During a taping with The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil during yesterday’s BAFTA awards brunch on the UCLA campus, I was asked what changes I’d make if I were King of the Oscars and could do absolutely anything. Sensing an opportunity for egregious attitude, I repeated my age-old gripe about the AMPAS’s Oscar voting process being degraded by too many deadwood voters. I said that my first priority would be to take steps to weed them out.

There are, thank God, exceptions to every rule and definition, but the deadwoods, most of whom are 70 or older, tend to measure new films by the aesthetic standards of 30 or 40 years ago (or even farther back in the calendar), and don’t seem to truly absorb and grapple with the “all” of a film as much as process it by the criteria of days past and — I’m trying not to put this too harshly — a certain hardening of the aesthetic arteries.
(Two exceptions would be the Real Geezer costars Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and Marcia Nasatir — a couple of tough nuts who know what they know, feel what they feel and don’t mince words.)
Minutes before I had listened to Pete Hammond talk about how many of the older rank-and-file Academy members may not have even seen the major contenders of ’07 (There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Away From Her, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I’m Not There) because of not wanting to sit through a film they figured would be too violent or complex or depressing due to depictions of paralysis or Alzheimer’s disease. These are people who, according to local legend, will then turn to their friends (who may not have seen the films either for the same reasons) for guidance, or take the word of their staffs or their gardeners or whomever. It’s ridiculous and disrespectful.

AMPAS headquarters on Wilshire Blvd.

So I said, only half-jokingly, that the best way to deal with the deadwoods was to purge them in the way that Josef Stalin used to 86 apparatchiks in the Russian Communist government of the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and early ’50s.
Russian Communism lasted for 74 years and thank goodness it’s gone, but you have to extend a certain grudging respect to the old Russian commies for knowing how to get rid of undesirables. If Uncle Joe wanted a guy gone, his henchmen didn’t mess around. They’d drive the guy out to his dacha in the middle of the night and that would be that. I’m not suggesting that any kind of brutality should be introduced in Academy procedures, but I do feel that the concept of “purging” the members who just don’t get it (and are thereby dragging down the integrity of the Oscars) should be considered. Seriously.
Let’s face it — at a certain point in your autumnal flesh-sagging years you start measuring everything you see and hear by the somewhat romanticized (or at least hazy) memories of your shining youth. You’re not part of the here-and-now the way you used to be, and your likes and dislikes tend to reflect this. Not every person over 70 is a deadwooder (I sure as hell won’t be when I get there), but a certain percentage of this demographic, let’s face it, qualifies.

Moscow’s Red Square

With all due respect, bestowing awards upon great films should not be a Democratic process to the extent that it allows for doddering retirement-home taste buds to play a significant role in the selection process. The deadwoods, keep in mind, are almost certainly the ones who cast the votes that denied Brokeback Mountain the Best Picture Oscar in early ’06.
Find me the director or producer who would honestly say “yes, I want as many septugenarians and octogenarians as possible deciding whether my film deserves a Best Picture Oscar or not.”

The most incisive post-suspension comment on the whole David Shuster/Chelsea Clinton/”pimped out” brouhaha has been written by Cenk Uygur, co-host of “The Young Turks,” and can be found on the Huffington Post.

“Would anyone raise an eyebrow if Bill Maher made the same comment as David Shuster? Would HBO consider suspending him? Not in a million years. His role is clear. Provide funny, irreverent commentary that is often controversial. Shuster can’t say that religion is stupid and full of crap. Maher says it all the time.
“The problem is MSNBC doesn’t know which universe it’s in. Among cable news stations, it’s stuck between Fox News Channel and CNN. They haven’t decided what their identity is. I’m not even sure they realize they have this problem.”
May I interject? Being a huge fan of MSNBC’s nervy attitude and general feistiness, I would be hugely depressed if they made a decision in the wake of the Shuster slapdown to try and become CNN. Back to Uygur…
“Fox lets their hosts say any damn thing they want. And they have said the most damnable things. Bill O’Reilly made fun of homeless vets the other night. The man has never served, supported sending kids to die in Iraq and then laughs at them when they come back and don’t have anywhere to go (he even blames homeless folks for not watching his cable program — they don’t even have homes, let alone cable!). Yet, he is untouchable. Where’s his suspension?

“Fox doesn’t do suspensions. They chalk it up to talk show hosts doing what they do. Of course, they turn around and pretend to be a news organization the next day. But most people have caught on to their scam. And what they do is accepted with a wink and a nod. They’re the folks who can and do say anything at all.
“CNN, on the other hand, is straight news. Wolf Blitzer isn’t going to give you his opinion on a damn thing, if he has one on anything (I secretly believe that Blitzer is a robot). When is the last time Anderson Cooper said anything interesting? How about Paula Zahn? Right, they moved her out because they told her to not give her opinions and then were pissed when she lost in the ratings game to people who do — and then hired someone else to do the same exact thing.
“Lou Dobbs is the obvious exception at CNN, but he’s grandfathered in and turned crazy later in his career after it was too late to remove him (i.e. he had already gotten popular by the time they realized what he was doing). Now, they move all of the people with opinions to CNN Headline News. This is CNN’s compromise in how to deal with news/talk programming.
“But MSNBC hasn’t come up with a compromise yet. So, they have Keith Olbermann blasting away at the administration (bless his heart). They have some anchors pretending to be news folks. They have some real reporters (like Shuster, ironically) filling in as talk hosts. Then they have Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough who don’t really know what they’re doing over there.

“What is Chris Matthews? Is he a reporter? A journalist? A talk show host? A commentator? An interviewer? What is the right role for an interviewer? Can he give opinions?”
HE response: Matthews can do and should do all these things and more. He’s the greatest free-associating blabbermouth provocateur on the airwaves right now. A brilliant shoot-from the hipper, an old-school boomer newshound, a Bill Maher facsimile, a sardonic preacher, a print guy from way back, an agitator, a stalker of evasion, a carrier of the old-liberal Kennedy nosalgia flag and a bullshit spotter par excellence. Even with his mistakes and sometimes too-effusive garrulousness, let Matthews rip!

I wouldn’t otherwise comment on the Mucca-Macca divorce case, but “Rumpy Stumpy” isn’t merely a good or clever tabloid headline — I think it’s inspirational in the vein of “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” You need to read the story so as to appreciate the full import.

Roy Scheider, who had a brilliant eleven-year run as a near-movie star during the ’70s and early ’80s, portraying a series of anxious, somewhat bruised urban hard guys in a nearly unbroken run of top-drawer films, died this afternoon in Little Rock, Arkansas, according to the N.Y. Times. He was 75 years old.

Scheider had “suffered from multiple myeloma for several years, and died of complications from a staph infection,” his wife told the Times.
Scheider’s eleven-year hot streak began with his breakout performance as “Cloudy”, Gene Hackman‘s partner in William Freidkin‘s The French Connection (’71). His next two films, The Seven-Ups and Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York, were substandard but Scheider scored big with his Chief Brody role in Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws (’75). He was almost as good the following year as Dustin Hoffman‘s older intelligence-racket brother in John Schlesinger‘s Marathon Man (’76).
For me, Scheider’s peak was his lead role in Freidkin’s Sorcerer (’77) in which he played the role that Yves Montand became famous for in Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s Wages of Fear, the 1955 French film that Sorcerer was a remake of.
His performance in Jonathan Demme‘s Last Embrace (’78) was emotionally raw and close to the bone. He was even stronger as a Bob Fosse-like character — a self-destructive womanizing choreographer — in Fosse’s All That Jazz (’79). I saw Scheider give a gripping, first-rate performance as the cuckolded publisher husband in a Broadway production of Harold Pinter‘s Betrayal, with Blythe Danner and Raul Julia. His last reasonably decent role in this streak was Dr. Sam Rice in Robert Benton‘s Still of the Night (’82) with Meryl Streep.

From then on things started to go downhill. Scheider worked and stayed in the groove as best he could, but he seemed to take more and more straight-paycheck jobs. I thought Blue Thunder devalued him because it was basically crap despite the money it made. Playing Dr. Heywood Floyd in 2010 was a terrible thing to have done. Every film he made from ’82 on was either bad, so-so, “meh” or tolerable. The only half-decent film he did in his getting-older-and-grayer period was Bart Freundlich‘s The Myth of Fingerprints (’97).
I interviewed him in late ’81 or ’82 for Us magazine. We met at a coffee shop on either Lexington or Third Avenue somewhere in the mid ’70s. He used to go there after his morning run. He was a good egg, an honest cat and a hard worker. I’m sorry for his family’s loss. Most actors don’t get to flourish with the kind or roles that Scheider was able to land from the early ’70s to the early ’80s. He had a great run, and we’re all richer for that.

For the crime of having taken five hours off this afternoon, riding the bike over hills and around curves under beautiful blue skies and then taking a nap on the couch, I feel obliged to at least acknowledge the developments since 12:45 or so. The WGA strike all but over pending a membership vote on Tuesday. Barack Obama having won again in Maine (his fourth win this weekend), and by a handsome margin. And Michael Clayton‘s Tilda Swinton taking the Best Supporting Actress BAFTA award. Not bad for a sleepy Sunday.

I’m at the BAFTA awards brunch on the UCLA campus, and the show (a direct feed from London) is about to begin. There’s no suspense in this, however, since the winners (not 100% confirmed but quite possibly reliable) have been leaked and are up now on Sasha Stone’s Awards Daily (www.awardsdaily.com). Posted from my iPhone at 1:01 pm. Update: The feed from London isn’t working so everyone’s just sitting around and drinking champagne. Except for me.

25 minutes from now, four Writers Guild of America honchos will hold a press conference at WGAW headquarters to “update the media on important developments” regarding contract negotiations between the WGA and the AMPTP.

A friend has sent along three links to recent NPR ruminations concerning No Country for Old Men. An “All Things Considered” visit by producer Scott Rudin, “Weekend Edition” chat with director-screenwriters Joel and Ethan Coen, and a “Day to Day” discussion with Oscar-nominated costar Javier Bardem.

N.Y. Times Magazine editor Lynn Hirschberg narrates a montage of fifteen youngish actors (Seth Rogen, Ellen Page, James McAvoy, Josh Brolin, etc.) who broke through this year with strong, distinctive performances in high-calibre films. Here‘s the article itself.

Barack Obama‘s successes in yesterday’s primaries “don’t just speak to his popularity as a Democratic candidate,” writes Time‘s Ana Marie Cox. “A close look shows a fundamental shift not just in who’s winning but in who is voting for the winner.

“Obama’s victory in Louisiana could be, if one were especially cynical, written off as success with ‘black voters.’ But what of Nebraska, just to take one example? Obama won the state 68 to 32; he won Nebraska’s second congressional district 77 to 23. And while it’s true that this district (my home district, by the way) encompasses the University of Nebraska and the capital (pointy-headed academics and whatnot), it’s also 80% white, with a mean household income of about $50,000.
“These are not latte liberals. They are just barely caffeinated. What’s more, 1,500 of the 10,000 those who voted in just Lincoln, registered that same day.”