Oscars 2018

I looked up "Inclusion Rider"--Steppenwolf B-side from '68. I'm not big on the rah-rah, so I had to flee from Frances McDormand.

the entire thing was a liberal issue checklist for the Whole Foods demo

Tom D, at least Judi Dench wasn't even nominated this time

Tomboto, go see Phantom Thread and then we can podcast about it

I only got 20/24 correct so I got no prizes in the online contest I co-won last year (missed both Blade Runner awards). I did beat the Slant guys at least (sorry, honeybunch).

Not a lot of people know this but A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS was the first Best Picture winner to feature fish fucking

— Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt) March 5, 2018

I was watching on dvr on a slight delay and had to fast forward through that greatest showman song it was so fucking irritating. I know we all like to make fun of the sufjan but that was a nice (and short performance) and I liked seeing Annie Clark and Chris Thile up there. Other performances were all pretty great too.

Chris Thile is a miracle of a musician tbh

It was a big mistake not having the Showman singer wearing her bearded-lady makeup/costume

"Dear Basketball was terrible of course it won"

I'm shocked they gave an oscar to someone widely assumed to be a rapist this year.

and no one booed him

You're shocked that Angelenos voted for a Laker?

I'm shocked they did with everything else going on, yes. slightly less shocked that they voted for Oldman considering his reputation as well but maybe they feel taht's far enough in the past.

i'm really glad Alison Janney won. I thought she was amazing in I Tonya (so was Margot Robbie actually).

Janney's pause, point, glance into the camera and then "I did it all on my own!" before then composing herself and thanking a ton of people was officially A Great Moment.

or just a good joke.

For a few seconds this morning I forgot what won Best Picture.

i never saw what everyone else saw in janney's performance - seemed like a very very good impression or caricature but not a ton of notes to play. my pick was metcalf followed by manville, but i also haven't seen mudbound.

I don't mind performers doing goon show imitations of people but Janney did nothing with the already pallid script.

surely making dubious dull decisions is the point of the Oscars?

Roger Deakins finally wins his Oscar for Air America!

— Matt Prigge (@mattprigge) March 5, 2018

btw: Lesley Manville is in the Gary Oldman Ex-Wives Club, along with Uma Thurman. Neither of them are the one he allegedly hit in the face with a phone (when phones were heavy).

Beatty fish fuck!

This is a pretty good (pre-show) rundown of the contenders by A.S. Hamrah, tho I don't share all the brickbats or praise:

Allison Janney goes beyond simple ludicrousness. Her performance, equipped with shoulder parrot and emphysema hose, exhales malice in an anti-Lady Bird evocation of working-class motherhood....

Call Me by Your Name’s strength is that it really does seem like the character played by Timothée Chalamet made the film himself. Who else but an actual actor-director would end his film by staring tearfully into a fireplace in winter because he’s realized he will always be separate from other human beings, even though he spent last summer having sex in Lombardy with two kind and very attractive people (Armie Hammer and Esther Garrel)? The first Sufjan Stevens song that interrupts the movie so we can concentrate on nature for a few minutes also indicates the hand of Chalamet’s Elio at work, as he remembers how beautiful it was and how nothing hurt, before he found out on that last trip that Hammer’s Oliver was going to start dancing in public to “Love My Way” again.

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/sanctuaries-of-trust-and-caring/

haha oh lord

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/mar/05/frances-mcdormand-oscar-stolen-arrest

Rich people throwing hot dogs at working people in a movie theater will have to suffice until we get Medicare for all. #Oscars

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) March 5, 2018

as the L.A. Times put it, "Armie Hammer had a hot dog cannon at the Oscars and nothing else matters"

and here i thought it was J-Law holding a wine glass while stepping over a seat that made life worth living.

wait, does McDormand's publicist not mean a Double Double? fake news imo

I did not even notice that James Ivory's shirtfront had an image of Timothee Chalamet.

For a few seconds this morning I forgot what won Best Picture.
― Josh in Chicago

Usually takes longer than a day, but I do believe that's where this one's headed: Best Pictures that people barely remember and never talk about. The Out of Africa/Shakespeare in Love/King's Speech group of Best Pictures. (American Beauty at least has the advantage of being hated by most people.) In fairness, I haven't seen it. I never will--zero appeal.

I haven't seen it either (want to, though, because I often like del Toro), but whether people like it or not, it is still a much weirder Oscar winner than something like Out of Africa or The King's Speech--films that are only notable for being Best Picture winners or, more generally, the kinds of things that usually win Best Picture. While Get Out winning might have made a bigger statement, it is still represents an embrace of the kind of genre cinema that Oscar usually ignores.

Ivory was quite touching in his speech. Lots made about Plummer's age etc, but I imagine this is probably the last time Ivory will be nominated or even work on a film; lovely way to end his career if so.

Trying to step back here...I didn't care for Get Out, but it'll be remembered; the comparison that I saw the other day to Dr. Strangelove made sense to me. Lady Bird will still be seen and footnoted years from now. You're right that The Shape of Water doesn't really fit the Masterpiece Theatre stamp of those other three I mentioned, and del Toro has made other critically acclaimed films, but it just strikes me as something that'll quickly be forgotten. I can't really defend that statement, and I'm talking about something I haven't seen--no offense intended to anyone who liked the film. Just a feeling.

The atomization of pop culture has made Oscar winners irrelevant for a while. It still results in box office if the movie's still out -- I think The King's Speech made most of its (considerable) American profits in the weeks before and after its win -- but for millions of people why go to the theater when Netflix exists?

Cool xp

It was an utterly magical film fyi

To clemenza's point, I will say this: I am currently working as a Teaching Assistant for a class on Fantasy Fiction. At the beginning of today's class, the prof talked about del Toro's speech w/r/t the recognition of Fantasy as Serious Art, with her point essentially being "this is what I'm always saying!" (things like Fantasy Fiction are good for getting butts in seats, but maybe not taken as seriously within English departments). When we were speaking after class, I asked her if she'd seen The Shape of Water, to which she simply replied "No."

I'm out of my element there, too. Is The Shape of Water viewed as sci-fi, fantasy, or some kind of hybrid? I know a pure sci-fi film has never won Best Picture, but one of the Lord of the Rings films won, so there's been at least one previous fantasy winner.

I'm whispering in my ear, "Just see the film or shut up." So I'll shut up.

it's really not sci fi at all

that n+1 article that Morbius posted is so good, so funny and smart.

Back in the 1990s, I predicted—maybe it was after I saw Happiness—that sound design would soon get so extreme there would be a movie in which we heard not just the sound of salt leaving a salt shaker, but also the sound of it hitting the food... Since I have a touch of Roderick Usher in me, I am sympathetic to Woodcock’s bristling. As sound design has become more intrusive in movies, my relationship with it has deteriorated. While in real life I do not notice audible eating and drinking, in the movies every moment of intimate conversation over a drink has become a symphony of slurp I can’t ignore. People attracted to working in sound design no doubt have sensitive ears. But directors have got to dial this down. Either that or ban breakfast cereal from their movies. In Logan, the noise of Dafne Keen eating corn flakes sounded like a recording of John Goodman on a gravel road in work boots. I think she ate one of her teeth. The literalism of this kind of sound design, in which every action depicted on screen must have an accompanying sound, even if you would never notice that sound in real life, is as distracting as an unasked for pot of tea shuffled into the room when you are working.

A. S. Hamrah is my new favourite journalist.

i’d call it magical realism if anything. i liked it but it was quite inoffensive and didn’t do anything mind blowing.

It's an adventure movie.

it was lovely! and i love doug jones.

it's really not sci fi at all

― Clay, Monday, March 5, 2018 7:16 PM

otm

I suppose I've been working on the premise that it is a lot like Pan's Labyrinth--somewhere on the border between Fantasy and Magic Realism.

xpost -- ...there really are fish people?

(xpost) I can't let that one pass by: The Shape of Water has a Dougie Jones too? This is spinning out of control...

DOUGIE: "of control."

The film ends by illustrating the reason W. C. Fields gave for not drinking water: fish fuck in it.

xpost -- ...there really are fish people?

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 6 March 2018 02:08 (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is every fiction fantasy?

This movie isn't about the existence of origin of fishboy. Its not interested in the wider questions of his a fishboy changes the world. It's not particularly even about that which makes him fantastical.

It's about a woman falling in love with him and breaking him out of captivity.

Right I'm turning off this fucking predictive text shits unbearable

(xpost) Lynch should have called him Dougie Two Times, like in Goodfellas. Maybe even Dougie Three Times.

Yeah that was what I found refreshing tbh - it drops you into this world where people are capturing aquamen and experimenting on them and no one's being particularly secretive about it (the fucking cleaners get to gawp at all the goings on ffs). It just is, no one seems suprised by it.

Deux-guy