“One of the dirty secrets of this time of year is that the money that is spent on the Oscars — hundreds of millions of dollars on television and trade ads, parties, and shipping DVDs to academy members — can never be recouped even by the most spectacular post-awards bounce. None of last year’s contenders surpassed the $100 million mark in domestic box office. All that money is, in part, the price tag on ego — of making sure that the captains of this industry have something in the trophy case when all is said and done.” — from David Carr‘s 2.12.07 N.Y. Times piece about Oscar credit skirmishes.
“And then the Best Picture category was announced: Babel, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, he Queen and Letters From Iwo Jima. Wait…are they nominating six [films] this year? The hundreds of reporters in the [Academy] auditorium were leaning heads together, making sure that they did not hear the name Dreamgirls.
They did not.” — from David Carr‘s Oscar nomination piece in the N.Y. Times.
“Independent bloggers can laugh all they want about the imperious posture of the mainstream media, but I and others at the N.Y.Times have never been more in touch with readers’ every robustly communicated whim than we are today. Not only do I hear what people are saying, but I also care.
“Sometimes I wonder whether I care to the point that I neglect other things, like, oh, my job. Tweaking the blog is seductive in a way that a print deadline never is. By the time I am done posting entries, moderating comments and making links, my, has the time flown. I probably should have made some phone calls about next week’s column, but maybe I’ll write about, ah, blogging instead.” — from David Carr‘s weekly N.Y. Times media column (1.15), this one titled “24-Hour Newspaper People.”
I doubt if former Paramount Pictures president Gail Berman had anything to do or say about the Dreamgirls Oscar campaign — Terry Press, Nancy Kirpatrick and Gerry Rich are calling the shots, no? — so I’m not sure I grasp the linkage that N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) wrote about this morning when he wondered “if the slow erosion of Dreamgirls leadership in the race to Oscar has anything to do with [Berman’s departure].” But the mere fact that Carr is talking about the Dreamgirls bandwagon losing steam caught my attention nonetheless.
“Dreamgirls had a limited opening and then was expected to explode its way to huge audiences and major awards,” he’s written. “Some silly bloggers took the bait, and while the movie is doing fine, it’s not breaking down the doors. In fact, over the past few weeks, there has been far more talk about the other big D, The Departed, than Dreamgirls.
“Oscars can break careers as well as make them and there continues to be a perception that Ms. Berman and others misplayed a big lead. Others point out that with all-black cast, Broadway-musical DNA and stiff competition from a star-studded cast in The Departed, it was always going to be a dogfight.”
Does this mean Carr will be denied entrance to the Dreamgirls Golden Globes party? Does this mean a couple of goons will walk up to him when he steps out of his Los Angeles hotel during his next visit and say, “Hey, buddy, got a match?” and then whoomph and lights out?
While trashing the intramural industry attitudes of some of the Left Coasters who’ve dissed David Denby‘s New Yorker piece about Hollywood ‘s digital future while at the same time (almost in the same breath) allowing that Denby’s piece “isn’t that good,” N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr (a.k.as., the Bagger) offers some interesting side-sights:
#1: “Denby’s story is just more Chicken Little hollering about the same old pieces of the sky. iPods, downloads, home theaters — all of them represent additional programming space for an industry that can’t find a place to land a movie that is not based on an ancient sitcom or comic book character. The studios are so busy putting up tents that they haven’t noticed that the ground is shifting under their feet.”
#2: “Meanwhile, a new, if still-nascent, industry, one that will bypass traditional tastemakers and marketers, is growing up of its own accord. And that is a far more interesting story than the blundering of the studios. Digital in, digital out, to be consumed at a time and place and on a device of one’s own choosing. Consu- mer-driven choice, the ultimate capitalist algorithm, will tunnel beneath the studio system.”
#3: “Why is Hollywood so stuck, given that they make a product we can’t resist and the world continues to ingest in spite of our country’s tattered global image? Hollywood is a fundamentally conservative industry. The seven sisters are The Blob that ingests everything — talent, innovation, enterprise. They not only don’t enable innovation, they eat it in hopes it will go away. Anything that comes over the hill is worth shooting at and if doesn’t die, it is ignored.”
#4: “Remember when VCR’s were going to gut the industry? They spun film libraries into gold instead. It was lucrative enough that Sony was able to buy the software — a studio no less — to go with the hardware. And DVD’s, another shot straight to the heart, now serves as the product after the trailers — that blockbuster opener — has come and gone.
#5: “The studios generally treat people with new ideas the way China does, by parking them in padded cells. Mel Gibson gets tagged as a nutter when he taps into a massive Christian market, while Mark Cuban is judged to be an Antichrist when he suggests alternative means of distribution. Audiences, of course, want plain English, the dumber the better, but the impact of films where dialect is rendered in text — Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima and Volver, to mention a few — suggests an increasing consumer openness to a combination of image, text, and sound.”
“Because President Bush declared Tuesday a national day of mourning [because of ex-President Gerald Ford‘s passing], the United States Postal Service did not deliver mail. No big deal right? Except that yesterday was the deadline for ballots to be returned to the Producer’s Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild for their respective film awards. And those Oscar screeners that were coming out at the end of the year spent a day somewhere deep in the bowels of the postal system.” — N.Y. Times guy David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) on the fretting and running around that happened as a result.
Here’s an upbeat (i.e., not cynical enough) but nonetheless cogent analysis of the Golden Globe nominations by N.Y. Times Oscar guy David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger”).
Basic conclusions: (a) Babel is back in the game, although the HFPA’s international constitution was undoubtedly a factor in its susceptibility to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s “big, complicated movie…[which] some critics felt required too much assembly on the part of the audience”; (b) In Contention‘s Kris Tapley “gets the smartypants award for correctly guessing that the HFPA would not be able to resist the star quotient in Bobby; and (c) “One thing seems perfectly clear — things aren√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t perfectly clear.”
This last line takes me back to Bill Duke‘s response to Terrence Stamp‘s rambling confessional monologue in Steven Soderbergh and Lem Dobbs‘ The Limey: “There’s one thing I don’t get. The thing I don’t get is, every motherfuckin’ word you’re sayin’.” Okay, it’s not the same thought…but it’s funnier.
If I were a N.Y. Times media columnist with a vanquished drug problem in my past, I’d probably leave well enough alone. It appears that David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) is made of sterner stuff. He has my respect and interest in what he comes up with.
I liked David Poland’s comparing the various Oscar bloggers to early ’60s Rat Pack members (Pete Hammond is Sammy Davis, Jr., David Carr is Dean Martin, I’m Bing Crosby, et. al.), but boy, is he wrong when he says the Oscar race “is a horse race” and “there is no Secretariat this year” and that “anything can happen.” I know it’s more fun to pretend the ball is still in the air, but that sad little flick about them cowboys jes poke-poke-pokin’ along has the Best Picture Oscar all but roped and tied, and for two reasons above and beyond the reviews and the critics awards and the guilds: (1) when sizable numbers of Average Joe’s in red-state areas went to see it last weekend, thus proving it’s not just a blue-state, big-city film, and (2) when the gentlemanly Larry Miller took it off the marquee in his megaplex in Sandy, Utah, it suddenly became The Movie That Got Shut Down by Red-State Bigotry, which of course gives a whole ‘nother dimen- sion. Now if you vote for ole Brokeback you’re socking it to Miller and his fat-cat cronies from Utah…yee-haw!
It’s evident why David Poland would be miffed at Patrick Goldstein’s just-up column about Oscar bloggers (“Making Oscars a mule race”), but I’m not going to squawk about Goldstein calling me “the Lewis Black of Oscar bloggers.” Plus he compounded whatever impact my anti-Memoirs of a Geisha views may have on the local populace by imprinting my words on wads of actual lumber-mill paper, which, for some people over the age of 45 or so, carries a certain legitmacy that cyber copy lacks. I have to say that I agree with Poland in his dispute with Goldstein over which acronym applies in the matter of a deminishing media enterprise. Goldstein describes himself and the L.A. Times as representatives of MSM (i.e., mainstream media) while Poland refers to the same as OM (i.e., old media). Either way, the notion that you need to hold finger-smudging newsprint in your hands in order to read something of consequence is totally out the window as far as the under-35s are concerned.
Last posted on 7.10.20, originally posted on 12.8.06: “Not long ago, the Bagger was at a restaurant event with a major film writer and director and ended up in a booth with him for several hours. He admired the man tremendously, [but] did not like his last project. Finally, the subject came up and the Bagger told the truth, after which there was suddenly very little to say.
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Both are gone now. The redoubtable David Carr in actuality (passed on 2.12.15) and Scott because the person he was ten years ago no longer "exists", in a certain sense. Because he went over to the woke side sometime around '19 or '20, and in so doing jettisoned the 2013 version -- a guy I really liked and admired and lament the absence of.
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