Well, my food poisoning pretty much wiped me out all of yesterday, and now I'm sitting in the Salt Lake City airport. I'm still feeling a bit, um, funky, but definitely travel-ready—the thought of my return to My Lovely Wife (and my beloved neighborhood) bucks me up a lot. Once I'm home, I'll start filing reviews of the Sundance pictures I wasn't able to write up while I was there—and I expect dispatches from fellow travelers Howard Karren and Ryan Stewart as well. So expect a Sundance blizzard. In the meantime, I'm gonna sit calmly and try to avoid the Oscar nomination coverage in the major papers—it'll just upset my stomach. For instance, the Brooks Barnes/David Carr piece in today's New York Times is, after some good reporting on reactions from the nominees, just a lot of pissy boilerplate about, you know, how uncommercial the nominees are: "Now [ABC] faces a nightmare situation of pursuading viewers to celebrate a batch of difficult films that most have never seen." (Shouldn't that be "have not seen?" Nevermind...) One could take that unsupported assertion (ABC itself did not talk to the reporters) apart in any number of ways (for one thing, multiple nominee Juno is thisclose to hitting the $100 million mark), but as I said, I've got stomach trouble at the moment. I'll just point out, however, that if the Academy made a habit of giving Best Picture noms to the likes of Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean, and so on, Barnes and Carr would invariably be coughing up something along the lines of "But in lauding the greatest commercial successes of the year, the Academy gave short shrift to a wide range of more serious releases, placing the credibility of the Oscar into question." Regular readers of this blog probably know just what I'd like to see Carr and Barnes fetch from the refrigerator right about now...
Later...
I always think it's the funny movies that don't make it into the Oscars (Juno notwithstanding), not the commercial ones. But then, I didn't even watch the Oscars until about two years ago! I hope your stomach feels better....
Posted by: oakling | January 24, 2008 at 02:19 AM