Some Thoughts on the Oscars:

Some thoughts on the Oscars after 24-hours of marination.

1. The host sets the tone: The Oscars bored you to death last year partly because hobbits had overrun the joint. The rest of it was Billy Crystal not realizing how charmless and unfunny he has become while playing anyone other than a cartoon character. As host, Crystal moved the show along with the alacrity of your deaf uncle playing charades on the first night of Hannukah. You wanted to yell "Just get to the damn presents!"

Which is why this year felt swift, jabby and wound a little tight, like a Chris Rock comedy special.  Rock set the tone by telling his standing ovation "Sit your asses down." Meaning there would be no tearful speeches, no "Yay Hollywood!" film montages, no stupid presenter banter once he took the reigns. He broke all those rules a little bit but only a little. The program clocked in at 3 1/4 hours, a full 45 minutes shorter than last year.

2. Clint Eastwood on life support: Like I've said before, while everyone I know was calling Mystic River "A Greek Tragedy on par with Oedipus", I was calling it "powerfully flawed." While everyone I know and the lady at my dry cleaner was calling Million Dollar Baby "a knockout punch to the gut," I was saying "Only if you didn't see the last act coming, which I did. From outer space."

Not because I'm genius (boy how that has been disproven!) but because everyone seems to think that we have have simply not honored Clint Eastwood enough yet. He's won just about every award possible (a previous Best Director Oscar, an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award and the mayoral seat of Carmel to name a few) and is an icon of cinema, of American masculinity. But no, we need to make sure that he gets buried in gold trinkets like the Pharoah. So who cares that Million Dollar Baby is a good-but-not-great film? Not us as we yell "more, more" while kneeling before the buldge in his tuxedo pants.

3. Who gets the tickets? Some ace reporter/blogger needs to investigate precisely who gets a seat at the Oscars and who doesn't. The Kodak Theater aint Michigan Stadium. There's maybe 2,000 seats in the place. We get that famous people and nominees sit on the main floor so they can be cut to or climb up onstage but how do they decide that Oprah gets a ticket this year and isn't involved in the show one bit but Jack Nicolson (who was elected Mayor of the Oscars around 1983 in a secret ceremony and hasn't given up the office yet) was mysteriously absent? How did Lou Gossett Jr. (still smarting from too many Iron Eagles) and Spike Lee (wearing swimming goggles) end up there while box office titans like Tom Cruise and Will Smith don't?

Cintra Wilson argued that Oscar producer Gil Gates, aiming for a younger, hipper, and hence, not-all-white demographic, stocked the crowd with people of color. There's probably some truth to that but P Diddy? Wasn't he a youth favorite in like 1997? Jay Z is retired. Beyoncee' maybe but she actually had a job to do. 3 of them.

At this rate, plan next year to see Martin Scorcese sharing a knowing glance with Lil' Jon.

4. The Techie Ruse: Can we quit the stupid, patronizing charade of having a hot little under-30 actress host the "Scientific and Technical" awards and then reading a report card of it on Oscar night? Please tell me what Scarlett Johansson is doing hosting a ceremony that has awards like "Best use of a Steadycam" other than to give a bunch of techies an erection? Give that job to Harry Knowles or some other Ur-Geek. At least it would be honest.

5. Nobody pays attention to what the men wear: Ever.

Sunday Morning Shards #24:

On my mind and in the reading queue this week: The "Saturn Return" Edition:

*12 days until South by Southwest Interactive. I can't wait. This year my old college buddy Josh is coming alone. Are you?

*My friend Tara explained the concept of "Saturn Return" to me with I had heard about when I first moved to San Francisco from my cousin Amber. Very applicable to now even though I'm technically one year out of it.

*When I saw The Polyphonic Spree in concert last week as part of the Noise Pop festival, they announced that, after 3 continuous years on the road, they were "taking a break." with plans for some new music in the summer time. Beyond that, they were vague.

*I'm on page 237 of Lolita, 72 pages to go. This is the home stretch of more than 4 months of wrestling this brilliant difficult book to the ground. Almost there...

*My friend Jason Kottke has thus far raised about $4800 in his plan to blog full-time for a year. I've  become a Kottke.org micropatron.

*I'm trying out Quicksilver again after losing patience the first  time. I'm letting this tutorial guide me (via 43 Folders).

*Oscars are tonight. Allthough nobody really cares, I'm eager to see Chris Rock as host. My friend Dave (the Where There's Smoke film critic of record) has a complete set of predictions.

One Sentence Movie Reviews #26: "The Yes Men"

The Yes Men (2003): "A prank is only as compelling as the story of why it happened in the first place."

'Naked' as a Noun:

Lately I've been saying "The naked" when I mean "naked" as in "So you had the naked on the third date?" I think it works for me.

Staring You and Your Family:

What a neat idea. Reel Stories is a San Francisco firm of professional filmmakers (one of whom is a longtime WTS reader) that creates cinematic biographies of families for special events (birthdays, weddings, graduations, anniversaries) but instead of being a cheesy video of your aunt doing the Electric Slide, it's a movie, a documentary, starring you, about your life.

I dig it.

Kottke Goes Full-Time:

My friend Jason Kottke has decided to try to blog full time for a year. He's moved to a smaller apartment, downsized his budget and taken up collections on his site. He's raised nearly $5000 in slightly under 3 days.

This is a huge step for blogging. Jason runs one of the best traffics and most respected blogs so is in a position to try this experiment, the same way U2 and not 7 Mary 3 could launch the branded iPod. But he's not coasting on his celebrity. He's not specializing on one subject matter or text ads. Instead, he's making the boldest simplest statement possible: I'm good at blogging. Can I make a living at it?

Bravo Jason. I think we're going to look back on this as the day "blogging goes electric".

UPDATE: Articles in Wired News and Red Herring covering the decision.

#21: Grapes of Wrath:

So I've been making a sort-of-half-assed-not-really (SOHANR) attempt to watch all the films on AFI's Top 100 Films of all time. AFI put the list together in 1995 as a celebration of the 100th anniversary of cinema.

I had decided to make, say every 5th rental from Netflix, something from the Top 100 on the idea that I could run through it in six months or so.

That so didn't happen. Because I'm a big baby.

I have some juvenile tumor running loose inside me that says that anything "classic" will be soul-sucking drudgery and why should I bother and hey, isn't there an old Gilmore Girls episode on the Tivo?

But last weekend, I offered up a viewing of Grapes of Wrath (#21) to Suzan who had refused several times before (She knows herself better than I. When she isn't interested, she means it). This time she said yes.

Good movie. I've never read John Steinbeck's novel nor anything about the movie so I was in without a point of reference. I gather after seeing it that Grapes is one of cinema's great tributes to working people and New Deal FDRism (the cops, landlords and companies are all corrupt heathens, the government-run worker's camp is an oasis of brotherhood) but by golly, it earns it. The performances, Greg Toland's lyrical, silent cinematography and a screenplay that pushes itself forward as effortlessly as wind. This is a movie you "should" like but end up liking all on your own.

How do you feel about "classics?"

Jen for Sale:

My friend Jen Leo auctioned off a date with her on her blog with All the money bid going for Parkinson's disease research. Neat idea. I wonder if I could do the same here. Then again, I don't photograph this well. I'd probably have to start the bidding at, eh, a nickel?

Okay, Thanks:

For indulging me. I'm ready to get back to blogging now.

Call Me Lame-o:

Ok this is really lame, especially since I haven't posted in a few days and I didn't do "Shards" on Sunday. But facing yet another deadline on my book, it's all I have time for. So...

Following SloLane and Lucia's lead, please introduce yourself. Who are you? What brings you here? And how long have you been reading?

That orange Feedburner thing to the right has proven to be yet another web doodad to obsess over. How many readers does my feed have? Who loves me? Will Billy Callaway ask me to the Harvest Ball?

So I'm getting a reality check. Comment away...

Kevin in USA Today:

Hey Hey Hey. I'm in USA Today.

They called my book Bookmark This instead of Bookmark Now but whatever.

VBT Returnith

The Virtual Book Tour rides again today.

Calling all Bay Area Photographers:

SFist reports that recently a Bay Area photographer was arrested for taking pictures inside MUNI, our local subway system. The photographer was violating precisely zero laws and since the the MUNI is city property, the taking of pictures is protected by the First Amendment.

In protest, SFist's editor Jackson West is organizing a "Shoot In" this Saturday at noon at the Emarcadero station. Be there with camera and Muni fare in hand. Details here.

Sunday Morning Shards #23

On my mind and in the reading queue this week. The "Canadian Skye" edition.

*Christo's Gates have been unfurled, in all their saffron glory, in Central Park. The New York Times has an appraisal.

*R.I.P Arthur Miller. What a genius.

*Why the future of music needs more bands like Wilco.

*The Future of Music Coalition is non-profit organization of musicians, technologists, policy makers and lawyers seeking to discuss these issues in an intelligent and rational manner. I signed up for their newsletter (via Scott Andrew.

*A profile of Philip Seymour Hoffman that doesn't use the word "pudgy." How refreshing. (via Heath Row).

*Instatone is a HotorNot-style database of unsigned musicians and songs. Last.FM strikes me as a better way of discovering new music as it filters based on what you already like. But I'm open to other points of view (via Large Hearted Boy).

*The New York Public Library's Home Library Kit. Comes with databasing software.

*AlterNet give an in-depth look at the acendancy of the right wing.

*Howard Dean will lead the Democratic Party. Anyone found any news analysis of this?

Our next Virtual Book Tour happens Tuesday. Mark your calendars!

It Must Be Me...

But I have an annoying habbit of only feeling luke warm about movies that everyone else I know thinks are the shiznit. I suppose it started with Pulp Fiction which my whole college dorm could not stop raving about. Even my stoner dude neighbors typed up the Samuel Jackson "Ezekiel 25:17" speech and hung it on their front door. I on the other hand felt like I was being told a 2 hour 45 minute joke about people I didn't know at a party I hadn't been invited to. And Quinten Tarantino kept filling my drink. And I don't drink.

Which brings me to the latest crop of you-got-it-I-didn'ts: Two movies that are nominated for several Academy Awards.

Million Dollar Baby. My old friend Justin practically flew out here from Chicago and escorted me in handcuffs to this movie. Suzan and I went, unmanacled, last Friday.

This is a good film, not a great one. Which is exactly how I felt about Mystic River, Clint Eastwood's previous widely-lauded film. Mystic River, to my mind, is 2 hours of great drama entirely premised on the under-developed, skated over prologue. In publishing terms, the story doesn't "earn out." What comes later isn't jusitfied by what came earlier.

Million Dollar Baby has the reverse problem: Its lead up promises a knockout its conclusion doesn't deliver. Justin and several other friends have said, repeatedly now, that the last 30 minutes of Million Dollar Baby is like a kick in the gut, a twist you never saw coming and remember long after the film ends. A) I saw it coming from across the sea and B) Because the last 30 minutes played like a foregone conclusion, it made the rest seem rather anticlimatic.

Yes, I still liked it. But it did not change my world. And the expectation with Clint Eastwood now seems to be that every third film of his is a classic.

The Aviator: Suzan raved about this movie. I had an unexpected cancellation after a very busy Thursday and took myself there.

Eh. I expected more. Howard Hughes led one of the most iconic lives of the 20th century yet this treatment of it seems curiously flat and joyless. We see him as a dashing young engineer, movie producer and entrapaneur. We get brief glimpses into the gathering darkness that consumed his later life. Yet we never really are shown what motivated Howard Hughes, what made him a person this compelling or what his influence was. I'm assuming it was vast.

Martin Scorcese has been saying for years that his dream project was a biography of Howard Hughes. At various times, Steven Spielberg was attached to the project. Yet it does not feel like Scorcese brought his A-Game. I didn't see too many shots that I needed to talk about afterward. His screenplay, usually impecable, seemed amorphous and imprecise.

I admired The Aviator way more than I enjoyed it, the way one would a Barney's window at Christmas. The whole movie feels like it's behind glass, cut, burnished and sterile instead of alive.

What did everyone else think? Or is it just me?

Dump Him Beeyatch!

Just in time for valentine's day, a love advice column from 50 Cent (via Hiphop Blogs).

Mencken Memories:

Mr Torrez pointed me a few days ago to a collection of H.L. Mencken quotes. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", Henry Louis Mencken was a newspaper man there in the 1920s and 30s. Legend had it his intelligence was so admired that FDR used to call him from the White House for advice.

Mencken is something of a folk hero in my old hometown. Citizens are rallying to save his house after the City of Baltimore let it fall into disrepair. The local library houses his papers in their own special room. Once a year, on Mencken's birthday, the open it up to the public. The faithful line up hours ahead of time just to poke through the old man's stuff.

When I interned at the Baltimore Sun's editorial desk, Mencken's bully pulpit, in 1994, I used to ask the writers what they did when they got blocked. Most had a Mencken collection on their desk the same way a Catholic might have a little statue of St. Jude. I made a point of reading a little Mencken every Monday. It felt like putting on his hat.

Gems from the master:

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.

Nature abhors a moron.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

The role of the press is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

One Sentence Movie Reviews #25

Napoleon Dynamite (2004): It is never a good sign when the DVD commentary is more interesting than the film itself.

Song of the Week #8:

This editon of SOTW features a double shot from The Tubes. If you're just about my age, you remember a brief period when the Tubes were early MTV darlings with their hits "She's a Beauty" and "Talk to Ya Later." If you're a little older, you probably remember their mercurial lead singer Fee Waybill and their circus antics that even shocked fans in their native San Francisco. Even now, I still hear old-timers laughing about The Tubes and their PT Barnum-inspired numskullery.

Whatever. "Later" and "Beauty" are two delicious hunks of pop craftsmanship, beautifully constructed yet dizzingly alive. Both are about the wrong kind of woman: One who won't leave after the relationship is long past broke, the other an untouchable goddess, who in this case predicts the tragic allure of Internet porn.

I rediscovered The Tubes in college and promptly forced my roommates to listen to "Later" everytime we went to the grocery store. They became zealots.

Listen in. I defy you not to grin and sing along.

Natty Knitters:

Men are starting to knit, for a number of reasons. My favorite is "to meet chicks." Oh the lengths we will go (via Smoke and Ashes).

MenKnit.net.

Sunday Morning Shards #22

On my mind and in the reading queue this week. The "Listening to You" edition.

*The Online Journalism Review asks "Should newspapers made their online archives free and advertiser supported or should they charge per article?" Quite a debate. I haven't made up my mind yet (via New Media Musings).

*R.I.P Ossie Davis.

*43 Folders is on fire. They just partnered with MolskeineUS for notebook fufillment and are writing a column for Make, the new DIY Tech magazine from O'Reilly.

*Candlight and angry words at the closing of the Salinas, California libraries (via librarian.net).

*AlterNet profiles the 10 Worst Corporations of 2004.

*My buddy Jeff Veen has a fantastic primer on organizing your RSS feeds so they don't drive you to drink.

*In praise of not joining book clubs (via Arts Journal).

*In a rare ahead-of-the-curve-gesture, Sony Music now has RSS feeds for their artists.

*Punxsutawney Phil says "Six more weeks of winter!" He didn't spend this week in San Francisco.

Read Recently #5:

Blue Angel by Francine Prose

Backstory: I love novels about academica and had heard a bit about this one when it first came out in 2001. Bought a hardcover for $3 at last year's San Francisco Library Book Sale. In December, while between books, I was looking for a solid, midrange novel, 250-300 pages and written by a woman. Blue Angel fit the bill.

Notes: Sentence by sentence, Prose is one of the best there is. Her lines are like the courses of a fine meal, laid out one at a time to be chewed and savored. It almost works against her. Blue Angel tells the story of a has-been writer in a cushy teaching job at a small Vermont college and is falling in love with a manipulative student who happens to be a much better writer than he. She's got the college down and her plotting is confident and steady. But she does not so much inhabit her characters as she does describe them from behind glass. Because her prose (had to happen) is so strong, I didn't mind as much, but if you're the type of reader who doesn't like the author standing between you and the story, it will bother you.

Verdict: This book, about writing, about sexual politics, set at a university was a slam dunk for me. But I had never read Prose's work before. I hear if you're familiar, it's not one of her best.

Oscar Omits (Fly)Overs:

According to the New York Times, many of the movies contending for Oscar's this year simply aren't at "a theatre near you" unless you live in a major city. Which has the TV people worried because who the hell is going to tune in to an award show full of movies no one has seen? The reason though is another kind of economic worry-warting: Why spend a truckload on advertising for a movie that you think will get Oscar nominations when the nominations can bring in the hype for free? And why open the movie across the land if it doesn't get nominated, isn't of interest to (subtext: those bozos in Middle America) everyone? Now you've just wasted money.

That's the argument anyway. I think it's unfair that smart people living halfway between nowhere and never-heard-of-it get lousy films at their local theater. But that might also be one of the trade-offs of choosing that corner of the world.

Bonus: Article includes photos of the greatest movie theatre in the whole wide world, The Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Teenage Boy Fakes Own Kidnapping for Cell Phone:

I won't elaborate (via Endgadget).

AG Oy Jeez:

In a rather telling article from AlterNet, another Latina lawyer asks, is the new Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "the best we can do?"

California on 25 Cents a Day:

California is the 31st state have its own quarter design. It features John Muir in profile hiking up a mountain crowned by a soaring California Condor. Arnold the Guv unveiled the coin in Sacremento on Monday.

Merlin is Meatloaf:

My buddy Merlin took the words right outta my mouth. His assessment of the Delicious Library program, a very slick OS X dealy that creates visual shelving of your books, dvds and music, includes a pitch for social networking. In other words, it's cool to log all my own media on a database but the potential is really in whether I can see what my friends and other people like me have got. Social network the bastard and the possibilities are limitless. That's what I've been sayin'.

Blowin' Up Bay:

Seems like my friend Jeff isn't all that's blowing up here in The Bay. The East Bay Express reports that Bay Area Hip-Hop is undergoing a renaissance.

Can't Stop Him!

My buddy Jeff Chang's first book Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation has just hit shelves. Jeff has been a presence in Bay Area hip-hop journalism for over a decade. Over the last year, we've gotten to know each other and mutually support each other's projects. I'm also an avid reader of his hip-hop political blog Zentronix.

The book's already gotten killa reviews from Entertainment Weekly, Publisher's Weekly and Booklist. Hopefully I'll be able to grab my copy before the launch party next week.

Congratulations Jeff!

The Whole Wide 'World':

Run, don't walk to see A Home at the End of the World, an absolutely lovely sweet, little film about loss, identity and evolving notions of family. The trailer should sell you but if it doesn't just take my word: It's 90 minutes well spent. And don't let the looming head of Colin Ferrell disuade you. It's the Irish hound dog like you've never seen him before.

Go.

Deep in the Desert:

The 2005 Lineup for Coachella has been announced. I've actually heard of a few of these bands.