledger, of course, took the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Ledger’s dad, mom and sister accepted. “An original and enduring legacy” indeed. A feeling of sadness, solemnity, finality. “On behalf of your beautiful Matilda….thank you.”
Bill Maher‘s introductory remarks for the awarding of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar contained, naturally, a slight plug for Religulous . The Oscar, of course, was won by Man on Wire and director James Marsh. Phillipe Petit ‘s coin trick and Oscar nose-balancing was exquisite. And congratulations to Megan Mylan and Smile Pinki for winning Best Doc Short.
Visual Effects Oscar went to Benjamin Button. Naturally.
The Dark Knight‘s Richard King took the Best Sound Editing Oscar. And the Best Sound Mixing Oscar went to the sweeping Slumdog.
Jerry Lewis accepted his Oscar with dignity, brevity, graciousness. Not a trace of snip or caustic wit, even. Short and sweet, in and out, thank you from the bottom of my heart, etc.
“Man! Man on the street is never easy but lemme tell ya. Gettting people to admit they’re going to watch the Oscars, have opinions on them? Tough sleddin’ out here. Good luck with the ratings, guys. It’s dark out here. It’s been ‘no’ after ‘no’ after ‘no’.” — from David Carr‘s final video report from 42nd Street, posted two days ago.
There’s something I’ve learned in all my years of banging out columns. The less you have to write about, the more personal and engaging the copy tends to be. (Mostly.) Which is why I love David Carr”s Oscar season jottings. Most or much of the time he’s not writing about much. Gut feelings, intuitions, moods, what ifs, why nots, hairs on the back of his neck, lower-back scratchings and so on. And he’s really good at it. Got that, Timothy Noah, a.k.a. “Mr. Chatterbox”?
Speaking of funny, nobody’s more hilarious than N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr (a.a.a, “the Bagger”) when he gets a good grump on. From a posting earlier today:
“This is the Bagger’s fourth season at Kudo Camp and he has never seen such a lack of oxygen. The lack of a best-picture throwdown, combined with a class of nominees that don’t have huge traction at the box office, means that we are spending a fair amount of time talking to ourselves. While doing man on the street interviews in Times Square earlier this week, the Bagger discovered that many people thought they might have already taken place.
“Sasha Stone, a bit of den mother in the Ninny Kingdom, lavishes praise on all five films this year, but then finishes with this: ‘The five Best Pictures this year, admittedly, are nothing to write home about, meaning, none of them will really set the world on fire in ten year’s time.’
“Gee. Kind of interrupts the seance about excellence a bit.
“The Biggest Movie Event of the Year, so far, seems like a little bit of a non-event. C’mon people, careers are at stake, there is studio loot on the line, bloggers are getting tired of capping on each other for attention. It’s time to snap to and start paying attention or we just might have to…um, oh, never mind.”
Because N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger”) managed to get only six people to talk to him about the Oscars during a 90-minute troll around Times Square, he’s taken this to mean that the economically besieged Everyman is almost angrily dis-engaged from it all, in part, obviously, because the nominated films haven’t connected in a big way (i.e., no Best Picture noms or Dark Knight or WALL*E), and therefore…no, he;s not saying the Oscar ratings are going to be totally toileted. But indications are, he reports, that “if people are going to tune into this year’s Oscars, they haven’t made their plans yet.”
What happened to the old adage about people traditionally being keen to escape into fantasy reveries during tough economic times? What about the old example from the 1930s about the movie business being recession- or, more to the point, depression-proof? As Carr reports, the Grammy show ratings “perked up this year” and that “people are still going to the movies” with “admissions…up nearly 8 percent this year.” Nonetheless, he warns, “It’s going to take a lot more than a little song and dance from Hugh Jackman to bring home the Nielsen bacon.
“Those of us who live in the Oscar Ninny kingdom might have missed something. While we were all debating the whole Mickey vs. Sean thing, the rest of America has been out there living life on life’s terms, which has not been a pleasant endeavor of late.” Perhaps because deep down, he suggests, it’s “hard to get past a president shouting we are all about to go over the waterfall if something isn’t done soon.”
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