The Oscar telecast audience last night was the lowest rated in history. A lousy 32 million viewers tuned in, which is a huge disaster considering that 95.5 million sports fans watched the Super Bowl earlier this month.
This is the way of American culture — more and more followers of competitive games in which men on performance-enhancing drugs try to either hit or take possession of a ball in order to score with it, and fewer and fewer true movie fans. I guess this means…what, ABC might earn a bit less in the way of ad revenues next year? I need to know why I’m supposed to care about this.

I got upset about Roy Scheider being ignored in the Oscar telecast’s death montage (i.e., “in Memoriam”), and Us magazine has gotten riled about Brad Renfro being left out as well. But what about Ulrich Muhe, who gave one of the 21st Century’s greatest performances in The Lives of Others, which is hands down one of the century’s greatest films? He died of stomach cancer last July, and the Academy blew him off also.

An Academy spokesperson told Us that Renfro’s omission was “an editing decision because we can’t fit everyone in…there was no specific reason.” Well, c’mon. The Academy cut Muhe out because he was German and because they tend to think like xenophobes now and then. Ask anyone in this town who cares about movies what they thought about Muhe’s performance in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s film (which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film). One of the film’s more ardent admirers, I read somewhere, is Tom Hanks.
Famed trailer and main-title designer Kyle Cooper (the guy who designed the main-title sequence in Se7en) cut “In Memoriam.” I called his company, Prologue, to ask him about the omissions. He said he didn’t make the choices; Gil Cates’ office did. He was just given a list of names and instructions about who comes first and comes last and that was that. Cates’ assistant said he was out. An Academy spokesperson said the same thing about the p.r. team.

Finally…where has this video been hiding? I first ran something about it 10 days ago or whatever.

“My favorite movie of the year was the one about the heartless con man who’s obsessed with finding oil. Its called No End In Sight.” — Bill Maher on the Huffington Post.

Barack Obama is in front of Hillary Clinton, 56 to 39, in a USA Today national poll. And is beating her 54 to 38 in a N.Y. Times/CBS poll. And edging her 50 to 46 in Texas, according to a CNN poll. (Change from 2.18 poll — Obama up two points, Clinton down four.) And columnist Robert Novak is asking today “who will tell her that it’s over, that she cannot win the presidential nomination and that the sooner she leaves the race, the more it will improve the party’s chances of defeating John McCain in November?”

Due respect, but Tina Fey‘s pro-Hillary bit 36 hours ago on Saturday Night Live was not cool. Not at this stage of the game. Not with Hillary’s latest race-baiting maneuver. She’s now on the HE shit list and will stay there until she writes or directs or appears in a really good film. I’m sure she’ll be fine with this. That said, her riff about how it’s good to be a bitch because they get things done (or a mean nun because they make you learn things) is pretty good stuff.

“Change” is obviously a big theme in the political landscape right now, and there are definite signs over the last couple of years that things have been changing profoundly in terms of Oscar winners also, or more precisely in terms of the makeup of Academy voters. It’s the most interesting thought I’ve heard all day about last night’s show, and it came out of a chat I had a few minutes ago with Pete Hammond. Here it is.

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.”