Entries associated with the tag "Ellen DeGeneres":

Shot up in bed yesterday morning with a single anxious thought running through my head: "Is this Oscar-night Sunday or what?"

My one and only, who remembers these things better than I do ("O look, there's Penelope Cruz lifting her feet so Ellen DeGeneres can vac the front-row carpet," etc), assured me in her own estimable 5 AM way that yes, it was indeed that unavoidable day (or night) . . . which means that by then I'll need a couple new inches of snow, so I can haul out the shovel, clear the town-house walks, slip on the ice and tear a rotator cuff, call 911 and get airlifted to the nearest emergency-room facility, as more or less did happen (except for the 911 transport) a Sunday or two ago. Just another Oscar-avoidance evening in the making . . .

Not that I hate Oscar so much, because actually I don't—I simply don't pay that much attention. And it's not an attitudinal or put-on thing—at least not mainly—since not once in my life have I ever watched the whole damn telecast straight through. Besides which, we just gave away our minimally operable 30-year-old Motorola—sometimes the antenna worked, on some of the channels anyway—so it's not even the NCAA Final Four for me this year.

But already you've probably scanned our online selection of Reader Oscar picks, to which I've contributed my own harebrained assortment of shipwreck candidates. A society of choosers is what we are, with everyone obliged to make at least a dozen or so whether he/she's inclined to or not—Hillary or Barack? Jif or Skippy? Toyota or Suzuki? M&M's or Mary Janes?—as part of the whole freedom package, what our "Western values" are all about, the kinds of things Al Qaeda and the Taliban allegedly want to kill us for.

Except: I couldn't have told you what was on the awards list without an official trot sheet spelling it all out in big, bold categories, like judicial retention ballots in general election years. Best picture—well, there's Reygadas's Silent Light, my own enthusiastic nominee for '07, with everything else an afterthought . . . except it didn't make any of the eligibles, right? Or best director—always P.T. Anderson, whatever he's been up to . . . which is pretty much how I decide on judges too: another one who's Irish—automatically out! And who are these other guys anyway? Yeah, the Coens, especially if crosscutting close-ups are your thing: what contemporary prefab "best direction" apparently comes down to these days. And don't even get me started on the Butterfly guy . . .

Also the screenplays (original or adapted) . . . also the, ahem, "performances" . . . also the cinematography (which seems more about calendar art and House Beautiful spreads than anything cinematographic—another one saved in the editing room!)—stuff you can't, or wouldn't even want to, single out if the movie's coming together the way it should. And "costumes"—the most radical being the ones that didn't exist in Ten Canoes (another ineligible: wrong country, wrong year), no bonnets or frippery, just the literal, unadorned, down-to-earth truth! But the year's deal breaker has to be "best supporting actor"—button-down dullards all, dependably skilled at what they do, also dependably forgettable: another month and we'll wonder what all the teapot fussing was for. Which is why, in that one lonely category, I initially opted for Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson from Southland Tales, just to be mean and ornery, but also as a provocation: enough of these judicious, measuring-rod approaches, the inconsequence of incremental "perfection." Like grading term papers . . . except it's supposed to be about "aaarrrrttt."

But now it's Paul Dano as my new, inspired supporting-actor "choice" (see comments thread here): better a raw, hysterically confused, freaked-out amateur than all that anally retentive baggage, somebody you can feel the conflicting energies coursing through (because they actually are!), remember indelibly for years—positively, negatively, whatever the alternative is fine.

So: Academy Awards with passion—who'd even dream of such a thing?

Why wasn't a single reference to George W. Bush made by anyone--including Ellen DeGeneres in her gently laid-back stand-up routines? Probably for the same reason that I rarely heard Bush mentioned by anyone in conversations when I was recently in Rotterdam, Toulouse, and Paris. Why beat a dead horse?, the deceased in this case being the fate of the world, or perhaps innocent civilians in Iran, not a spry but clueless leader. Once it’s become accepted and mutually acknowledged that the overall will of the world’s population and the will of the American people--insofar as either will can be correctly inferred--has almost no bearing on what Bush decides to do, speaking out of rage and impotence about a stupid dictator’s whims won’t accomplish very much. So instead of cracking jokes about how Clinton risked impeachment for getting a blow job while Bush risks nothing but a little wrist-slapping for endangering the survival of the planet as well as his own country, DeGeneres brings out a vacuum cleaner. The closest she ever got to evoking Bush was implying at one point that more of the American public voted for Al Gore. The overall implication: when in doubt, lie down and turn on the TV. Which is presumably why such PC questions as the importance of someone using the word faggot elsewhere on TV is supposed to matter so much. Once you give up on the prospect of saving the country or saving the planet, much less improving the quality of your own life, there are still loads of other things to get even more worked up about.

And why is it that on a relatively well-managed, intelligently orchestrated show almost every time world cinema was evoked it had to be alluded to only in relation to tearjerkers and the most egregiously banal cliches? I’m speaking more of the montages than of the awarding of an Oscar to The Lives of Others, a film already understandably tweaked by Pat Graham in a recent post (even though I recently made it a Critic's Choice), but the same overall principle might be said to apply to both: tears, kids, madonnas, and wistful, impotent smiles are apparently supposed to constitute the sum of what we’re supposed to get from the world’s collective cinematic wisdom.

As for the multiple Oscars to The Departed—none of which convinces me that I should necessarily see it, any more than the Oscars given to Braveheart ever made me feel I was missing something important—it seems par for the course to give belated consolation prizes after neglecting to give Oscars to filmmakers when they deserve it. But if I'm wrong--if there's something exceptional or different about this movie that's being recognized--could somebody explain what is it? 

1) A little late for dinner, though it's just after seven and already the restaurant's deserted. Not Super Bowl Sunday, so it can only be ... "The snow," my partner for life insists, "plus maybe it's always like this on Sunday night." In any case, we're out of there as quickly as possible so Cheryl can catch the Oscars: updating an encyclopedia article on same, wants to do all the primary research firsthand. Meanwhile, I've decided it's time to ...

2) Attack the snow on the walks. Shovel the pavement behind our unit ... then the pavement in front of it ... then the neighbors' walks on both sides, front and back ... then all the walks and street frontage along the north end of the courtyard. Which unfortunately will come to an end before the Oscars do, so it's inside again to find the cat's fuzzy ball and ruminate profusely on ...

3) A very stupid op-ed by David Brooks, published originally in the New York Times, that's been e-mailed to me by a friend. "Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don't even notice until it has almost disappeared," Brooks blusters on. "Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness. ... Today parents don't seek to liberate their children; they supervise, coach and instruct every element of their lives. ... People are mostly skeptical of social engineering efforts. ... Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state." Don't see why he wants to drag in that "goodness" notion--perfectibility's the usual Enlightenment-hating rubric--when all that's actually at stake is a kind of ameliorative response: better to have food than not, a job than not, an economy that's not a priori punishing to more than 30 percent of the people subject to it, and so on and on. Plus now we learn that Ronnie the Gipper was actually an "Emersonian liberal" in disguise: so what's the effect on Brooks's pantheon of "Tragic Vision" thinkers, "many of them ... conservative"? But I'm sure he'd be more than willing to welcome the "strong order-imposing state" into his own presumably upscale, comfortable life ... What, you mean it's not just for all "those others"?

4) "Pan's Labyrinth won for Best Cinematography," Cheryl's come down to tell me. O crap, that cinematography's just plain bad. "Yeah, I know," she agrees with me for once, "and I liked another one better." Except she can't remember what the other one was.

5) Back in a couple minutes: "So guess what won for Best Foreign Film?" Obviously Pan's Labyrinth. "Nope, guess again." Jeez, I can't even tell you what's been nominated. "The Lives of Others!"--which is like sticking in the needle, since we've been fighting over this movie for almost a week: a real stinker, in my opinion, with a big, hulking tomato-can target, like the broad side of the morality barn, but for Cheryl it's close to divine--and where's your human sympathy absconded, tough guy? No emergency counseling for us yet, though ...

6) "What about Best Supporting Actress?" Abigail Breslin on that one--in fact I hope Little Miss Sunshine sweeps in every category it's nominated for. Pure schadenfreude on my part there, like letting "the terrorists" win one for a change ... and why do you hate Oscar so much, Pat? But, fortunately or unfortunately, it's somebody else and we all know who by now, though Cheryl couldn't recall right then ...

7) Finally upstairs to witness the rest of ordeal, and it's Dreamgirls medley time. Pretty appalling stuff at this late stage of our racial disenchantment, more like a throwback to Josephine Baker-style negritude, all that fetishistic sass and shimmy, which seems to me pretty much a white-bread fantasy of what life-affirming "blackness" ought to be about. Must we really go there now? But Forest Whitaker pretty well recouped the disowned territory with his awkwardly charming and disarming Best Actor's acceptance speech: so maybe it's a shared culture after all, where we recognize ourselves in whoever the imagined other is. Didn't like the film much though, also thought Whitaker's work in it way too obvious and overscaled, but damn if I didn't want to shout hooray for the guy!

8) Learned that a lot of obscenely rich male types really do grovel and groove over their new Mercedes Benzes. So what about soccer moms? Not their own fantasymobile, I guess ...

9) Emcee Ellen DeGeneres applies the vacuum to the carpet in the theater's front row and Penelope Cruz obligingly shifts her feet. Hoping against hope that everyone else in the row sits tight ...

10) Well, it's The Departed--and not Little Miss Sunshine--that's sweeping away everything in its path, so it's just about time for me to do a little sweeping too, take out the Sunday trash, the cat litter and recyclables ... Plus I think it's starting to snow again.