{"id":586,"date":"2013-02-25T14:15:50","date_gmt":"2013-02-25T14:15:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=586"},"modified":"2016-10-10T21:34:18","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T21:34:18","slug":"seymour-movies-a-six-pack-of-post-game-oscar-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=586","title":{"rendered":"Seymour Movies: A Six-Pack of Post-Game Oscar Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some things I didn\u2019t have time or space to squeeze into this CNN thingee. (<\/a>I had to sleep sometime after all):<\/p>\n

1.) Watching some of \u201cJimmy Kimmel Live\u201d last night & noting how the post-Oscar cast was more enjoyable, and a tad funnier, than what it followed (& that includes Your Local News), it occurred to me that all awards shows, except maybe the Tonys, will have to become desk-and-couch affairs if they expect to survive as annual broadcasts. I know historians now regard David Letterman\u2019s turn-at-bat as a cataclysmic whiff. But imagine how he\u2019d have done if he\u2019d been in his comfort zone with Paul pouring the necessary smarm over everything. It may be another ten years or so before that happens, by which time desk-and-couch shows will be as obsolete as analog phones.
\n2.) If this year\u2019s producers were so damned anxious to have a Broadway feel to this thing, why didn\u2019t they just call Neil Patrick Harris to the captain\u2019s chair & let him go nuts? He & Billy Crystal may be the only two people alive who know how to go meta with this glitz while still respecting it as glitz. Good luck boosting next year\u2019s ratings.
\n3.) You know what was even more enjoyable than Kimmel or the Oscars? Cruising Facebook & Twitter for immediate reactions to last night\u2019s awards. Maybe the future will really involve people showing up on red carpets in fancy clothes before heading into chat rooms to tap out the individual impressions through their FB pages or shoot their own video. The Academy will take care of the rest by mailing out the statuettes in advance. In Anne Hathaway\u2019s case, at least, I though they did, anyway.
\n4.) I wasn\u2019t surprised that both Lincoln<\/em> and Zero Dark Thirty<\/em> got relatively shut out, even though I thought right up to the end that the hacks respected Tony Kushner\u2019s ability to effectively dramatize difficult material. Instead, the hacks got theirs by raising a middle finger to those who slapped Quentin Tarantino upside his head for turning slavery into, if you will, pulp fiction. (As I told CNN, wait twenty years\u2026)
\n5.) Paraphrasing Oliver Stone, there\u2019s the way America is & the way we ought to be. Argo<\/em>, as I wrote in my CNN piece, was the way Hollywood & America prefer imagining themselves while Lincoln, The Master<\/em> and Zero Dark Thirty<\/em> reflected, in different ways, what they, and we, really are. That the Academy voters let controversy (or at least its prospect) get in the way of acknowledging those movies suggests that even the opposite edges of the continent are as polarized & tied-up-in-knots as the rest of America.
\n6.) People ooh-ed and aah-ed over Michelle Obama\u2019s hook-up with Jack \u201cKing\u201d Nicholson. (She has that effect on people, especially after she did the hippy-hippy-shake with Jimmy Fallon last week.<\/a>) What I was hoping for, ever since last summer, was an excuse to put Clint Eastwood on stage last night and have Michelle\u2019s husband show up in a chair off to Eastwood\u2019s left. \u201cDid you have something to tell me?\u201d the president would have asked in, of course, the nicest possible way. A braver world than this would have allowed it to happen. As last night awards made clearer than ever, we do not live in a brave world, except when we\u2019re tossing snark through our keyboards. In the meantime, I love you, Amy Adams & wish you better luck next time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are some things I didn\u2019t have time or space to squeeze into this CNN thingee. (I had to sleep sometime after all): 1.) Watching some of \u201cJimmy Kimmel Live\u201d last night & noting how the post-Oscar cast was more enjoyable, and a tad funnier, than what it followed (& that includes Your Local News), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[179,182,178,180,184,93,181,26,183,162],"class_list":["post-586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-179","tag-2013-movies","tag-academy-awards","tag-anne-hathaway","tag-jimmy-kimmel-live","tag-lincoln","tag-michelle-obama","tag-movies","tag-the-master","tag-zero-dark-thirty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=586"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1688,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions\/1688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}