…to run this during Phase One or phase Two.

Yesterday N.Y. Times Hollywood correspondent Brooks Barnes posted a piece that echoed what Barnes claimed is the general morning-after industry view about Green Book having won the Best Picture Oscar, that it was nothing less a social-political tragedy — a mortifying act that angered, outraged and depressed not just Spike Lee but everyone in town, including the mail-room guys.

I knew this was a bullshit take from the get-go, but Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone put her objections into words faster than I. This morning Sasha forwarded a draft of a letter that she’d sent to the Times, and I suggested…I don’t know, three or four edits. Sasha gave me permission to post it here, but wants it understood that the use of certain explicit terms (“too white, vaguely racist”) was my idea, not hers. It’s a smart, well-reasoned response — please read:

“It’s disappointing that the Times did not offer more balanced coverage of Oscar night than what is contained in Brooks Barnes’ 2.25 article (“In Green Book, Oscar Critics See An Old Hollywood Tale“). It is misleading, on one hand, to point to a small but loud group of people protesting the film’s win but not, on the other, to report how popular Green Book was across the board.

“Two years ago, La La Land’s momentum was slowed because of politically correct protests online. (It was inauthentic, they claimed, for a white guy to be a jazz buff.) The Best Picture Oscar went to Moonlight. The following year, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was met with protests over its rural insular whiteness. It, too, was derailed — The Shape of Water won. This year Green Book was repeatedly assaulted for being old-fashioned, too white and even vaguely racist.

But this time the protests didn’t work. This may reflect an exhaustion with the hive mind continually pushing the red button of alarm.

“Green Book won the Toronto Audience Award in September, beating Roma, A Star is Born and every other film that played there. Green Book also defeated BlacKkKlansman, Black Panther, Roma, Bohemian Rhapsody and The Favourite at the Producers Guild of America Awards. It triumphed at the Golden Globes as well. If you ask me that show’s broad support counters your headline, and the narrative going forward.

“The fact is that for a film to win on a preferential ballot, as Green Book did at both the Producers Guild and the Oscars, it had to have broad support across all markers. That meant it could not have won with just ‘old white guys.’ Moreover, if ‘old white guys’ led that vote, how do you explain the unprecedented array of diversity and inclusion in the other categories?

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Author and Vulture columnist Mark Harris is generally a temperate, perceptive, well-phrased Twitter fellow. His posts are usually on the sensible, carefully measured side.

But let’s also call a spade a spade: Harris has been fully in league with the SJW Stalinist scolds who attacked Green Book all through the ’18 and ’19 Oscar season.

Last night Harris blew a kind of gasket after David Poland let him have it between the eyes (“So angry…so much the victim…and so willing to assume the arrogance of others”), and particularly over Harris’s irritation over the liberal use of the term “virtue signaller.” I enjoyed the rancor — good stuff.

Mark Harris (‪@MarkHarrisNYC‬) / 2/25/19, 7:25 AM:

“Re-sharing the Oscars piece I wrote for Vulture right after last night’s show. Click on it to see the much darker second half of that headline! (https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/the-oscars-made-progress-this-year.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1)”

Mark Harris (‪@MarkHarrisNYC‬) / 2/25/19, 7:31 AM:

“I’ll add: Since criticizing Green Book I’ve been called a Stalinist, a fake white woke liberal, a virtue signaller, all the usual nonsense. But not one person has said to me ‘It’s the year’s best movie.’ For a lot of them, it’s not about loving GB but about hating its critics.”

Wells to Harris insert: Correct!

Mark Harris (‪@MarkHarrisNYC‬) / 2/25/19, 4:10 PM:

“Okay, I REALLY will let this go after today, but this “virtue signaler” shit is snapping me. No, you superannuated Bill Maher fetishists. Every white person to the left of you on any issue of race, culture, and/or representative is not performatively faking it for the crowd.”

Mark Harris (‪@MarkHarrisNYC‬) / 2/25/19, 4:13 PM

“And when you talk that way — when you reveal that you can’t tolerate a political/cultural disagreement about a film without parroting ad hominem horseshit — you expose yourself as a fragile mewling whiner terrified that your view of the world isn’t permanently chiseled into law.”

Mark Harris (‪@MarkHarrisNYC‬) / 2/25/19, 4:15 PM

“This has been a loud subtweet of literally everyone who drops this particular log and than acts like they hatched an original manifesto and are now clearing shelf space for a Pulitzer. And with that, I will go rearrange myself and come back a pleasanter and more cheerful person.”

David Poland (‪@DavidPoland‬) / 2/25/19, 6:36 PM:

“Honestly, Mark — those 3 tweets seem an honest assessment of how you judge others who disagree with you in the details of your politics. So angry. So much the victim. And so willing to assume the arrogance of others. I don’t know if it’s fixable. But I feel like you defined it.”

Mark Harris (‪@MarkHarrisNYC‬) / 2/25/19, 6:52 PM

“We’re done now, David. Best of luck to you.”

David Poland (‪@DavidPoland‬) / 2/25/19, 6:55 PM

“Wow.”

At the end of the third paragraph in Michael Schulman‘s New Yorker piece about attending the Oscars (“An Oscars-Night Diary,” 2.25), the author speaks “to an Oscars attendee from Eastern Europe” (presumably Cold War director Pawel Pawlikowski or somebody on his team) at the Vanity Fair after-party. Schulman asks for a summary of the just-concluded telecast.

“It was all either corporate spin or political correctness,” the Eastern European fellow replies. “Everybody said what they were expected to say. It was very Soviet.”

Last night’s death-reel sequence ran 4:21, but the cavalcade of faces only lasted for 3:29. It began with Susan Anspach at the 24-second mark and ended with Albert Finney at 3:43. The Academy had a little less than a minute’s worth of wiggle room. They surely could have fit in the great Stanley Donen, who passed the day before yesterday.

I know enough about editing and re-editing a video piece that adding a single visual element isn’t a big deal these days. If they had wanted to include Donen, they could have done it. They were lazy, plain and simple.

And while they were at it, they could have included Andy Vajna, Gary Kurtz and R. Lee Ermey. I understand about omitting Carol Channing — she was a Broadway gal.

In the eyes of history, the SJW toxics (or, if you will, the virtue-signalling Stalinists) lost last night. Their bullshit is evaporating into vapor as we speak. They can stomp and whine and punch the refrigerator all they want, but Green Book took all their slings and arrows and won the Oscar anyway.

But before we put this stinking battle to bed, a final word from Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, who liked Green Book as much as I did and lamented the relentless p.c. putdowns:

“Set in 1962, Green Book is a feel-good liberal buddy movie that’s like a cross between Driving Miss Daisy and Rain Man, and 20 years ago it would have been a slam-dunk Oscar triumph.

“But it came up against a newly purist and progressive mindset, one that said, in essence: If you take a white character’s struggle and make it the moral/spiritual ‘equivalent’ of a black character’s struggle, you’ll be saying that the pain of the oppressor is equal to the pain of the oppressed — and that, in itself, is a racist lie.

“As someone who believes that Green Book is a powerful, moving, and emotionally complex film, I’d push back against that argument by saying: The movie isn’t equating the experience of black oppression and white blindness. It’s saying that they co-exist in the world — and that for the purposes of this movie, it will give them equal screen time.

“My point here is not to re-fight that fight; it’s simply to say that Green Book is a film that got transfigured in the culture. It started off as unabashed liberal comfort food; it ended up as a movie that divided as much as it united. It became a political hot potato, and so voting for it wasn’t simply like pulling the lever for Driving Miss Daisy or Rain Man — for the kind of intimate and uplifting relationship-of-opposites heart-tugger that has often triumphed at the Oscars. Voting for it became, at least for some Academy members, a political act in a different way: a knowing defense of what’s left of the Hollywood status quo. It became a rebellion against the rebellion.

“You could say, of course, that the victory of Green Book came down to one elemental thing: A lot of people in the Academy really loved Green Book. Fair enough. But my point is that its win last night still played as an upset, as the triumph of the underdog.

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“Without a host to guide the writers’ room, the banter doled out to presenters can feel a bit aimless. Trust Awkwafina and John Mulaney to make so much of their time presenting two short films that viewers at home were surely asking, ‘Why didn’t they host?’ From the nerves they cutely faked to the surprise they evidenced when, yes, they got to present a second category, let this be considered their audition tape for next year.” — N.Y. Times “carpetbagger” Kyle Buchanan in a 2.25 “Oscar’s Best & Worst Moments” piece.

In the view of writer Joelle Monique, Green Book had to be racist because it was made by white guys. The fact that Mahershala Ali was easily as much of a strong collaborator as director Peter Farrelly cuts no ice with her. She’s basically saying that no matter how you slice it, “dominant white guy input” guarantees racism, or certainly a lack of a fair perspective.

Which is another way of saying, in a broader sense, that in any realm white-guy dominance can come to no good end because white culture has been historically incapable of fairness or justice, and is not likely to change its spots. There is abundant truth in that viewpoint, but on the other hand what are amiable, well-educated white guys supposed to do?

The basic idea is that even well-educated, urban-residing fair-skinned folks who wear Bruno Magli lace-ups are fundamentally bad news no matter what. Maybe so. Hollywood Elsewhere regrets its whiteness as well as the unfortunate genetic inheritance that I was sadly cursed with when I took my first breath.

On the other hand I yam what I yam. I’m a curious, well-educated, fairly liberal dude…world’s full of guys like me. I say “please” and “thank you” all the time. I observe traffic laws and have good taste in music, and I watch TV with headphones when it gets late. I’m not going to kill myself anytime soon, and I’m going to work hard and try to be fair with everyone I run into. And if that’s not good enough for certain parties, tough.

There’s no questioning the oft-shared observation that Green Book, winner of the 2019 Best Picture Oscar, is less than Olympian in certain respects. It’s no one’s idea of a complex film, and it’s a long way from classic arthouse fare. It’s a smoothly assembled, well-acted period dramedy that’s based on a true story — a 1962 road trip that actually happened, and which is based on first-hand recollections of the men who shared this experience — the late Don Shirley and “Tony Lip” Vallalonga.

It’s a parent-child relationship film that’s mainly about the child (Viggo Mortensen‘s under-educated goombah chauffeur) finding it within himself to take a couple of steps toward even-handed adulthood and compassion. That’s all it is — nothing more.

Director Peter Farrelly and his collaborators went after a certain chemistry, a certain mood. It delivers a genuine feel-good vibe — one that I felt in my gut when I first saw it last September in Toronto — and although it was clearly made in a familiar, carefully measured, commercially calculating sort of way, Green Book deals honest, upfront cards. The stellar lead performances by Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen close the sale.

Alas, the p.c. left tried to kill Green Book over and over. Ask anyone in the Oscar-strategizing business — it was one of the ugliest attempted takedown campaigns in Hollywood history.

But Academy members, to their eternal credit, told the haters to stuff it. It’s not that I think Green Book is an especially brilliant or mesmerizimg film, or that it delivers a profoundly meaningful subcurrent or after-vibe or what-have-you, but the tears of joy that came to my eyes when it won are about the glorious decision by Academy voters to tell the Stalinist lefties and p.c. virtue–signallers to go fuck themselves…that they like or love what Green Book is about and how it made them feel, and to hell with the snooties.

For this reason alone this is a very happy night for Hollywood Elsewhere. The Academy flipped the bird to the haters, and that, to me, is a fairly wonderful thing.

For the record: Yesterday Tatyana predicted with absolute confidence that Green Book would take the Best Picture Oscar. She has a pretty good track record, so I just thought I’d mention this.

She also told me months ago that Cold War, which she loves, will never win the Best Foreign Language Oscar. Because, she said, “Americans are unable to understand what it was like to live under Communism, and the fear that ruled the lives of the two lovers (played by Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot) and penetrated their psyches. Cold War was a huge success with the European Film Awards voters (Best Picture, Director, Actress, et. al.) but not as much over here. Kulig’s character, Zula, is fueled by passion but deep down is a Slavic woman, a woman who wants to feel protected by her male partner. As much as she’s chemically attracted to Kot’s musician character, he didn’t make her feel this way.”

That “Green Book” wins best picture #Oscars like … pic.twitter.com/vCoOEysNLY

— It’s Mueller Time (@BookHookah) February 25, 2019