No, Really, I Come to Bury Oscar

Excitement over the Killers of the Flower Moon movie made in my community translated in me being interested in the Academy Awards for the first time in many a day. I was especially interested in Lily Gladstone, nominated for best actress, and Scott George, nominated for the best original song.

Gladstone was nominated for her portrayal of Mollie Burkhart, the woman whose bravery and determination eventually helped expose the murder of Osage people by white men trying to secure the wealth of their oil. George's song "Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” was featured in the movie in a scene showing modern Osage dancing.

George and several Osage singers and dancers performed the song onstage, a historic moment in itself. "Wahzhazhe" is the name of the Osage people in their own language before it was Franco-fied by the French-speaking traders who met them, and Osage people shot off fireworks near town when the performance aired.

He lost to "What Was I Made For?" from Barbie. Academy members often pride themselves on their liberal or even progressive attitudes about most social issues, but they have always been gun-shy about going all the way to elevate something entirely from another culture and in another language. The first movie not shot in English to win a statue was the Korean horror move Parasite in 2019.

While "Jai Ho" won best song from 2008's Slumdog Millionaire, it was an English translation of the song in the soundtrack. "Naatu Naatu" from the 2022 Telugu-language action movie RRR was the first and only non-English song to have won an Oscar. The vaunted progressivism goes out the door when given a chance to reward music from Native Americans -- and correct the gross caricatures of  "Indian music" from movies of years past. The Academy's songwriting members went with a hit song from a hit movie about one of the most ubiquitous toys in America.

Gladstone, along with Annette Bening (Nyad) and Carrie Mulligan (Maestro), played a historical character. Diana Nyad is an out LGBT journalist who, after several tries, swam from Cuba to Key West in 2013 at the age of 64. Mulligan played Costa Rican actress and activist Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, the wife of composer Leonard Bernstein, the maestro of the title. Winner Emma Stone of Poor Things and Sandra Hüller of Anatomy of a Fall played fictional characters.

Despite my antipathy towards the awards, I've always believed that the nominees for different acting categories are generally good performances from talented people. Yes, Whoopi Goldberg won the Best Supporting Actress category in Ghost, but every theory has holes.

But when given the chance to make history and buttress its progressive bona fides by rewarding Gladstone's performance, or to honor actresses who brought two other extraordinary women's lives to the screen, the Academy's acting members thought it best to laud an actress who plays a woman given the brain of her unborn child who then indulges in lots of sex and socialism.

Over the last 25 years or so, women playing characters in normal situations or playing historical characters have occasionally won Oscars, but it's not the way to bet. When there's weirdness or excessive sexuality (or both), lay your money on the actress playing that character. Because the Academy voters probably will.

Head-Scratcher

I could be mistaken and I haven't dug into this as deeply as have some others, I am sure, but if I read the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences diversity initiatives right, a curious little quirk pops up. A previous Best Picture Oscar winner that would meet the minimum standards as described in this Variety article is 1939's unenlightened Gone With the Wind. A previous best-picture winner that would not meet those standards is 2019's Parasite.

It's a shame the Academy backslid so much in those 80 years.

Omission

Someone told me the Oscars were tonight. Turns out I saw as much of the Oscars broadcast as I saw of the Oscar-nominated movies and performances -- no more than I wanted to.

Like, Black Panther. Into the Spider-Verse. Incredibles 2.

You could say I've gotta get out more. Or you could say the entertainment industry needs to give me a reason to want to get out more. To-may-to, to-mah-to, I suppose.

Back to the Drawing Board

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided to put it's new "Best Popular Movie" category on hold after a lot of people pointed out a significant flaw: It's a silly idea.

A lot of the criticism aimed at the idea labeled it a kind of ratings grab, acknowledging that recent  Academy honorees were movies that nobody went to, so nobody cared to watch them win or lose the Academy opinion poll. With the new category, Academy members could keep rewarding stuff they liked and offer the television-watching (and movie attending) masses a bone by sending a statue home with one of those movies they liked.

Whether the problem is that Hollywood forgot how to make top-quality movies that also attracted people to the theaters or Academy voters have for their own reasons been drawn to movies that didn't interest anyone who had to pay for tickets is a question beyond my ability to research. Either way, the performance category Oscars are still what they have always been: An opinion poll among a small group of people with their own tastes and interests. Until those interests intersect more with those of the people who buy the tickets and might watch the show, that "might" is going to stick around no matter how many gimmick categories the Academy dreams up.

Go Home, Oscar. You're Drunk

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided to add a new category for the 2019 awards show: Best Popular Film.

I am sure the Academy hopes that this will get more people to watch the show, since over the last 10 to 15 years they have been handing out statues to movies that not very many people watch at all, with a couple of exceptions now and then. It turns out that not many people are interested in whether or not a movie they've never heard of wins an award.

Left unaddressed is the fact that the Academy puts together a slate of 10 American-made movies for its "Best Picture" category but relegates every other movie in the world to a limited "Best Foreign Film" category even though some of those entries make the Best Picture nominees look like student films.

Also left unaddressed is how the Academy plans to honor good performances in popular movies, but that's probably a question that will have to be answered by someone who pays attention to the Oscars.

#oscarssowhat

My Facebook trending items widget is filled with items about the Academy Awards presentation tonight. Some of the items are essentially useless but are also the point of the proceedings -- such as the actual awards themselves, when we learn which entrant in a particular field had more votes than the others in a highly specialized opinion poll.

Some of the items are essentially and functionally useless, such as the endless list of what dress a particular actress or presenter is wearing.

The stream has served one useful purpose, though. It has confirmed that my decision to ignore the telecast was the right one, and so I now descend into a flurry of self-congratulation...Darnit, you won again, Oscar!

Show Biz Iz Stoopid, Part Bunch-of-X's-and-V's

So Sunday is the broadcast of the 2014 awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), better known as the Oscars. The show itself will be a huge smash or amazingly bad failure, depending on who you read or listen to, and at least as much attention will be paid to what people are wearing as to the actual awards themselves.

Some of the awards will be the exact right choices, while some will be egregious mistakes. Some will be both at the same time, again depending on who you pay attention to. Other than kind of hoping Michael Keaton brings home one of the little golden twerps for his role in the otherwise WTH? Birdman, I've got no real preferences. Although if an American Sniper win caused Michael Moore to drop his gravy bowl on his foot (complex arcs, angles and ricochets would be involved), that would be kind of cool.

A story in USA Today details just how dumb some of this soiree winds up being -- a fellow named Lash Fary -- really -- heads up an outfit called Distinctive Assets, which puts together "swag bags" for the celebs at the show. Actually, the bags go to the actors who lose in their categories -- apparently losing writers, directors and producers have to console themselves on their own dime -- and this year's packages would go for $167,000 if all of the items were purchased retail.

The likelihood that some of these items would be purchased retail by some of the nominees is remote, however, as neither Robert Duvall nor Meryl Streep seems the type to purchase orgasm booster shots or laser sex toys (my search engine hits just got a wee bit outré).

AMPAS is clear that the work of Distinctive Assets is not an officially recognized part of the Academy Awards show. Given the nomination of The Grand Budapest Hotel for Best Picture, it's nice to have it confirmed that the Academy does have some standards after all.

An Actor and a Movie Star

Among my least-favorite days would have been yesterday, as legendary actor Peter O'Toole passed away at the age of 81. That he was nominated for an Oscar eight times but never won says as much about the excellent quality of some of his competition in his early races, as well as the myopia of Academy voters during the latter ones.

The title of the post is a nod to his Oscar-nominated role as Alan Swann, the Errol-Flynn-esque swashbuckling actor appearing on a live TV show in the 1950s, in 1982's My Favorite Year. Confronted with the reality that the show is live, Swann panics -- he has not been before a live audience since he was a very young man and the idea terrifies him. "I'm not an actor!" he laments to Mark Linn-Baker's Benjy Stone. "I'm a movie star!"

He was, of course, among the best of both.

Best Picture Pictures?

A writer invites her 7-year-old daughter to judge what this year's nominees for best picture may be about, based only on the posters (she is too young to see any of them. Way to reach out to that future audience, Motion Picture Academy).

Several of her guesses are very funny and some of them would probably have made better movies than the ones the posters actually represent. According to her mom, the young Jeanette-Siskel-in-the-making is picking Lincoln to win the Oscar.

And the Winner Is...

Well, we'll see. Don't have plans to watch the Oscars this evening, to be honest, although I think the Best Picture category is stronger than it's been in a long time. Even so, the Academy criminally overlooked Get Low, as well as Robert Duvall for best actor and Bill Murray for best supporting actor. It lumped True Grit's Hailee Steinfeld into the best supporting actress category, when she's actually the first of the three main cast members to appear onscreen and has a larger role in driving the story than either of the other two.

Colin Firth is likely to win best actor because he performed well but didn't win last year, even though Jeff Bridges and James Franco both topped him. Javier Bardem and Jesse Eiesenberg's presence on the list of nominees is not, as some movie writers suggest, a travesty. It is, however, a mystery.

Natalie Portman is likely to win best actress because she plays a woman losing her mind and acting that out sexually (including a meaningless titillation scene with costar Mila Kunis), which the Academy rarely fails to reward. She's actually the second weakest performance on the nominee list, although on odd-numbered days I'd agree she was the worst and that Nicole Kidman edged her out. Jennifer Lawrence from Winter's Bone ranks at the top of the nominee list.

The King's Speech, starring Firth, is considered the favorite for best picture. It's certainly not a bad movie, but there's nothing about it that couldn't be seen on any Masterpiece Theatre production on PBS. The only ones of the ten that would rank as Crash-level head-scratchers would be Inception, Black Swan or The Social Network. The first is a dazzling spectacle without much of a story at its center, the second's an un-dazzling spectacle without much of a story at its center and the third tries to make me care about a fictionalized version of the creation of Facebook, and I don't. If I go with the one I liked best (which is what Academy voters will do anyway), I'd take True Grit, Toy Story 3 or Winter's Bone.

For best supporting actor and actress, I'll take my lead from Mr. Murray, who used to do an Oscar prediction bit on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" sketch: "Who cares?"

ETA: But Bob Hope rocked ;-)

There's No Business Like Show Business

Technically, I only listened to most of the Academy Awards telecast last night -- it was on in the other room while I was online and did some other computer work. Which is OK, because "The Oscars" are more about show business these days than awarding actual moviemaking craft and excellence.

In fact, that's one of the of the things that still intrigues me about the show of "The Oscars" as opposed to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' awarding of the best work done in the previous year -- which awards are featured. The technical awards, few of which are noted in the telecast and many of which are given on another night entirely, are actually the ones where an observer could apply some objective criteria and measure success and excellence. But the acting, directing and writing awards, where measurements of quality incorporate a huge subjective factor, get all the play.

Oscar winners -- and this year, for the first time since 1988, Oscar presenters actually said "The winner is" instead of "The Oscar goes to," omitting that silly attempt to hide from the idea this is a competition -- get their awards because more Academy members vote for them. In other words, what we call "Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role" is actually "The Actor in a Supporting Role who Got A Plurality of Votes Of the 5,835 AMPAS Members Who Voted."

What Christoph Waltz won was an opinion poll among a specific set of people. Was his performance better than Christopher Plummer's, Stanley Tucci's, Woody Harrelson's or Matt Damon's? Not to mention men who weren't nominated? Eh, who knows? Some people thought yes, some thought no, and enough Academy members liked it to send Mr. Waltz home with the gold. Why they liked it instead of the others is as up in the air as what you or I thought about it. Some, maybe many, cast their vote based on what they knew as professionals in the craft of acting and what they saw when Waltz played a nasty Nazi in Inglourious Basterds, but even there, I'm pretty sure other factors played a role.

Some Oscar odds and ends:

-- Sean Penn lived up to his image as an odious egotist -- as last year's Oscar winner for Best Actor, he presented the award for Best Actress. He was dunned for omitting his wife (actress Robin Wright Penn) from his thank-you speech, so he said he was going to show appreciation for actresses this evening. Shut up and read your lines, twerp.

-- A movie critic who forgot he writes for The Tulsa World said in his Oscar preview that a win by Sandra Bullock would represent the Academy honoring the "least deserving and least demanding role in history." To be fair, he wasn't the only person to hold this view. I'm not sure what he meant, except that perhaps Bullock should have been overlooked because she was playing a strong woman who was a wife and mom instead of a hooker, addict, nut or a poor, uneducated woman who might wind up as a combination of all three for some reason. Over the last dozen years or so, that's been the kind of role that wins women their statues.

-- Much ado was made because two of the competitors for Best Director, The Hurt Locker's Kathryn Bigelow and Avatar's James Cameron, are ex-wife and husband, respectively. Would there be animosity? Would there be conflict? Would anyone asking those questions remember that they were married for just more than two years and that it was almost 20 years ago, or that Bigelow was Cameron's third wife and he's with No. 5 these days?

-- Best Supporting Actress winner Mo'Nique thanked the Academy for recognizing that "it can be about the performance and not the politics." Unless she was referring to the absence of Cause of the Year ribbons pinned to the dresses and tuxes of presenters and attendees, I think she's got the wrong group of people in mind. For the Academy, it's always about the politics.

-- The morning shows offer more proof that whatever else is done on Oscar night, the movies themselves are usually overlooked. Did they feature movie writers or film professors discussing the different performances? Nah. Let's get some fashion writers -- whatever the heck that means -- in here to talk about dresses.

Batting Average?

The Oscars are tonight! Will Avatar win Best Picture? Will The Hurt Locker? Will I care?

Well, I went one for three on being able to answer those, which if I keep it up all season long will definitely help me when it's time to renegotiate my contract.

Oscar? Grouch!

I used to care soooo much about the Oscars. I made sure I saw at least every best picture nominee, and as many of the best actor/actress nominees as I could, and maybe squeeze in the supporting cast or director awards. I figured out my own picks for the awards, tried to crystal-ball the ones that would actually win, crossed my fingers for my faves and cursed the Academy members for idiots when they didn't (but seriously...no to Goodfellas? C'mon, you dinks!).

Other than being happy for the folks who win -- with the exception of the odious Sean Penn, whose post-Spicoli work is dead to me because of his love for Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez -- I don't much care who wins what anymore. Of the best picture nominees, I saw Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Slumdog was not bad, but Button was just a series of unconnected vignettes centering on Brad Pitt's face, frequently altered by computer-generated imagery. Neither was as good as The Wrestler or Gran Torino, neither of which were nominated.

I'm not sure why I lost interest. It may have had to do with the Academy's predisposition to nominate and award actresses who play hookers, strippers, emotionally disturbed characters and the like. Charlize Theron's 2003 turn as a serial killer prostitute was a lock. Women in positions of strength, power or leadership seem to fall by the wayside. And this year, supporting actress nominee Marisa Tomei played a stripper, while best actress winner Kate Winslet played a grown woman who seduced a teenage boy.

It may be that or it may be some other facet of the roles and movies the Academy chooses to honor that just turns me off. Or it may be that one day I realized the awards were just a very specialized popularity contest. We tend to think the Academy Awards represent some sort of absolute standard, simply because the people who vote on them are in that field. I'll go with that on a lot of the technical awards. But things like acting and directing are subjective matters, and that means I can judge for myself what kind of movies or performances I want to see and which ones I think are good. Matters of personal taste, liking or disliking a nominee, the political impact of a film or performance can play just as much a role in the opinions of Academy voters as they do in mine. And that means sometimes they make choices that plain flat-out reek (Crash? Dances With Wolves? Whoopi Goldberg? Mira Sorvino? Nicholas Cage? Cuba Gooding, Jr.? Titanic?)

The ratings for the Oscar telecast have been stinking for some time, which makes me think I may not be the only person asking, "Who cares?" Whether I am or not, I'm pretty sure that Hollywood isn't giving me any answer to that question. So congrats to the winners (except for you, Mr. Penn) and lets all of the rest of us cross our fingers that Academy voters will find a clue when they make out their ballots for the 2009 version of their awards. After all, it is the land of imagination out there, and a fella can dream, can't he?

Recount!

I rented the DVD No Country For Old Men the other day -- I'm getting to where I only want to watch really violent movies on my nice small TV screen, and some of them I'd rather not watch at all. No Country earned four Oscars, including best director, best picture and best adapted screenplay. All of them well-earned; the Coen brothers have a rare gift for directing as well as they write, and they writes some goodness.

I can't say the same for Javier Bardem's win for best supporting actor, though. He walks around stone-faced and stupid-haired, flipping coins and shooting people with a gun and a funky oxygen-tank cow-stunner. If this is what it takes to win best supporting actor, then the Academy needs to repossess Haing S. Ngor's 1984 best supporting actor Oscar for The Killing Fields and hand it over to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Or, if they decide that Arnie's actually got the lead role of The Terminator, then they need to ring up F. Murray Abraham and tell him that Salieri loses again, this time to a robot from 2029. Given that Abraham's recently offered the entertainment world the magnum opus Blood Monkey and is about to grace us with something called Shark Swarm, maybe they should do that anyway.

Tommy Lee Jones would have been a better nomination, and his work here is everything that anyone who suffered through In the Valley of Elah wished it might have been in that film. Of course, in No Country he's saying words from Cormac McCarthy by way of Joel and Ethan Coen. In Elah, he's having to make do with the boiled tripe of Paul Haggis. Even Olivier might have stumbled.

Oscarzzzzz...

I didn't watch them. Apparently, I'm not alone.

Kind of like Bob, I guess. I used to care. But things have changed.