the groundhog day project

Opening shot of The Revenant : Hugh Glass and his Native American wife and child. That's one white guy, and two people of colour. Suck it, Jada Pinkett Smith. Or, you know, watch the rest of the movie, which focuses quite a bit on the white guys. Plus, that wife and kid are soon dead. But, that sort of anecdotal evidence is all the rage among the... Whatever you would call the anti-#OscarsSoWhite crowd. Republicans? There's a list going around among the crazy conservative groups I follow on Facebook, a list of something like 56 people of colour who have won Oscars in the past 16 or so years. I went after the list on Facebook with some math pointing out that 56 out of 1840(-ish) nominations-- And that thought got interrupted by the opening battle sequence in The Revenant . If Inarritu wins the Oscar, this is why. Not the somewhat gimmicky thing of only using natural light so his shooting time per day was reduced but a sequence like this, dozens of actors and extras, practical...

A new angle for the next week (then I mean to get back to Charlie Kaufman to end out the month): the Oscars. I talk about them off and on anyway. And as I have seen most of the films nominated, I am inclined to express opinions about them. Plus, this past week I set up my own Oscars-specific page on Facebook. I intend to get into, and probably rant for many hundreds or thousands of words about, the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, but may not get that far today. So... the plan: One best picture nominee a day, starting with Mad Max Fury Road today. I've already seen each of the eight films and wrote in detail about a few of them in this blog already, but I might get so sidetracked by Oscars business and bigger Hollywood politics--and societal standards on race and gender for that matter--that I might say very little about the films themselves this week. Not one per entry anyway. Mad Max was headed toward the storm before I even started typing today. That might be the only specific ...