Salon.com > Will Di Novi

“In Memoriam”: Oscar mourns the dead

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:01:00 +0000

We love to hate the Oscars. We seethe with resentment when the Academy passes over bold and original talent, lavishing nominations on sentimental standbys and flavors of the month. We sting from the piercing epiphany, the movie lover's equivalent to uncovering the myth of Santa Claus, that many Oscar voters are simply too busy making movies to watch all the nominated films. We gnash our teeth during the big show itself, as blowhards of merely moderate talent preen and posture before the cameras, locking us in the inter-galactic blast radius of their egos. It's not hard to imagine the stream of half-masticated snack food that will hurtle across living rooms from L.A. to Lahore when James Cameron, newly recrowned King of the World, asks for a moment of silence to honor all who perished in the Na'vi insurgency.

Films of the decade: “Chop Shop”

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:30:00 +0000

Back in 2008, long before the Obama juggernaut was humbled by double-digit unemployment and the war in Afghanistan, a film entered American theaters that seemed to capture the spirit of the political and cultural moment. The story of a young boy defying abject poverty to pursue his dreams, it spoke to the harsh realities that Americans were enduring in the twilight years of the Bush administration, as well as to the hopeful, multiracial future embodied by the half-Kenyan, half-Kansan's historic ascent. Ramin Bahrani's "Chop Shop" demonstrated that you didn’t have to go all the way to Mumbai to make a serious film about poverty and that some of the decade's greatest cinema shared at least one thing in common with such inner-city squalor. It was often lurking right around the corner, in places familiar yet unexpected.