Oscars 2019

huge gulf is right

thought that the screenplay was kind of ham-handed but that the acting was really good

The fifth time in six years a Mexican director has won best director. That's some kind of progress at least. Or lack of progress?

I wish Roma had won best picture

Olivia Colman's speech was so much better than the rest of the show

“My kids, if you’re home and watching — well, if not, well done! But I sort of hope you are. This is not going to happen again!”

Green Book was a big crowd pleaser. I saw it opening weekend, packed matinee full of older white people, all of them in stitches throughout. I agree with comments above about it being an enjoyable, perfectly fine broad comedy very clearly from the minds that brought you There's Something About Mary and Me, Myself, and Irene. Its racial outlook is retrograde. I didn't see Boho, but I assume Green Book is better. A Star is Born is anodyne but fine for what it is, the thing about Green Book is it's a blinkered, immature comedy positioning itself as a message movie, and it fails for obvious reasons. It won BP because old white Academy voters, like the audience I saw it with, resented being made to feel bad about liking it, and voted for it out of "rage" (quoting one anonymous Academy voter) and as a response to what they would call "SJW outrage culture." This embrace of the movie for nasty reasons (that email from the producer to the journalist is infuriatingly stupid) doesn't prevent it from sitting in the same canon as Road Trip, American Pie, Dude Where's My Car?, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Harold & Kumar, and all of the previous Farrelly brothers movies. But to see it used as a cudgel for white resentment by the Academy is upsetting, especially considering the circumstance of Spike Lee sitting there 29 years later lose to another Driving Miss Daisy.

The irony is that Black Klansman (which I didn't think was that good) was, at its most basic, about a black guy in the south ... enlisting the help of a white guy to overcome racism.

also ironic that Netflix, the champion of small screen home comfort film-watching, put forth a film that was really best-appreciated in theaters with good sound systems and big screens

xp agree that the Green Book win may have been about a backlash to the backlash

I def thought Green Book would have been a lot better if it just went full Blazing Saddles/Putney Swope instead

Like especially after Get Out and Black Panther proved you can do real, deep criticism of racism in hugely popular genre movies

Vallelonga jr. is now making a romcom about pizzeria worker meeting a woman named Patti Amore. It's titled That's Amore!

Patti Thats

i think i'm okay never seeing green book or the freddie mercury film or any version of a star is born ever

anyway, the thing people should be losing their shit about is "Skin" winning the oscar for best short film; that was the most irredeemable, tryhard powertrip, boneheaded wrt racism thing I've seen this year.

Skin sounds and looks cringeworthy.

impressed that you would have seen Skin but not Green Book or Bohemian Rhapsody! I think I want to be in that world

My stepmom asked me what I thought of the Oscar winners, and I said, "I haven't seen Green Book and don't plan to, but based on what I've heard about it, I was disappointed that it won." She was surprised because a friend of hers had seen it and loved it. Then she said that she'd gone with that same friend to see The Favourite and they both hated it so much they walked out halfway through. I asked what she didn't like about it, and she mentioned the naked dude being pelted with oranges, the "graphic" lesbian scenes, and the fact that it was "inauthentic."

I couldn't even imagine my parents watching it, but that said, I think your stepmom and friend shouldn't have walked out, it had a great ending

I saw it with erstwhile ILXor carl agatha and we both really liked it and stayed to the end.

and the fact that it was "inauthentic."

i assume your stepmom is a noted scholar of 18th-century britain?

although maybe it became more authentic halfway through and she and her friend will never know! :(

i saw precisely one of the BP nominees, blank panther, and thought it was mediocre.

the number of people i know dunking on green book has become so large, the reaction so seemingly reflexive, that i'm inclined to want to like it (or give it a try) just to be ornery.

that said, i don't know why anyone is bothered by a shitty movie winning best picture, it's a grand tradition!

wait, i lie. i did see the favourite. so that's two of the nominees.

that said, i don't know why anyone is bothered by a shitty movie winning best picture, it's a grand tradition!

― affects breves telnet (Gummy Gummy), Tuesday, February 26, 2019 12:18 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Still sucks every time. and Oscars winners/losers have a material effect on the industry. When bad films or bad filmmakers win, they'll get to make more, and with more money.

yes, otm

There was a good Green Book discussion on CNN tonight between Kierna Mayo and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Get Out was not deep. Its best scenes were the social embarrassment stuff, not the horror.

speaking of horror and of best endings, I thought First Reformed had a spectacular resolution, and as insane as the film was I thought Suspiria also had one of the great final moments of any film this year

Its best scenes were the social embarrassment stuff, not the horror.

These are not discrete elements of the film.

Sorry i can't let this go but this is an atrocity and should be called out in advance of its inevitably shitty full length version so people can avoid it.

https://slate.com/culture/2019/02/oscar-winning-short-film-skin-review.html

But even in a lineup of nominees in its category that this year included a child slowly sinking to his death in quicksand and another film that reenacted the kidnap and torture of a toddler, Skin was the pièce de résistance, an idiotic parable about racist violence so breathtakingly vulgar that the audience in the theater where I saw it laughed out loud in incredulity when the lights came up.

slate synopsis edited for brevity/clarity:

Skin opens with a portrait of a father, a mother, and their young son, attending backwoods shooting sessions and joyriding a couch tied to the back of a truck. At first, the film reads as an affectionate portrait of a particular flavor of blue-collar whiteness. Then one night at the supermarket, a black man in line smiles at the son, and when the white father sees this, he fires off a racial slur, and the two men exchange words. The father and his white power gang then brutally beat the black man nearly to death in the parking lot as his own wife and young son watch, screaming, in a nearby car.

Some time later, the Nazi father falls for a trap in the road and, as his son looks on, is kidnapped and thrown in the back of a van. He’s brought to a garage, where a group of black men - pointedly including the young son of the man the skinheads beat - cut off his clothes and hook him up to an IV. Then one of the men fires up a tattoo needle. After a long, smoky and creepily lit tattoo session, the group dumps the Nazi in the street, and we and he realize that his entire body has been tattooed pitch black. The man then goes to his house, where his young son shoots him dead. The end.

https://deadline.com/2019/02/oscars-best-live-action-short-skin-guy-nattiv-news-1202564333/

“I don’t think we were trying to make a political statement necessarily. In the short, we explored [how] what you teach your children is going to influence the next generation,” Newman reflected. “I think the beauty of Guy as a filmmaker is he doesn’t pound anything over your head. [It’s like] ‘I don’t have the answers, but these are the questions.’”

I think I want to be in that world
― Dan S

omg that synopsis!!

Distant xpost, but for a remake of a remake of a remake "A Star Is Born" is far from boilerplate and worth seeing. Or at least, not worth aggressively resisting, like "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Green Book," both of which seem like cheeky parodies of '80s Oscar bait reborn as made for TV movies. Anytime I see even a still from "Bohemian Rhapsody" I think of the VH1 Def Leppard film. Hell, give that one an Oscar for this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEIMfrFVFpg

bo rhap has parts that feel like hollywood made a pg-13 blockbuster out of fox and his friends... and other parts that are exactly as you describe.

i saw Bohemian Rhapsody and Can You Ever Forgive Me on the plane last night. BH is a great plane movie and I like the woman from Sing Street in it. I had low expectations.

Boremian Hhapsody

I just got off a ten hour flight and posting about the movie Restoration Hhapsody was very pressing.

my resistance to the new Star is Born comes out of a real lack of interest in bradley cooper as leading man/director and - much moreso - a decade of deep-seeded antipathy toward Gaga's voice, persona and schtick. i'm not stubbornly prejudicial against too many pop artists but she's an exception.

BorHap: Cultural Leanings of Oscar for Make Benefit Glorious Actor of Mister Robot

“I don’t think we were trying to make a political statement necessarily.”

This is incredible (if that synopsis is accurate.)

I thought Mr Robot was good in the movie despite the flippers. I don't get Bradley Cooper at all. If soaps were still popular, his career would've landed there.

xp that synopsis (which, again, i tinkered with for clarity based on my recollection of the film) is dead accurate.

Lmao

What an insane movie

It seems like the feature version is a completely different story, a biopic of an ex-skinhead. That's confusing.

Nattiv went on to direct a separate feature, also called “Skin,” about a former skinhead (played by Jamie Bell) who had a change of heart and went on to have all of his white-power tattoos removed.

that sounds like a more reasonable and potentially interesting project

“I don’t think we were trying to make a political statement necessarily.”

in traditional hollywood speak this translates literally to , "please give me an oscar."

that said, i don't know why anyone is bothered by a shitty movie winning best picture, it's a grand tradition!

― affects breves telnet (Gummy Gummy)

my concern about green book winning is not about the movie - i haven't seen it and can't say first hand whether or not it's shitty - but the way it caters to the fragility of its older white target audience and the way in doing so, it serves to perpetuate a lie which is, ultimately, unsustainable

my objection is this: who are the audiences who flocked to "green book" going to vote for next november?

having asked that question i suspect that in many, if not most, cases the answer will be "the democrat". my mom, who hates trump as much as anybody, probably really enjoyed green book. we haven't talked about it because i quit talking to her after she told me that racism is a problem on "both sides".

Nattiv went on to direct a separate feature, also called “Skin,” about a former skinhead (played by Jamie Bell) who had a change of heart and went on to have all of his white-power tattoos removed.

this sounds like an entirely unnecessary dramatization of the documentary "Erasing Hate"
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2011/06/22/skinheads-story-redemption-help-splc-be-told-msnbc-documentary

I saw it when it came out and it's watchable though hardly essential... useful if you're unfamiliar with the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center and/or you're really into redemption stories. If the concept sounds particularly of interest to you, skip the sure-to-be exploitative narrative film and watch the doc instead
https://tubitv.com/movies/310496/erasing_hate

isn't Green Book one of those movies that you know sucks just from watching the trailer?