Fin: 10 final thoughts before the Oscars
Help out BSR, do we need to hear from Harvey Weinstein?, two big anniversaries, a great SNL short, and more in this week’s notes column.
After what feels like the longest Oscar season in history, the Academy Awards ceremony is finally set to take place this Sunday night.
I’m not going to do category-by-category predictions or anything, although I did go through them with my colleagues on the Film Scribes Podcast, in a show that will go up sometime before Sunday.
Also, my colleague Rich Heimlich and I appeared on 6ABC Action News for an Oscar segment with the great Alicia Viterelli, which aired Thursday night at 11. It was my first ever visit to the headquarters on City Avenue, and yes, I heard The Song while waiting in the lobby.
The segment’s not online yet, but I’ll post it when it is; also the dateline is misleading, as we were not, in fact, in Hollywood, California.
At any rate, with two days to go, ten last-minute Oscar thoughts:
Either One Battle After Another or Sinners is going to win Best Picture, and I would be more than happy with either one of them. Both are all-timer movies and neither would ever be looked at in the future as an embarrassing or unworthy choice. In years when there are two clear frontrunners, that’s not often the case.
That said, can we please, please not do this?
I don’t even know what Buzzfeed’s editorial operation is at this point; they seem to have settled on ragebait with a side of emotional blackmail. The outcome of the Best Picture race is many things, but it is assuredly not a referendum on race relations or racial progress in this country.
There is, once again, not a conspiracy against Sinners. It has been a uniquely beloved and celebrated film since the first day anyone saw it. It was a massive hit, got a record number of Oscar nominations, And if it wins five or six Oscars on Sunday but not Best Picture, that will not mean it was rejected or slighted.
I’m very glad that Paul Thomas Anderson directed the version of One Battle After Another that he chose to make, and not the version preferred by the children of the Weather Underground who wrote this ludicrous New York Times op-ed. A movie treating the failed ‘60s radicals as unambiguous heroes would have much less interesting and way more boring.
Speaking of ragebait… that’s all those “brutally honest anonymous Oscar ballots” have ever been. There’s no need to read them, but if you must, please acknowledge them at that level.
I really don’t care about the thing Timothee Chalamet said about opera and ballet, or about the thing Jessie Buckley said about her boyfriend’s cat (if anything, I think it makes me like her more.) A whole lot of people nominated for Oscars this year have said and done worse things; Sean Penn alone has been spouting embarrassing nonsense in public and otherwise acting like a jackass since before Timothee Chalamet was born, and Penn is favored to win on Sunday.
No, I don’t think there’s going to be a “Norbit effect” for Jessie Buckley because The Bride! was such a flop. I’ve never really bought that there was a “Norbit effect” for Eddie Murphy, either.
There’s going to be a longer-than-usual In Memoriam segment this year, Variety reported, considering all the major deaths in the last year, aside from the expected tributes to Rob Reiner and Robert Redford.
Also in Variety, we learn that Corey Feldman is upset that he wasn’t invited to take part in the tribute to Reiner, his Stand By Me director. The tribute, per the report, will feature Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, “while standing on stage alongside other stars from the late director’s movies.” I don’t know- I think if one were to make a list of actors most closely associated with Rob Reiner who might be included in something like that, I would probably reach about 50 names — maybe even 100 — before I got to Corey.
I was reluctant to wade into this last week, but… on the BAFTA Tourette’s incident, one complaint I’ve heard is that the producers should have cut the offending moment from the broadcast. But if they had… wouldn’t have been censorship, a coverup, and controversial for a whole other reason? A critics group in Toronto just imploded, because they removed a pro-Palestine statement from an acceptance speech in their awards broadcast.
Enjoy your Oscars, everyone. I’ll have some commentary on Monday morning.
Support BSR!
For about the last decade, I’ve been a proud contributor to Broad Street Review, the Philadelphia-based arts and culture journal that provides a great deal of coverage of the local arts scene, including the sort of stuff that you can’t find anywhere else.
BSR is doing a fundraising drive this month to raise critical funds, and I wanted to put in a call to donate, and ensure the continuing health of this valuable cultural institution, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary.
Do we really need to hear from Harvey Weinstein?
The Hollywood Reporter this week ran a jailhouse interview with none other than Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced former mogul and convicted rapist who is currently incarcerated in Riker’s Island, as he waits to yet again stand trial.
