The Visitor sent me this link to Annie Proulx's wonderfully caustic account of her night at the Oscars and the awards that got away:I don't think I've ever been so upset by a film not getting the Best Picture Award when it so clearly deserved it ... I'm right with you here, Annie.... We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - excuse me - Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline.
14 comments:
Go read the comments to my visual rant about BBM not get the Best Picture Oscar. The last one explains how the voting is done. BTW, I got a local copy of BBM - picture and sound good, but the subtitles a bit off. Oh, did you get my sms about the new Janis Ian CD?
this may make you laugh after the BBM fiasco.
www.overheardinnewyork.com
chet - yes, that's interesting ... just goes to show what a farce the whole thing is when it comes down to promotion and not merit ...
er .. who is janis ian? (*ducks*) ... got your kind message thanks
ms d - love that website and the british version
Ouch ...
She's the one I'm going to see in England next month, who has a charity foundation in honour of her mother. The foundation gives money to adults who never had a chance to go to college to do so now. So, you want or not? Oh, and she's a published sci-fi writer and the new CD has some pretty interesting lyrics. We've been analysing one of the songs.
Hmmm...I haven't seen either movie myself (as I don't own anything - except my TV - that can play a movie to me) but I have heard a number of comments from people whose opinions I respect, who have said variations along the lines of: Well, BBM was an excellent movie, but Crash was totally brilliant and deserved to win.
And no matter what Annie thought, her comment comes across as the worst kind of sour grapes. To trash the competition is, well, tacky when you have a vested interest.
chet - yeah will be interested to hear and thank you so much for thinking of me
glenda - she happily admits it's sour grapes ...
not everyone thinks crash so good ... rumroll for the visitor's take on it ... "not the worst movie of the year" ...
anyway, i admit my own vested interest in the film ... emotional interest ... maybe i will love crash when i finally get around to seeing it ...
Actually Ms Larke, Video CDs/DVDs should play on most PCs (depends on the hardware though.)
how come you call glenda ms larke and don't call me ms. bibliobibuli? i demand some respect, anon
The hardware is called DVD-ROM. But since Glenda does not own a DVD player, I doubt she'll care about adding a DVD-ROM to her PC. She probably has other uses for her computer than watching movies.
Chet - you are absolutely right. I quite deliberately have a computer that is not set up to show movies, for the same reason that I wipe off all the games the moment I get a new computer.
I know myself you see. And I know too well those insidious, loathesome things that creep up on me, called deadlines.
Glenda, just Glenda...
I liked the film (even better than the short story it was based on) but I really don't like this article, which I feel is unworthy of the author. I also dislike the ungrammatical, though presumably standard in the U.S., expression in the last line, "play it as it lays". I hate the shift of the verb "lay" from transitive to intransitive - except in relation to hens!
damn - that's why I keep missing my deadlines. spacebugs begone!
qaminanate - i quite like the expression 'play it as it lays' and thought i might appropriate it for my own use later ...
Well, having read the story, I found myself comparing the movie to it as I was watching it. And I have found the movie does not live up to the story at all.
The scenery is spectacular, but I found the acting, especially of the two main actors, rather forced. And to be honest, the two of them are not how I pictured them in my mind (from the story).
IMHO, this is not Ang Lee's best work. That he was given the Best Director Oscar is probably a nod to his earlier movies.
Well.. the only Glenda I knew was in The Wizard of Oz, and I didn't want to be insulting anyone that way. There's really nothing good on TV these days.. not a lot anyway. I have a DVD-ROM but it's just for backing up stuff (really !) :)
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