EPISODE 612 WHEN’S IT END, DIANE?
I think anyone who has read my newsletter more than once would say a) It’s too long, why does he have to be like that; and b) I try to find a space in the midst of whatever is going on that is funny and also human.
That’s what I’m going for, anyway. (Not going long; the other thing.) There’s plenty of places that you can go for Reasons to Be Bleak. And there are certainly times I want to unleash that Kraken myself. Meet me in my private life and occasionally you can experience that hot mess of nightmares.
(Have I ever posted a photo of me? I don’t think I have. Here you go.
Hope you read this newsletter with a mirror.)
But when it comes to this newsletter I’m not much for the outragery.
Except tonight I’m writing this after checking in to see what happened at the Oscars, aka The Show That Makes Me Feel Bad About the Industry I Love, and saw that the one award that everyone in the industry had agreed on, that Chadwick Boseman should win Best Actor, instead went to Already Well Acclaimed White Guy, Anthony Hopkins.
I responded to this information with considerable aplomb.
And my personal favorite:
Ya think?
Have you seen The Father? Don’t worry, pretty much no one has. Not because the film isn’t great – it is. In fact the one thing I cut from the newsletter last week that I knew I wanted to mention tonight was that you should definitely see it at some point.
(The premise: Olivia Coleman tries to figure out what to do with her father Anthony Hopkins as he struggles with dementia.
And if you think you’ve seen that movie before, I did too, and No, you really haven’t.)
Could one say that Hopkins’ performance was beat for beat better than Boseman’s in the great Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom? Sure. Of course. I’d disagree, but as Jesuits like to say, De gustibus non disputandum.
(Jesuits really do love to say this. As in, if you had to drink a shot every time Jesuits at a party said this you would not be driving home. And if you let the Jesuits make the drinks that would most definitely be true anyway.
Every time I hear someone say it I expect a floating Jack-o’-lantern to appear in a puff of smoke. But I guess it means There’s no arguing over taste.)
(You might wonder, why don’t Jesuits just say that then. I suspect many would respond by saying the same thing again.
WE TRAINED OUR WHOLE LIVES FOR THIS YOU GUYS.
But I like to imagine that down deep it’s because we’re all really hoping eventually we will level up to manifesting Jack-o’-lanterns.)
DE GUSTIBUS!
(It totally works.)
But this year’s vote was not about measuring two/five performances. It was about four very skilled performances up against the body of work an extremely talented young actor who died tragically before that work, which was characterized by a nobility and humanity that inspired a lot of people, could be properly recognized.
I realize, but that’s not what the category usually involves. But that was the agreement everybody made this year, so much so in fact that the Academy actually changed the order of the awards so as to save Best Actor for the very end, in a classic Hollywood moment of self-congratulation.
(In some ways maybe I should be cheering the fact that it all went awry as it highlights once again what artists of color keep saying over and over, namely that the Academy is racist as INSERT ALL THE WORDS HERE.)
Some years voters can point to hard choices and justify voting for the white folk that way – it was just so tight u guys :(. But there’s no such place to hide this year. Everyone knew what this vote was about and what it meant, and many of them voted for Anthony Hopkins anyway.
And that says everything you need to know about the state of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Chloe Zhao was the first woman of color and Asian woman to win an Oscar for directing Nomadland (another great film); Youn Yuh-jung from South Korea won best supporting actress for her outstanding work in Minari; Daniel Kaluuya won best supporting actor for Judas and the Black Messiah; and Soul won best animated film.
I’m happy for all those wins. But beware those who think that excuses voting for Hopkins. The point isn’t that the Academy doesn’t occasionally let people who are not white and straight (and usually men) win, but that when the Academy is actually asked in a very explicit way to show where its commitments lie, it continues to default to the racism that undergirds its foundations and the foundations of our society.
I don’t know how many Academy members need to be something other than straight white men for things to change, but it clearly remains a hell of a lot more than they currently have.
And hey, speaking of white people being awful.
This is absolutely a joke meant to get people like me to repost so that you can do the same. Even so, it’s kind of horrible too.
It seems to be part of its own weird and awful subgenre, too.
So yeah, as you can tell, this is my temperature today.
Also this.
(Thanks to my friend Joe Wakelee-Lynch for that link. The most brilliant retelling of the Creation story I’ve seen in forever.)
And this:
This week on my scriptwriting blog I’m looking at writing lessons from Sondheim songs. This actually had me in tears at the end.
Let’s end on a more positive note, shall we?
A design teacher asked his third year illustration students to design post-pandemic covers for the New Yorker. They came up with so many beautiful things.
My favorites:
Here’s the thread’s start, which has many other wonderful pieces in it:
Also, GQ did this short interview with Naomi Klein, who does a lot of writing about climate change. And she had this really interesting idea about thinking of love in terms of abundance instead of scarcity.
In the aftermath of every disaster, you see these amazing expressions of love. People risk their lives to save others. I'm describing a sort of abundance love, a love without scarcity. I've covered enough disasters to know that this is a profoundly human impulse. When disaster strikes, people are not asking, “Are you Christian? Are you Muslim? Are you related to me?” People are just faced with taking extraordinary risks to save each other, whether it is a home-care worker saving the life of the elderly person who they're taking care of or whether it is somebody risking their life to save somebody else's kids.
Outside of a crisis, are there ways we can make that kind of abundant love a reality?
Yeah, I think so. The question is, what are the structures that would enable us to have this sort of abundant love being more than a flash in the midst of crisis?
Painted by GeminiAvenger. Buy it for $18 here.
Rest in Power, Good Man. And thank you.