The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil has complained that last night’s Oscar winners were the darkest and creepiest ever. “Six [Oscars] went to pix about a wacko serial killer (No Country) or a psycho oil baron with murder on his mind (There Will Be Blood). Together they won picture, director, adapted screenplay, actor and supporting actor.
“The other two categories went to, well, somewhat lighter fare: a film about a drug-addicted chanteuse (La Vie en Rose) and a pregnant teen with a bad ‘tude (Juno).”
O’Neil was also on the Bill O’Reilly Radio Factor discussion during an Oscars segment that asked “what do the Academy Awards’ winners and losers tell us about our culture?” A reader wrote during the broadcast that O’Neil was “foaming at the mouth playing up the Heartland vs. Hollywood routine…going after the Academy for picking ‘avant-garde’ choices to antagonize all the soccer moms and farmers in the fly-over states…trashing ‘leftist’ Jon Stewart, trashing Obama and celebrities who act political…[claiming] he mourns for the days of Bob Hope.”
O’Neil says that O’Reillly started the conversation and “all I was doing was bolstering his points.”
He added that he thinks that Stewart “is the worst host ever…the Neilsen ratings were the absolute lowest in history….they should have someone in the family host it…Jim Carrey, George Clooney…not some New York comic like Stewart or David Letterman or Chris Rock.”

An hour ago I heard the best explanation (or at least the best partial explanation) as to why the Julie Christie momentum bandwagon stalled and gave way to Marion Cotillard‘s winning the Best Actress Oscar. (And I’m not getting into this topic as a complaint — I’ve long worshipped Cotillard’s La Vie en Rose performance as Edith Piaf.) I’ll give the person who told me credit for this when I hear from him and he says it’s cool, but until then here it is non-attributed.
Cotillard beat Christie because young actresses almost always beat older actresses in the Best Actress race. One reason this happens, it is believed, is because of the male geezer vote, which always responds to the sexual allure element. This is precisely how the guy put it: “They vote with their dicks, the geezers.”
The big exception to the rule was Helen Mirren winning last year for The Queen, but remember how she said saucy things all through the campaign, reminding everyone that she was a woman with a considerable sexual appetite and so on, posing for those hot-mama magazine covers. You can’t tell me that didn’t boost her vote tally.
I think it’s fair to speculate that Diablo Cody may have won also because of the old-geezer vote. I know that Lorenzo Semple, Jr., said in one of his “Real Geezer” confessions (it’s either in segment #1 or segment #2) that Cody’s stripper background was a decisive factor in his voting for her.

This is it, the absolute ethical nadir of the Hillary Clinton campaign so far. To my mind sending out that 2006 photo of Barack Obama dressed in Somali garb during a visit to that country is scummy and reprehensible almost beyond measure. It is a a classic race-baiting tactic obviously aimed at latently racist rubes from Texas and Ohio who say they’re still on the fence.
Reacting to a headline on the Drudge Report (still up as I write this) claiming that aides to Senator Clinton had e-mailed the photo to reporters and editors, Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe accused the Clinton team of “shameful offensive fear-mongering” with what is obviously an “attempted smear” that is seeking to inflame racial consciousness among those possibly pre-disposed to black-vs.-white thinking. This even outdoes what Bill Clinton tried to do in the lead-up to (and just after) the South Carolina primary.
Equally disgusting is a statement from Clinton campaign honcho Maggie Williams saying that “if Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed….Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely…this is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry.”
A statement like that coming from a woman of color should be enough to make anyone of any ethical conscience physically sick. The mentality behind the mailing of the photo is demonic in itself, but to try and lie your way out of it by saying the Obama campaign should be “ashamed”? Remember the name — Maggie Williams — and keep this in mind when she comes calling in months and years hence. For she is a liar, and the father of it. And she will have this statement hanging around her neck for the rest of her life.

A friend from Boston wrote this morning to say that she “didn’t see a single one of the nominated movies this year. The only one in the whole bunch that I saw was Once, and it was fun to see them win best song. A lot of people I talked to only saw Juno and none of the others. What percentage of people do you think are like me and didn’t see any of those movies?

“Too many seem to have too much violence, too many downer stories. We want to see something uplifting. I love Tilda Swinton but I have no desire to see Michael Clayton. Away From Her, too depressing. Other people who saw Atonement said the same thing I did — they couldn’t get invested in the characters.”
I answered that what she’s feeling is valid to some extent, but “movies are not supposed to be pills that you take to feel better. They’re not travelling carnivals with elephants and jugglers. They’re supposed to be aesthetic journeys and emotional hikes that get us in touch with things that too many of us tend to push away (or anesthetize ourselves from) in our day to day. They’re supposed to be compressions and condensations that create indelible moments, insights and excavations into our collective soul.
“We’re only here for 80 or 90 years, we need to figure some stuff out before we pass on, and good movies are part of the learning-and-realizing process.
“I don’t like downer movies either, but ‘uplift’ can turn rancid in the wrong hands. The bottom line is that 85% to 90% of the time movies looking to provide uplift are awful. I just want movies that are really engaging by virtue of being well made by talented people, and which tell fundamental or hidden truths and generally shed light in this or that way.”
She replied, “What if nobody actually saw all those movies? Isn’t that something you should talk about?”
I’m replying as follows: “These are some of the best movies that the filmmaking culture is turning out now. Every year there are at least 20 or 25 films that are somewhere between excellent, very good or good enough to watch and think about later. If regular people in Boston and Saskatchewan are living such insulated and cut-off lives that they can’t be bothered to go to some of these films unless it has an advertised ‘happy pill’ vibe then the hell with them. They’re children. I have no time for childishness, and neither does anyone else of any worth. Life is short.”

Eleven observations & thoughts from the Oscar telecast (and one from the Spirit Awards), now that I’m catching my breath and have a few moments to tap something out:

(1) Joel and Ethan Coen, good fellows that they are, were a little too modest and self-effacing last night. Their personalities are their personalities, and that’s fine. But they’re clever writers with things on their minds, and for their acceptance speeches they could have written something that might have cut through to the marrow or acknowledged something other than the state of winning. Anything that might have made people say, “Wow…good words.” But their attitude seemed to be “okay, we have to do this so let’s be gracious…it’ll all be over tomorrow morning and then we can get back to work.”
(2) Somehow the actual vote tallies have to be revealed some day. I’m told that the specific vote counts are kept for seven years and then flushed down the toilet. For years prior that find one of the old Price-Waterhouse guys and get him to open up. It would make it so much more fascinating to know how close this and that vote was. A legendary book it would be. (I hate sounding like fucking Yoda but sometimes that’s the best way to say things.)
(3) Roy Scheider died two weeks ago (2.10.08) — obviously plenty of time to slip him into the death montage. Any YouTube kid with editing software could have put his photo into the existing montage that showed last night . Why don’t those who handle this presentation keep themselves open to last-minute passings? They’re so ’90s! There’s no technological reason not to do this. And why was Brad Renfro blown off?

(4) Cheers again to Colin Farrell if it’s true he was the one who urged the producers to let Marketa Irglova back on stage to say a few words about having won the Best Song Oscar (along with Glen Hansard) for “Falling Slowly.” Marketa’s remarks, Glen’s thank-you and Javier Bardem speaking to his mom in Spanish were the three best moments of the night.
(5) I was a Marion Cotillard supporter going back to February ’07 but over the last several weeks I detached and started drinking the Julie Christie kool-aid, believing those reports that the over-65 Academy crowd wants to give her a kind of career-recap nostalgia Oscar. Now I’m slightly ashamed that I didn’t stay more loyal to Cotillard. (I recently described her as a personal Best Actress favorite who’d seemingly been overtaken.) I also passed along a late-wave observation from Pete Hammond that “the seeds of her grass-roots campaign [may have] taken root.” Who were the tea-leaf readers and friends of older Academy members who claimed Christie had the heat? Maybe the winning Cotillard margin was razor-thin, but the Christie crowd needs to come forward and own up and explain why it went the way it went.
(6) Jon Stewart‘s tuxedo pants were way too baggy. They looked like grand poobah black-silk pajamas that Julian Schnabel might wear. Anyone who’s halfway hip knows that suit and tuxedo pants are cut fairly trim and tight now. Stewart’s hip-guy factor dropped because of this. In this one respect he caused himself to look slightly clueless up there. He needs to find himself a new gay tailor.

(7) I loved Stewart’s joke about not believing Vanity Fair’s claim that they cancelled their party out of support and respect for the then-striking writers. And the follow-up: “If Vanity Fair wants to show respect to the writers, next year they could invite some of the writers to the Vanity Fair party.” And his noting that Away From Her, a movie about a woman who forgets her own husband, has been called “the feel-good movie of the year” by Hillary Clinton.
(8) It was so heartening that Transformers won absolutely dead fucking nothing. Simply wonderful.
(9) I wish I’d seen the red-carpet bit when Regis Philbin saying to George Clooney that “everyone in this town wanted to be Cary Grant, and now they want to be George Clooney” and Clooney replying, “That’s because he’s dead.”
(10) I need to find out today what happened with Charles Ferguson‘s presumably favored No End in Sight not winning the Best Feature Documentary, and Alex Gibney‘s Taxi to the Dark Side taking it instead. Some sort of brilliant strategic end-move by Thinkfilm (which had the Gibney as well as War/Dance on its plate) that I’d like to hear about.
(11) The best moment inside the big Spirit Awards tent on Saturday was when the rain started to really come down. The pelting sound suddenly got louder, the heavy-plastic top began to ripple and billow, and people nearby began to look around and look at each other with very faint “uh-oh” expressions. (A woman in her 20s sitting next to L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas — presumably his date — was especially animated in this respect.) There was something affecting about God and nature expressing something basic and real outside that was indifferent to the goings-on inside. It was good for the soul..

Variety critic Robert Koehler wrote a while back to ask if Marion Cotillard‘s Best Actress win is a first for a French actress or not. Is it? Koehler believes either way that it’s the first time that the same actress has won the French (i.e., Cesar) and American Oscars in this category.

Joel and Ethan Coen have won the Best Director Oscar for No Country for Old Men. Appropriately. Modest, thankful, self-effacing. Loved Frances McDormand‘s “yeah, yeah!” expression as they walk off stage.
And here’s a shaved-head Denzel Washington (for what role?) handing out the Best Picture Oscar for No Country for Old Men. No Clayton or Juno surprises. All according to general expectations. This is producer Scott Rudin‘s moment, all right. A happy man, “thank you so much.” And it’s over, dude. Three hours, 17 minutes.
I missed the opening monologue. Watching it now on replay. Best line: “If Vanity Fair wants to show respect to the writers, next year they could invite some of the writers to the Vanity Fair party.” And the withdrawing-the-Iraq-movies line is pretty good.

It can’t not be Daniel Day Lewis for Best Actor. No disputes or challenges (except from Tom O’Neil). And the Oscar goes to DDL, who kneels before Helen Mirren, the presenter, as he arrives at the podium. “This sprang like a golden sapling out of the mad beautiful head of Paul Thomas Anderson,” he says. “Thank you, Paul.”

Diablo Cody‘s win for her Best Original Juno Screenplay was mostly expected. A moving moment because she dropped whatever it is she’s been carrying around for the last few months. She mentioned her parents, teared up, delivered. Good for her. Eight to ten years of fat checks — originals, adaptations, punch-ups — are all but assured.

The winner of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar is a surprise. All along I was hearing No End in Sight, No End in Sight, No End in Sight. Hooray for Alex Gibney‘s Taxi to Dark Side, which won, but it’s a surprise is all. Nobody I know called this. That I can think of.

The Best Original Score Oscar should go to Atonement…and it does!

The Oscar for Best Cinematography ( a word that Cameron Diaz can barely pronounce) goes to There Will Be Blood‘s Robert Elswit. This is a surprise. I’m sorry, but the cinematography of Roger Deakins in The Assassination of Jesse James loses? On top of his work in No Country? That doesn’t feel right. At all. I loved Elswit’s work but…I don’t know. Conflicted.