I don’t want an Honest Trailers take on the Best Picture nominees — anyone can do that. I want an Honest Trailers take on the collapsing shit show that the Oscar brand has become over the last four or five years. Particularly the expertly-managed shrinking of the viewing audience, the mass indifference on the part of Millennials and Zoomers, the narrowing field (i.e., woke-icizing) of the nominees, the Oscars becoming the Left Coast Tony Awards, Film Twitter destroying prospective hosts like Kevin Hart, Academy members blowing off the most transportational fantasy film of 2021 as a Best Picture nominee, and the way last April’s Soderbergh show suffocated the Oscar glamour thing and did a brilliant job of channelling…never mind.
Jackson Action
As anyone would expect, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson deflected and dodged when pressed by Sen. Ted Cruz about critical race theory. She politely allowed Sen. Lindsay Graham to make a fool of himself — no assistance required. And Sen. Josh Hawley reaffirmed his scumbag credentials. Performers, all.
It’s 2022 and senator Lindsey Graham asked this question during a senate supreme court hearing.
— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) March 22, 2022
Zegler Will Attend Oscars!
THR’s Scott Feinberg is exclusively reporting that West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler will not be watching the 94th Oscars from her couch after all, but will attend the ceremony as an Oscar presenter. This is like Cinderella attending the grand ball in her glass slipper.
A Precise Definition
11:30 am update: I’ve just been informed from a knowledgeable source that the 4K Godfather has been tastefully de-grained and DNR’ed! Which nobody has reported so far. And that the slightly blown-out (i.e., white-ish, sun-bleached) look of the outdoor wedding celebration has been modified so it looks less blown-out. And that the rich 1940s-era celluloid colors (those wonderful reds, ambers and taxicab yellows) have been turned down a little bit. So — no one has said this anywhere — the new 4K Godfather doesn’t really look like Gordon Willis’s original version. Not really. The 2008 restoration is a faithful capturing and enhancing of the original, but the newbie is doing its own thing. That’s not a put-down — it’s just a different bird. Or, as Larry Karaszewski said last night, “stunning.”
This 2008 vs, 2022 comparison video, posted on 3.20.22 by Forgotten Tomatoes, conforms to descriptions of the 4K version. I can’t tell about the DNR-ing, but the newbie is seemingly sharper and slightly brighter but less warm. The bleachy wedding party palette has been toned down. It’s certainly different.
Earlier this morning:
The 4K digital restoration of The Godfather screened Monday night (3.21) at the Academy Museum. Larry Karaszewski attended and called the allegedly rejuvenated appearance of Francis Coppola’s 1972 classic “stunning.” Here’s my reply to Larry, posted this morning on Facebook:
“Larry — You’re a good, careful writer so I’d like to ask if you really and truly found the 4K digital Godfather restoration to be ‘stunning.’
“I often give in to hyperbole myself so I’m not finding fault or trying to give you a hard time. I haven’t yet seen the 4K Godfather but given that it’s built upon the magnificent 2008 restoration by Robert Harris, and given the general reverence for the look of the original Gordon Willis photography and the original 1972 grain structure and no one recently claiming that they’ve tastefully DNR’ed or de-grained the look of it [update — I’m hearing that tasteful DNR has been applied], I don’t see how it could possibly be honestly described as ‘stunning.’
“In this context that word would have to mean ‘whoa!’, agreeably startling, slap-in-the-face unexpected, so good it shakes you deep down. In HE parlance, you seem to be saying that this new rendering delivers an unmistakable ‘bump.’ To which I’m obliged to say ‘okay but really?’
Even If I Say So Myself
This anti-Marvel rant (from a review posted in the mid teens) is solemnly felt and well phrased:
Sudden Switcheroo
For six months Gold Derby’s weather-vane, damp-finger-to-the-wind reactives we’re ALL IN on The Power of the Dog winning the Best Picture Oscar, and then they all flipped around to CODA within the last 72 hours.
Friendo: “A good Oscar watcher doesn’t advocate or otherwise try to influence the race. You disagree with that, I realize. Right now awards season, writhing in the shadow of the massive awards machine that is Penske, is a hot bloated mess.”
Reminder: Cruz, Cruz, Penelope Cruz
Today is the last day of Oscar voting. HE hereby pleads with all last-minute procrastinators to please open your hearts and cast your all-important votes for Penelope Cruz’s straight-up soul serving in Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers. Many wise and good people (LAFCA, Venice Film Festival jury, other significant critics groups) stand with you.
Preferred Bad Guys
From yesterday’s review of The Lost City: “One earmark of a sucky movie is that the bad guys have no personalities — no wit or flavor or stand-out attitude of any kind. The Lost City bad guys are the same exact stooges you’ve seen in a hundred other action films. Remember Richard Masur, Ray Sharkey and Anthony Zerbe‘s bad guys in Who’ll Stop The Rain (’78)? It never got any better than that. They were darkly funny, eccentric, deranged, vulnerable, and they never once winked.”
Blue-Eyed Soul
With all the appearances and promotions for Ameca over the last couple of months, why hasn’t she done Jimmy Kimmel or Real Time with Bill Maher? She can obviously handle herself socially, at least under controlled conditions. Maybe her vocabulary isn’t large enough.
Seven years ago Alicia Vikander played a very similar type of robot in Alex Garland‘s Ex Machina.
What Is This? What’s Going On?
It’s just been announced that the “next wave” of presenters at the 94th Oscars will include actress Stephanie Beatriz (who?), DJ & record executive DJ Khaled, singer-songwriter H.E.R., skateboarder Tony Hawk and Olympic gold-medal snowboarder Shaun White.
Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: “Who are those guys?”
HE to Oscar producers Will Packer and Shayla Cowan: “Whadjoo guys do, invite some of your friends? I’m sorry but people who present Oscars have always been famous or at least accomplished within the motion picture industry. Is this is a mistake, these names? Is it a put-on?”
Woke House Recognizes Industry Jews!
It’s been six months since the almost comically myopic Academy Museum (i.e., “Woke House“) opened. We all remember that the main priority of the curators out of the gate was to apologize for the industry’s many decades of pernicious racism and to celebrate women and POCs as well as current efforts in the service of equity and inclusion.
But it wasn’t long before people started saying “yes, yes…we all acknowledge that Hollywood has always been an evil racist cauldron that needs to be corrected and cleansed by visionary wokesters, and that the worst perpetrators of this fundamental evil (not to mention innumerable forms of sexism) were the white men who founded and built the film industry back in the early to mid 20th Century. But what about the fact that these guys — all of the big-studio owners were Jews — actually created this industry? Shouldn’t the fact that they built this industry from the ground up…shouldn’t that warrant some acknowledgement?”
As far as I could discern the response from Woke House curators was something along the lines of “yes, of course…the men who created this business deserve some credit and I’m sure we’ll get around to paying tribute to their pioneering spirit and industriousness, but the main thing to keep in mind is that they perpetrated a system of fiendish exploitation, making life miserable for people of color and God knows how many struggling actresses and would-be female filmmakers, and that generations of successive white men came along and strengthened this evil system, and it’s now up to us and other forward-thinking progressives to finally put a stop to this and lead the industry out of the darkness.”
This morning Woke House finally relented and announced that a year from now they’ll be debuting a section of the the Museum that pays tribute to the founding Jews. It’ll be called HOLLYWOODLAND. Here’s the official announcement:
“Opening in late Spring 2023, HOLLYWOODLAND will trace the history of filmmaking in Los Angeles back to its roots at the beginning of the 20th century, illustrating how and why the city became the world capital of cinema that it still is today. This immersive gallery will convey the evolving topography of Los Angeles along the timeline of the developing movie industry, allowing visitors to feel a tangible proximity to this rich history and encouraging further exploration of the city’s landmarks upon departing the Academy Museum.
“The exhibition will focus on the predominantly Jewish founders of the early Hollywood studio system, delving into how their personal narratives shaped the distinct characteristics of the movies their respective studios produced. It will foreground the ways in which the birth of the American film industry — and therefore the projected depiction of the American Dream — is truly an immigrant story.
“The exhibition is organized by Associate Curator Dara Jaffe in collaboration with Associate Curator of Digital Presentations Gary Dauphin.”
