The morning after.
I should say pardon my gush, because looking over my Oscar live-blogging last night, I was a lot more excited than many of my fellow scribblers. I see James Wolcott deploring the "trivialized," "empty," and "vain" ceremony, as opposed to the deeply profound, content-packed, and self-effacing ceremonies of yore. I see that Nikki Finke, after doing such useful work on the writers' strike, has reverted to her non-stop impersonation of Helena Kallianiotes as Palm Apodaca in Five Easy Pieces. Outside, in the non-filmic blogosphere, the ultra-refined Ann Althouse pronounces the show "sucky." At least until Daniel Day-Lewis—"I love that guy!", yeah, me too—shows up.
Good gosh, there's just no pleasing some people. You give 'em pageantry and they complain that there's too much pageantry, it's too long, the pageantry is boring. You give 'em brevity and you get Finke's "This wasn't an Oscars. This was a slightly longer version of the Golden Globes." Great. You know what. I really hope they do bring Pilobolus back next year.
I did a radio tour this morning and one question I got a lot of was "What's with all these Europeans winning the acting awards?" After pointing out that this was, in fact, kind of statistical anomaly given that, with the exception of Cotillard, these were Europeans playing opposite Americans in American film, My Lovely Wife suggested an even better out...pointing out that Cary Grant was a European, David Niven was a European, Errol Flynn was from Australia, Audrey Hepburn from Belgium. That really did the trick.
So, how did you make out with your Oscar pool?
Bourne taking the technical Oscars sunk me. I should have remembered the classic tenet of picking the Best Editing winner: most cuts wins.
And I posted this below, but it may get lost in the shuffle: Tilda Swinton was on Good Morning America, and referenced the awards show scene in Zoolander when asked about her reaction to winning. That blew my mind.
Posted by: Matt Miller | February 25, 2008 at 11:27 AM
Have to agree with Matt. When that douche from The Bourne movie won I turned my 11 month old daughter towards the telly and pointed at him and said, "Bad man! That's a very bad man!" She started to cry. My logic is this: If all I notice is the editing, a la the Bourne movies, then it is precisely the opposite of a job well done.
And I did real shitty in my office pool because instead of going with my gut, I decided to follow the advice of self-styled "experts," you know, like everyone who is linked to greencine. That's why I picked Juno for best picture, because some idiot said he had heard from any inside source that it was going to win, same with Hal Holbrook. I mean, I'm not on the inside, so I thought I would listen to people who were, and all I learned, (and sorry Glen, because this is not aimed at you) is that no one knows a goddamned thing, that no one is an expert except for the people who are actually members of the academy, and as far as I know, none of those buffoons are blogging as of right now. So from now on I'm going to assume that I know just as much as everyone else.
But still, that guy who edited the Bourne movie should be embarrased that he won over the Coens, or whoever it was that masterfully edited Zodiac. I'm just glad Dylan Tichenor didn't win, because if he had any balls he would've figured out a way to get PTA to cut out that last god-awful 25 min. of TWBB. And I'm sticking to my guns on this one. I know there are others out there (Michael Tully, for example) who feel the same way I do. Paul Dano should've won a Razzie for his performance during the bowling alley scene. Overacting at it's worst, complete with the dreaded "dry-cry." Ugh.
Posted by: Chad Channing | February 25, 2008 at 12:33 PM
No offense taken, Chad. In essence I totally agree—no one does know a goddamn thing. That's what makes picking/guessing/predicting so absurd and fun at the same time. You could research your butt off and crap out, or use some equivalent of a dart board and get 100%.
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | February 25, 2008 at 12:57 PM
GK-
Reading your rundown of the Oscar haters reminds me of why I decided to NOT be a journalism major. A while back that was my plan and I was covering film and music for a local rag. I went to this BIG radio station concert with like, 12 bands and I was in the journos section.
This guy comes in from a big paper in San Francisco, sits down and goes to sleep. I went out to get a beer a little while later and made him move and when I came back I asked why the hell he was sleeping when-I dunno...the Lemonheads and Bad Religion or some great 90's bands were coming on-and he said "I'm only hear to see "Hole." And then he went back to sleep.
People in the bizz become soooo jaded and it's like they compete to see who's most angry at the biz or who loathes what the most. If that day ever comes for me I'll stop writing. Why does being an "insider" mean you have to be cranky and smug? That's why I dog your blog Glenn, you still seem to, you know, actually like movies.
And Chad...if Michael Tully said the last 25 minutes suck, then it must be true, huh?
Posted by: don lewis | February 25, 2008 at 01:46 PM
Hey Don, this is the second day in a row you've tried to lure me into some kind of dialogue. Seems you've got a bug up your ass about how I feel about TWBB. Sorry it makes you so upset that I don't like the last 25 minutes of the movie. However, you see, I don't come here to pick fights with the other people who comment. I just come here to comment, to see my own voice. Makes me feel special. In other words, leave me alone. And by the way: Michael Tully's reasoning for not liking TWBB as much as everyone else is as solid as anything I have read. Maybe you should check it out and stop drinking the cool air.
Posted by: Chad Channing | February 25, 2008 at 02:49 PM
Chad, Don isn't trying to "lure" you into anything. He asked a direct question, which I believe is pretty common on comments threads. If you don't wanna answer it, that's your privilege. But the expectation that nobody's ever going to argue against your assertions is a little disingenuous. I suggest that if you don't want to engage a question, then don't...but don't bait the interlocuter while you're at it.
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | February 25, 2008 at 02:58 PM
To answer your question, DON: The last 25 minutes of TWBB are a failure not because Michael Tully says it is so, but because they are.
And I don't care if someone asks me a question. I just don't like trolls, and that's what Don sounds like. Although I'm sure he's a friend of yours, Glenn, so I won't pick on your friends any more. As a matter of fact, I won't comment on your site anymore, okay.
Later.
Posted by: Chad Channing | February 25, 2008 at 03:23 PM
Glenn: I echo Don in saying I really enjoy reading your blog and appreciate your enthusiasm for watching and writing about movies.
*SPOILERS*
If I can-- innocently, not "baitingly" -- bring up those last 20 or so minutes of "There Will Be Blood" again-- Do you think that if TWBB didn't have that bizarro-milkshake-bowling-pin-"I'm finished!"-Brahms-concerto ending, it would have had a better chance at winning Best Picture? I don't know what I'd suggest instead of PTA's ending, but let's just say something more conventional, even if its not a "happy" ending either?
Ty Burr has a great essay up on the Boston Globe right now praising how uncompromised TWBB's storytelling is-- its not pandering to the audience, giving it what it wants, but it does what IT wants, and tells the audience that if they don't like it, so be it. Burr thinks that shows a unique and refreshing integrity of film making not seen often these days.
Also, one more question: In your estimation, decades from now, do you think TWBB will still hold up as a (most) critic's favorite? Will it be considered a "masterpiece" or will it age poorly? Last night I came across a lot of "TWBB is the new Citizen Kane" comments and while I think those are exaggerated, do you feel TWBB has the "potential"?
Thanks a lot again Glenn.
Posted by: Anna | February 25, 2008 at 03:51 PM
"Do you think that if TWBB didn't have that bizarro-milkshake-bowling-pin-"I'm finished!"-Brahms-concerto ending, it would have had a better chance at winning Best Picture? I don't know what I'd suggest instead of PTA's ending, but let's just say something more conventional, even if its not a "happy" ending either?"
The ending of No Country for Old Men is less conventional than TWWB's. At least the latter provides closure to the protagonist's struggle with the antagonist.*
*Don't read this as a knock on No Country (which ended perfectly), just an observation.
Posted by: Matt Miller | February 25, 2008 at 04:22 PM
The ending of No Country for Old Men is less conventional than TWWB's. At least the latter provides closure to the protagonist's struggle with the antagonist.*
That was (one of) my problem(s) with it. The bulk of TWBB feels like a Paul Thomas Anderson movie – a grandiose story sparely told, light on the backfilling of psychological motivations for the characters, every scene accomplishing what it sets out to do in an off-kilter fashion. But the ending is just ridiculous – pat, obvious, over-the-top, ludicrously acted, closurific. I laughed out loud at the last line; pander to the audience is exactly what it does. NCFOM, on the other hand, holds down the chords it had been striking throughout, about fate and fading and uncertainty in a big, violent land. Life is forced to go on.
Sigh. It was a weird year for nominations and critics both; then it became a (kind of) weird year for Oscar winners. Glenn, where's your alternative Oscars, or are we all just over the whole thing
Posted by: Arion Berger | February 25, 2008 at 04:50 PM
Glad to see I wasn't the only one who laughed at the last line of 'Blood'
Posted by: Dave V | February 25, 2008 at 05:16 PM
I swear all the WEST COAST stuff I read said the Oscars started at 8:30... and it turned out, of course, that here they started at 5:30. So I missed most of it! But at least I saw the "best parts"....
Posted by: oakling | February 25, 2008 at 07:57 PM
I had an interesting conversation with my father today at lunch about why TWBB doesn't work for him. He said something along the lines of "The greatest joy I get from fiction, from storytelling, is when I get put into the place of another human. And that's just what I didn't get from TWBB. Every time there was a great, dramatic, tragic moment, PTA pulled back and turned it into a joke."
All I could counter with is that I don't think this is a movie about humans, or humanity, in that kind of way. It's more about the not-human parts of humans. Or something. The argument is a simple inversion on the surface, but it's bigger than that. I don't want to get jargony but it's not even about the emotions of Plainview; it's more about him as a force of affect, or will. Which is not to say that my interest in the film purely structural: I'm wary of Deleuze as much as I'm wary of anybody but using some of his models works as an entry, I think, into why I get so excited by this picture. My friend Daniel and I like to call it a viscous film. Its architecture is liquid, surely, and part of why I think my dad thinks PTA pulls back is because it's not he's pulling back (even if that wide shot of the slapping is why the baptism starts to get chuckles), but pushing the picture -- absurdly, hyperbolically. It's a film that seeps and explodes.
Maybe it's easier to swallow _Punch-Drunk Love_'s disconnect, or something, for more people, but I find TWBB to be characterized by a pretty similar movement of interruptions, or eruptions. That TWBB plays more like horror than comedy, and that its humor is pitched dark, speaks to this aversion, I think. PDL is tense, yes, but it's outright a comedy -- a romantic comedy -- complete with satisfying resolution and gags and one-liners more pointedly designed to get laughs, to release that tension. TWBB may leave us with the horror of its obsessions (avarice, faith, family), but it's always hand in hand with a joke. I walked out of TWBB in November elated, giddy, kind of wild eyed. I walked out of NCFOM reticent and tired, eager to get home. It's from there that I start my project of understanding the two and while I still think NCFOM is ostensibly perfect, it doesn't show me much new, nor does it send a tingle through me as often as TWBB does. Plus, you know, it's bleaker. I've grown to understand the ending as a kind of acceptance of the world as it is, but it's still so *wise-y* -- after all that death -- that I find myself resisting it. (I also think this says more about me, and my taste, than it does about the movie, so there.)
I'm glad _No Country_ won, though, if only so Ethan Coen could give those two, um, speeches. And I'm glad Javier Bardem won. Has anybody blogged about how the two male winners probably constitute the scariest pair of characters (to win an Oscar) in a single year? Also funny: Javier Bardem is great looking in real life and terrible looking in that hairdo in the picture while DDL looks plain wacky in real life and is (oddly) more compelling to look at in TWBB. (Or so says heterosexual, I-dig-Ellen-Page-as-much-as-any-other-bored-boy-with-the-internet me.)
Finally: something else I tried to ask my dad: When you're dealing with non-humanist art, why try to impose a humanist reading of it? If there's one thing I've learned in school it's that you deal with the object as it is, not as you want it to be. What's really weird is how TWBB's defenders seem to always find themselves talking around the film to talk about the film. The idea of speaking darkly about something -- something like Socratic irony -- something like that TS Eliot aphorism: "The best criticism of a poem is another poem." But maybe this topic of conversation is exhausted already?
I should probably stop this, in any event, as it's approaching an epic length for a blog comment. In lieu of further blabbering, I offer that I wrote similar things here:
http://freenikes.blogspot.com/2008/02/encounters-61-62-what-community-17-18.html
Posted by: Ryland Walker Knight | February 25, 2008 at 08:05 PM
Oh yeah: really dug Cate Blanchett's reactions. Both to her Elizabeth clip and to Marion Cotillard winning. Plus, of course, that clip of the Coens sitting around on couches NOT writing. Also cool and funny: Roderick Jaynes' mug shot.
But the Oscars are pretty silly, as always, and I can't believe I paid _this_ much attention. Last night's _Wire_ was, like, totally cooler.
Posted by: Ryland Walker Knight | February 25, 2008 at 08:13 PM
Chad-
I do apologize for calling you out...I can see how you felt like I was picking on you. But, you do something that I really hate on blogs: you make a blanket statement with a smattering of opinion and do nothing at all to back it up. Your backup is that Michael Tully (who is a fine filmmaker and....) also didn't like it so, that must clear it all up? Then your answer to Glenn's follow up is the oh-so-mature "It sucks because it does" routine. Neat! And I'm the troll?
Why is the films ending "bad" because it's crazy, violent, campy and "over-the-top?" In my opinion, it's a perfect ending because Plainview was building to a big moment like that, a snap, through the whole film. Watch it again. Watch how he starts muttering to himself here and there before totally becoming alone inside his own head during that scene where he and his "brother" go for a swim. He loses it in that moment...his mind that is.
Plus...what...is...the...name...of...the...film!? That makes the scene even more funny/ironic/audacious. You didn't see that coming? Was the plot for SNAKES ON A PLANE offputting to you as well?
And on a purely visceral level I love the ending because it's so fucking entertaining and off the wall and fun and freaky and, well, ballsy. I was grinning ear to ear through that whole last part because I could feel the emotion in the room turning. Some people were laughing, others were terrified, others pissed. It's ART, Chad. it's supposed to make you feel. Sure, it made you feel irritated and short-changed but jeez dude, this isn't AICN where you do like, drive-by "that sucked! that ruled!" I mean, you can do that...but we'll just think less of you.
And Glenn and I are mere internet blogger buddies. Just like you and me, Chad
Posted by: don lewis | February 25, 2008 at 09:30 PM
You seem to have married well, Glenn. I've been enjoying your wife's little cameos in your blog.
Posted by: Tim Lucas | February 26, 2008 at 12:58 AM
You don't know the half of it, Tim. My Lovely Wife, now blushing, sends best regards to both you and your lovely wife, Donna. She's a fan, although it's true she didn't exactly relish carrying my copy of ATCOTD up three flights of stairs when it arrived while I was at Toronto...
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | February 26, 2008 at 09:41 AM
I love the Oscars and their tackiness. I just feel like the element of the unexpected has been completely drained out of it. In years past I was many things, but I was not bored. No, seriously, I wasn't. At worst I would sit there and wait for Cher to show up or Elizabeth Taylor to screw up her Teleprompter-reading.
as for the pool, I was way low in the finishing. I basically just tried to think of it as buying somebody at the party a drink.
Posted by: Campaspe | February 27, 2008 at 09:05 PM
Don't get me wrong, Campaspe; I always got off on the tackiness of the old-school Oscars; but that particular kind of kitsch can't be achieved self-consciously, and our moment is all about monumental self-consciousness. What will ever top the epochal Steve Lawrence/Sammy Davis Jr. "Not Even Nominated" medley, and more important, when will the damn thing show up on YouTube?
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | February 27, 2008 at 11:49 PM