the groundhog day project

To think, I only managed yesterday to get through the first three paragraphs of Mary McNamara's Los Angeles Times piece--"Oscars 2016: It's time for Hollywood to stop defining great drama as white men battling adversity." And the first paragraph was just one line. Meanwhile, I've got a screener of Spotlight playing right now. Immediately, I notice the music. Spotlight isn't nominated for Original Score. It is nominated for Best Picture, of course, which is why I'm watching it again this week. It's also nominated for Film Editing, Original Screenplay, Director Tom McCarthy, Supporting Actress Rachel McAdams and Supporting Actor Mark Ruffalo. I've seen a few people and at least one of the articles in this stack in front of me (but I'm not seeing which one at the moment) complain that Ruffalo just puts on an accent. I'm more impressed by his performance, I suppose. It feels like much more than just an accent. He's got a different dem...

As a screener of The Big Short plays and I must do my best not to get angry at Wall Street, I really don't want to talk about #OscarsSoWhite today. Spent too much of the last couple days arguing pointlessly about the topic on Facebook and Twitter. A little tired of it... which bothers me, actually. Inevitably it will come up because I have decided to get into the McNamara piece from the Los Angeles Times and that hinges on the race thing. But, I want to talk about McNamara's other angle--plot. See, she starts off with some hyperbole--"The winner of the 2016 Oscar in practically every category is ... white men facing adversity." She's making a point about it being white men, of course, but as she goes she also angles in on the "facing adversity" charge. Her take on the Best Picture nominees: "...with a few notable exceptions, follow a dishearteningly repetitive story line of white men triumphing over enormous odds." Because, of course, triu...

Robin Thede made a point I liked last night on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore ; she said, referring to black people of course, "You can't say in one breath how proud we are when Hale and Mo'Nique and Denzel and all those people win but then when we're not in there say that we don't care." On the one hand, I agree, it's a little two-faced. On the other hand, they should care all the time. And, so should we. So should everybody. As I said yesterday , the racial makeup and the racial prejudices in the Oscar nominations and the Academy membership do matter. Mary McNamara explains it well--and this was why I didn't get into critiquing her yesterday. She writes in the Los Angeles Times : ...a growing chorus wants to know why anyone really cares. With all the troubles in the world, do we really need to worry that a bunch of relatively rich and privileged filmmakers are mad that their movies didn't get an Oscar nomination? So what if the nominees ...

#OscarsSoWhite continues. Jada Pinkett Smith (married of course to Will Smith, who is one of the oft cited actors of colour who could/should have been nominated for an Oscar this year) put out a few tweets and then a video about boycotting the Oscars. Spike Lee joined her. So did Michael Moore. One person that specifically spoke out against Jada was her husband's old costar from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air , Janet Hubert. But, she had to go and start with a somewhat sexist-- I'm getting ahead of myself. How about Jada's tweets first, set some context beyond just the fact that in the past ten years worth of acting nominations (just to narrow it down to one field), the Academy had only nominated 26 people of colour and 174 white people. Colourless people, if you will. Because the Academy was last reported as being 94% white and 54% over the age of 60 (with an average age of about 62), so this is an organization of, you know, old white men. Anyway, Jada's tweets: At th...