Salon.com > The Kids Are All Right

Great Oscar debate: Is Natalie Portman overrated?

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:45:00 +0000

Matt Zoller Seitz: First things first: This has been an absolutely tremendous year for performances by young female actress in complex leading roles. You've got Michelle Williams in two notable movies, and Jennifer Lawrence in "Winter's Bone," and Mary Tsoni in "Dogtooth," and Kate Jarvis in Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank," which you liked, too. And Hailee Steinfield, who's nominated as best supporting actress for the Coen brothers' "True Grit" remake but should be in this category, because as Mattie Ross, she carries the movie. It's totally her movie. Every minute is about the young adolescent heroine, Mattie Ross, and what this adventure meant to her, and took from her. Yet she's in the supporting category, and Jeff Bridges, whose Rooster Cogburn is clearly a supporting character, is in the lead category! It's maybe the most absurd example of tactical nomination displacement since Timothy Hutton in "Ordinary People," who was nominated for supporting actor (and won) even though that movie is almost entirely about his character.

Winners and losers of today’s Oscar noms

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:20:00 +0000

If the Kabuki theater of the 2011 Oscar race is to yield any major surprises -- let alone any of the half-baked sociological talking points so beloved by the media -- that wasn't evident in Tuesday morning's nominations for the 83rd Academy Awards. In fact, if there's anything strange about this year's Oscars, it's how predictable they appear.

Conventional wisdom has held for months that "The King's Speech" and "The Social Network," a pair of handsome and talky comedy-drama blends with biographical and historical roots, were the best-picture front-runners, and so it appears. (Furthermore, the latter will win, and I don't care how much tea-leaf reading to the contrary you hear in coming weeks.) Best actress is perceived as a race between Annette Bening's lesbian mom in "The Kids Are All Right" and Natalie Portman's demented ballerina in "Black Swan," and best actor as a race between Colin Firth, for his richly sympathetic portrayal of the stuttering King George VI in "The King's Speech," and, well, nobody in particular. Done and done.

Early Oscar odds: “Inception” vs. “Social Network”

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:01:00 +0000

Question: Is it too unbearably early to begin thinking about the annual winter circus that is Oscar season? Answer: Never! Or at least not after the Gotham Independent Film Awards nominations, the unofficial starting gun of award-mania, have gotten us started.

Let me save your comment-typin' fingers a workout and stipulate the following: No, the Oscars are no indication of quality, historically speaking; yes, the best films of the year (whether by my standards or yours) are often overlooked; and yes, covering movies by focusing overmuch on the Oscar race resembles the horse-race coverage of American politics and signifies the downfall of journalism in particular and civilization in general. But you want to know about it anyway, so let's move on. (Check out my Movie List for an utterly subjective and totally non-market-driven ranking of the year's best and worst movies.)

Cinema’s most pivotal gay sex scenes

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:01:00 +0000

Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are getting rave reviews for their new movie, "The Kids Are All Right," which concerns two lesbians whose lives are turned upside down when their teenage children invite their sperm donor father, played by Mark Ruffalo, into their lives. Tears, joy, hilarity and awkward dinner parties ensue.

Yes, the movie's family matters matter, but the film also deserves note for its frank and lighthearted depiction of lesbian sex. In one memorable scene, the women get it on in their suburban bedroom while watching their favorite gay porn, which features two muscular farmhands. Meanwhile, under the covers, Moore's character uses a vibrator on her increasingly frustrated wife. Things are going well until a mishap with the television's volume blasts gay porn grunting throughout the entire household. The scene isn't exactly sexy, no, but it's refreshing to see lesbian sexuality portrayed with a respect and humor rarely exhibited in mainstream movies.

Of course, Hollywood's approach to gay sex hasn't always been so straightforward. The treatment of gays in movies has changed tremendously over the past few decades. Here we review 9 of the most pivotal gay and lesbian sex scenes in cinematic history.

“The Kids Are All Right”: The gay-marriage movie America needs

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 01:01:00 +0000

Filmmaker Lisa Cholodenko can only hope that her lesbian-marriage comedy "The Kids Are All Right" can attract the degree of attention and animosity from the family-values right that it has already attracted from certain quarters of the lesbian and gay community. When I wrote two pieces about the film from Sundance in January, the feedback from Salon readers -- an unscientific sample, I grant you -- was strident and at least partly hostile.

By making a movie in which a pair of married lesbians are played by well-known hetero actresses Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, and in which one partner (Jules, played by Moore) has an affair with a straight man, Cholodenko and co-writer Stuart Blumberg capitulate -- in some people's view -- to a whole set of "Celluloid Closet"-type homophobic stereotypes, and possibly lend aid and comfort to the right-wing view of homosexuality as a "lifestyle choice." Furthermore, Cholodenko doesn't seem terribly concerned about it. Before our Sundance interview, I read her a few examples from the first wave of critical comments and she laughed them off: "Maybe those people need to take their pink megaphone somewhere else."