Salon.com > Oscars http://www.salon.com Wed, 30 May 2012 06:12:34 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Digging deep for the Oscars’ most memorable moments http://www.salon.com/2012/02/27/oscars_most_memorable_moments/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/27/oscars_most_memorable_moments/#comments Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12437281 The only thing that Hollywood loves more than itself is its past. And that slavish attention to nostalgia could not have been more evident Sunday, when perennial Oscar host Billy Crystal was trotted out after an eight-year hiatus, and the theme of the evening was, oh, I don't know, something about the magic of the movies. That whole James Franco and Anne Hathaway "youth" thing of last year a distant memory and those five minutes we thought Eddie Murphy would host a somewhat less distant one, this year's Oscars were awash in a self-congratulatory past. Unsurprising, maybe, given how many of the evening's big winners were movies set in the dreamy past of the Depression and the pre-civil rights era South. Magical! And though we say it every year, my God, this was truly one of the dullest, blandest evenings of millionaires slapping each other on the back ever. A show bloated with Reese Witherspoon's praise for "Overboard" couldn't spare three minutes to let Bret McKenzie perform his winning "Man or Muppet"? Is nothing sacred? But there were still a few surprises and oddities and genuine moments of joy to be had. We endured the whole three-hour broadcast to whittle down our 10 standout moments.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/27/oscars_most_memorable_moments/feed/ 29 Oscars 2012: The movies’ most painful night http://www.salon.com/2012/02/27/oscar_2012_the_movies_most_painful_night/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/27/oscar_2012_the_movies_most_painful_night/#comments Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:05:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12437821 Maybe the joke about George Clooney kissing Billy Crystal in a fake scene from "The Descendants" would have been funnier if Crystal didn't actually look like an old lady. That moment was awkward -- like virtually everything else about Sunday's 84th Academy Awards, -- but  it was also confusing. Was George supposed to be delivering a goodbye smooch to his wife, or his mom? Seconds later, we were treated to Crystal in blackface, or at least in tan-face, sorta-kinda doing Sammy Davis Jr. Extra-double awkward and confusing! Even if you've heard of Davis (and half the people watching probably hadn't), it took several beats to grasp exactly what target Crystal was shooting for. (It's been more than 25 years since Crystal played Davis on "Saturday Night Live.") Liberace's black half-sister, perhaps?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/27/oscar_2012_the_movies_most_painful_night/feed/ 160 LIVEBLOG: Oscars’ silent night http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/liveblog_the_oscars/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/liveblog_the_oscars/#comments Sun, 26 Feb 2012 22:15:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12427611 Join Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams (@embeedub), Tracy Clark Flory (@tracyclarkflory) and Laura Miller (@magiciansbook) as we live-tweet Hollywood's big night, along with Salon contributors Roger Catlin (@rcatlin) and Michael Barthel (@michaelbarthel). We'll also be RT-ing outside tweets; to participate, mark your tweets with #salonoscars.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/liveblog_the_oscars/feed/ 7 The Oscars’ woman problem http://www.salon.com/2012/02/25/the_oscars_woman_problem/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/25/the_oscars_woman_problem/#comments Sat, 25 Feb 2012 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12426151 Hollywood has long had a problem with women, but with Kathryn Bigelow's historic best director Oscar in 2010 for "The Hurt Locker," it looked like things might be slowly changing. And in 2011, the box-office success of "Bridesmaids," a raunchy comedy written by and starring women, led to predictions that Hollywood was finally ready to recognize the reality that female-centric movies could be as profitable as man-centric movies. While no industry that employs Michael Bay can really be considered a safe space, more women in production positions might mean better depictions of women, more roles for older actresses, and more influence at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that awards the Oscars.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/25/the_oscars_woman_problem/feed/ 43 Stop policing black actresses http://www.salon.com/2012/02/25/stop_policing_black_actresses/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/25/stop_policing_black_actresses/#comments Sat, 25 Feb 2012 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12424581 Months after its release, and perhaps in spite of the Academy Award nominations and Golden Globe awards garnered by two of its actresses, "The Help" continues to court controversy.  Such was the case recently when Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer visited the set of "The Tavis Smiley Show," and the host raised long-standing questions about why the actresses accepted roles that he felt diminished their humanity and that of other African-Americans. Smiley admitted disappointment that Davis and Spencer were being feted for playing the same role — as domestics — that earned Hattie McDaniel the first Oscar for an African-American for her role as “Mammy” in the film "Gone With the Wind" 73 years ago. Underlying Smiley’s gentle admonishment of Davis and Spencer is the simple question: Has so little changed that African-Americans are still tethered to the same stereotypical roles that defined their presence in mainstream American media nearly a century ago?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/25/stop_policing_black_actresses/feed/ 46 The remarkable reinvention of Brad Pitt http://www.salon.com/2012/02/25/the_remarkable_reinvention_of_brad_pitt/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/25/the_remarkable_reinvention_of_brad_pitt/#comments Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12427921 In all honesty, it took watching Brad Pitt's performance at the Cannes Film Festival last spring for me to consider him in a new light. I don't entirely mean Pitt's fine performance on screen as Mr. O'Brien, the tormented, hard-ass midcentury paterfamilias of Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life," although that helped too. I mostly mean his even better performance as the world's sexiest movie star attending the world's most glamorous film festival, which struck a perfect balance between irony and sincerity.

When I encountered Pitt at a press conference, he was dressed positively to the nines, in an outfit that seemed to radiate quotation marks: white silk T-shirt under white linen jacket, enormous gold-frame sunglasses, piles of gold chains, a delicious tan and four days' worth of carefully groomed stubble. But instead of the monosyllabic, Bob Dylan-style too-cool-for-school attitude you might expect to go along with that, Pitt was unfailingly polite and forthcoming, at least as far as the nutso surroundings would permit. He answered questions about his religious beliefs (slim to none); his family life both growing up in small-town Missouri and today, as a globetrotting and immensely famous dad; his relationships with his own father and own children, and almost anything else people came up with.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/25/the_remarkable_reinvention_of_brad_pitt/feed/ 55 The secret science of stardom http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_secret_science_of_stardom/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_secret_science_of_stardom/#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2012 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12424281 This Sunday, hundreds of Hollywood's brightest stars will cram into the Academy Awards. Among them will be George Clooney, Michelle Williams and many of the best-known names of the entertainment industry -- along with lots and lots of people you've barely heard of, forming an endless stream of anonymous penguins and haute couture gowns.

It’s not exactly headline news that being nominated for an Oscar can catapult the careers and celebrity status of newcomers like Jennifer Lawrence. What most people don’t know is that Oscar night is even more important to the invited non-nominees – those donning tuxes, shimmering sequined dresses and spray tans, but with little discernible talent: the Mandy Moores and Maria Menounos' of the world.

The Oscars are a key part of the secret economy of celebrity. A glance at the glossies at the grocery check-out aisle makes it clear that how and where a celebrity gets photographed can catapult -- or sink -- a career. But over the course of my research, I've discovered that the US Weekly factor has a much larger impact than most people imagine. In fact, it’s not just getting photographed but exactly where one gets photographed -- including the Oscars -- that may explain a star’s fortunes in Hollywood.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_secret_science_of_stardom/feed/ 9 The Oscars’ growing sequel problem http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_oscars_growing_sequel_problem/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_oscars_growing_sequel_problem/#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:01:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12423611 Three years ago, the Oscars announced the biggest change in its workings in decades. It expanded the best picture lineup to 10 films, up from five. We've seen two Oscarcasts since; the third one will be broadcast this Sunday on ABC.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, which puts on the show, doesn't admit it, but the tweaks are born of a concern about one thing and one thing only: TV ratings. The academy makes a mint each year off the broadcast, traditionally one of the year's biggest shows. But the trend line for viewership has been heading downward for more than a decade. The academy's not in the poorhouse or anything; it can still charge an ever-growing premium for advertising, of course. But the show's not cheap, either, and those declining ratings are a very real indicator of the once fabled awards show's fading glory.

Here's the academy's biggest, and growing, problem: The movies winning Oscars are movies that nobody has heard about -- and, as a result, nobody is tuning in.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_oscars_growing_sequel_problem/feed/ 42 The Oscars’ hated savior http://www.salon.com/2012/02/23/the_oscars_hated_savior/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/23/the_oscars_hated_savior/#comments Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12410671 The most surprising moment of last year’s Academy Awards broadcast occurred a little bit past the halfway mark, when a well-tanned, kewpie-faced Billy Crystal showed up for an unbilled cameo. It had been a long night: Hosts Anne Hathaway and James Franco had been struggling, sometimes nobly, through a series of erratic comedy bits, while many of the other presenters had reverted to that dead-eyed, forced-gravitas zombie-state unique to awards shows and North Korean news reports. So when Crystal stepped into this humdrum thunderdome, the response was a sustained, rapturous standing ovation—the sort of outpouring Oscar attendees normally reserve for the newly and/or nearly dead. The message was clear. These people wanted Billy back.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/23/the_oscars_hated_savior/feed/ 41 How Viola Davis took Meryl Streep’s Oscar http://www.salon.com/2012/02/23/how_viola_davis_took_meryl_streeps_oscar/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/23/how_viola_davis_took_meryl_streeps_oscar/#comments Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12406151 When I saw Viola Davis across the room, wearing a shimmering pink sheath dress, I wasn't quite sure what she was doing there. This was at the New York Film Critics Circle's awards dinner in January, a relatively intimate event that has a history of bringing out the stars. But it's not the Oscars or the SAG Awards or the Golden Globes; there are no TV cameras and no red carpet to work. More to the point, the awards are announced in advance, and Davis hadn't won anything. Maybe she'd have turned up anyway to support Jessica Chastain, her costar in "The Help," who was winning a supporting-actress award, but Davis was mostly on hand to introduce Meryl Streep, who had won the group's best actress award for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/23/how_viola_davis_took_meryl_streeps_oscar/feed/ 41 The Oscars’ old, white, male problem http://www.salon.com/2012/02/21/the_oscars_old_white_male_problem/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/21/the_oscars_old_white_male_problem/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:50:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12397881 On one hand, the evidence dredged up by an extensive Los Angeles Times investigation into the membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is damning: The Oscars are being decided by 5,765 voting members (itself a smaller number than usually reported) who are 94 percent white. The membership is also 77 percent male and 86 percent over the age of 50. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is drastically unrepresentative of the United States population as a whole, which is about 36 percent non-white and 51 percent female. The median age of all Americans is 36.8 years, meaning half the population is younger than that and half older.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/21/the_oscars_old_white_male_problem/feed/ 36 The Oscar favorite no one really likes http://www.salon.com/2012/02/18/the_oscar_favorite_no_one_really_likes/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/18/the_oscar_favorite_no_one_really_likes/#comments Sat, 18 Feb 2012 22:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12381071 I can't be the only person who had a mixed, double reaction to George Clooney's big emotional scene near the end of Alexander Payne's "The Descendants," which seems destined to end up as the also-ran or bridegroom in this year's Oscar race. Wearing his bad haircut, his Hawaiian shirt and his 15 extra pounds as Honolulu lawyer Matt King, Clooney bends over his recumbent wife in her hospital bed, murmuring things to her that I won't specify, in case you haven't seen the movie yet. He calls her "my joy and my pain," lets a quite convincing tear run down his face, and leaves the audience digging for tissues.

Sure, the moment affected me -- but there was both something Pavlovian and something willed about the way I was affected. Part of me was right there with Matt and the severely ill wife he's learned a lot of unsettling things about, the daughters he's just getting to know and the big decision about selling unspoiled land on Kauai to developers that still lies ahead of him. (As if anybody in the viewing audience believes for a second that George Clooney is going to do that!) And part of me was thinking, "Boy, George is really acting his ass off right here, isn't he? I'm supposed to cry, right?"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/18/the_oscar_favorite_no_one_really_likes/feed/ 111 “Undefeated”: An Oscar-friendly inner-city football odyssey http://www.salon.com/2012/02/16/undefeated_an_oscar_friendly_inner_city_football_odyssey/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/16/undefeated_an_oscar_friendly_inner_city_football_odyssey/#comments Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12365671 If puzzling out the Oscar vote involves trying to mind-read the electorate of the world's weirdest small town, then the Academy's documentary category is more like a tiny Alpine village. People watching the Oscar ceremony probably don't realize that the best documentary award is not voted on by the entire membership (although that's supposed to change next year). Michael Moore recently observed that when a documentary filmmaker gets to stand on the stage of the Kodak Theatre and thank the Academy, he or she is really thanking 5 percent of the Academy -- and Moore's guess was way too high.

In fact, there are reportedly 157 members in the Academy's documentary branch, which is about 2.5 percent of the total membership. Until recently that tiny group was seen as a bunch of hidebound conservatives, notoriously resistant to new aesthetic and narrative approaches to documentary film. There's really no way to exaggerate the strangeness of this category over the years, or the number of important films that have been completely overlooked. The most famous non-nominees include "The Thin Blue Line," "Roger & Me," "28 Up," "Hoop Dreams" and "Grizzly Man," and it's absolutely not coincidental that I've just cited films by Moore, Werner Herzog, Steve James and Errol Morris, all of them controversial figures whose work flies in the face of long-standing cinéma-vérité convention.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/16/undefeated_an_oscar_friendly_inner_city_football_odyssey/feed/ 3 Oscar-nominated Oldman still feels Globe snub http://www.salon.com/2012/02/15/interview_gary_oldman_talks_about_his_first_oscar_nomination/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/15/interview_gary_oldman_talks_about_his_first_oscar_nomination/#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12360411 A woman in the audience gets up to ask Gary Oldman a question. He's finally been nominated for an Academy Award, 26 years after his breakthrough performance in "Sid and Nancy," she says, but it's for the quietest and most subdued role of his entire career. He has played Beethoven and Dracula and Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as Sid Vicious; does he regret that "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" didn't allow him to show more emotional range?

Oldman is a reflective, soft-spoken fellow who considers questions carefully before answering them, but he doesn't have to think about this one. "It was greatly liberating, powerfully liberating, to play George Smiley," he says. If he plays a character who's called upon to cry, Oldman explains, "Those are Gary's tears. They have to be real. I've had to feel that grief or that anger, and then the performance is contaminated by that emotion." With Smiley, he goes on, he didn't have to display that emotion on the outside; the character is a profoundly melancholy, even tragic figure, but all that emotion is bottled up inside, in the classic English style.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/15/interview_gary_oldman_talks_about_his_first_oscar_nomination/feed/ 19 And the Oscar goes to … “Twilight”! http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/and_the_oscar_goes_to_twilight/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/and_the_oscar_goes_to_twilight/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:10:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12327781 I'm here to make a modest proposal. What if the Oscars -- an imaginary Oscars, a thought-experiment Oscars, the Oscars of an alternate universe -- honored movies that people actually liked?

No, I know, I know -- they sometimes do, pretty much on the stopped-clock-occasionally-correct principle. And somebody must like each of this year's best-picture nominees, with the possible exception of the universally allergenic "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close." (I appreciated one reader's recent comment that the hidden virtue of that film lay in combining the annual quota of schmaltzy Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock vehicles into one compact package.) After all, the whole reason why "The Artist" appears to be the front-runner is because it's charming and unpretentious and nearly impossible to dislike -- although I don't happen to think it's all that great -- whereas the other nominees do not share that quality.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/and_the_oscar_goes_to_twilight/feed/ 51 Pick of the week: A spectacular Cuban-jazz love story http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/pick_of_the_week_a_spectacular_cuban_jazz_love_story/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/pick_of_the_week_a_spectacular_cuban_jazz_love_story/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12326521 A dazzling and delightful work of modernist animation, a classic movie romance and a hip-swinging, finger-popping tale of musical revolution, "Chico & Rita" is the first big serendipitous surprise of 2012. Like a lot of other people, I saw this title on the list of Oscar-nominated animated features and gave a baffled shrug. I'd barely heard of it: A movie about Cuban jazz, co-directed by Fernando Trueba, a Spanish filmmaker who won a foreign-language Oscar in 1993 for "Belle Époque," the erotic roundelay that helped bring Penélope Cruz to international stardom. It sounded, you know, somewhat interesting, a niche film, perhaps a bit educational and spinachy.

Well, I'm here to tell you that the niche for "Chico & Rita" includes you, if you are interested in music or art or movies or love. Or, for that matter, in Havana or New York or Las Vegas or Hollywood or Paris, the cities captured with such verve, passion and style by Javier Mariscal, the well-known Spanish designer and artist who crafted this film's visual universe. (Mariscal and Trueba co-directed "Chico & Rita" with Tono Errando, who is Mariscal's brother.) Balancing the tropical primary colors of pre-revolutionary Cuba with a wintry, neon-flavored vision of bebop-era Manhattan, "Chico & Rita" is an ecstatic musical and visual celebration, taking its cues from Gauguin and Picasso in one direction, from Dizzy Gillespie and Tito Puente in another.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/pick_of_the_week_a_spectacular_cuban_jazz_love_story/feed/ 6 Oscar 2012: Chicken soup for the Hollywood soul http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/oscar_2012_chicken_soup_for_the_hollywood_soul/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/oscar_2012_chicken_soup_for_the_hollywood_soul/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12315961 It's beyond redundant to say that the Academy Awards are Hollywood's way of making itself feel better. Self-congratulation is the foundational axiom of the whole enterprise, which for many years amounted to a version of American triumphalism. We had the most powerful nation in the world and the dominant manufacturing economy, and nothing symbolized the global hegemony of American culture and values like the worldwide popularity of America's dream factory.

If in those days the Oscar campaign was a question of burnishing the imperial brass, this year it's something quite different. These are the Oscars of wounded dads and autistic kids, of orphans in love with old movies and lonely guys struggling to break free of nostalgia. When you look at this year's nominated films, it's not like there'a a tenuous theme that halfway threads them together. There's more like a torrent of male grief, sadness and loss that pretty well drowns you. These are the maudlin Oscars, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past"; the Therapy Oscars, the Oscars of Healing, the Oscars of Chicken Soup for the Hollywood Soul. I'm just not sure the therapy is likely to meet the patient's needs.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/oscar_2012_chicken_soup_for_the_hollywood_soul/feed/ 45 Salon’s Oscars picks http://www.salon.com/2012/01/25/salons_oscars_picks/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/25/salons_oscars_picks/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12229421 You can read the usual political-junkie analysis of Tuesday morning’s Academy Award nominations almost anywhere else, and it's not as if anything that happened today changed the horse race too much. I’m definitely going to allow myself to ventilate a little rage against the Academy for its unforgivable omissions – chant along with me: Al-Bert BROOKS! Al-Bert BROOKS! – and for showering so much love on namby-pamby, pseudo-significant, middle-of-the-road crapola like “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” (Ask me how I feel about that movie sometime. I might tell you!)

But the Oscars we have are the Oscars we have. So I want to lobby here for who really should win now, given the unfortunate but undeniable reality that Brooks and Kirsten Dunst and Tilda Swinton and Michael Fassbender, et al., are out of the picture.

BEST PICTURE

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/25/salons_oscars_picks/feed/ 35 The Oscar race begins http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/the_oscar_race_begins/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/the_oscar_race_begins/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12216921 This year's Oscar nominees were announced this morning in Beverly Hills -- and fans of "Hugo" and "The Artist" (which lead the pack with 11 and 10 nominations, respectively) will find plenty of cause to celebrate. If you didn't catch the broadcast, you can watch it below, or see the full list of nominees here.

Click through the following slide show to see the nominees in the four main acting categories.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/the_oscar_race_begins/feed/ 5 The Oscar nominations we’re hoping for http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/oscar_nominations_were_still_hoping_to_see/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/oscar_nominations_were_still_hoping_to_see/#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:25:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12164101 With the first round of Oscar voting about to close, and the announcement of this year's Academy Award nominees set for the morning of Jan. 24, those of us who follow this circus -- in spite of our better judgment, perhaps -- are still hoping for miracles. Now, it's one thing for me to offer a whole bunch of subjective blather about what I think the best films of the year are (and, let's face it, I've spent the whole year doing that). It's quite another to suggest things that lie within the penumbra of plausibility -- award candidates Academy voters might just consider, should their leathery souls be touched by the better angels of their nature.

That's the assignment for today: Films, filmmakers and actors who clearly deserve awards consideration, who would definitely receive it in a universe superior to this one, and who still have some kind of shot even in the cold, hard world of reality. If you're warming up your comment-writing fingers to accuse me of elitist snobbery, please note that we are not discussing films or actors that probably or certainly will be nominated, no matter how deserving they may be. I'll be as happy as a Pismo clam dressed in lemon butter to see George Clooney and Brad Pitt get their best-actor nominations this year; they were both terrific. But I won't pretend to be surprised. (Ditto for Meryl Streep, Michelle Williams, Albert Brooks, Terrence Malick, Martin Scorsese, and so on.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/oscar_nominations_were_still_hoping_to_see/feed/ 22