The Last Thing I'll Write About The Oscars In 2013

I was so proud of myself for skipping the Oscars that I turned it into a self-righteous, poorly spell-cheked, one-man movement. Apparently, the world did not listen. All morning, the whingers of the Internet have bickered about an unsurprisingly tasteless host, an unsurprisingly dull series of montages, and an evening of television that was all-around awful in a thoroughly unsurprising way. The Oscars were awful—who'dve thunk?

But no one is asking the important questions. The insane questions. The questions that don't need to be answered because they were too stupid to have been posed in the first place.​

No one...but me.​

Today I’m wondering if Argo might have been better off not winning Best Picture. Take away that honor, and the film remains an underdog—forever remembered as the little (big budget, star driven) movie that could. Argo was a fun movie, but calling it the best picture of 2012 only underlines. It’s been pointed out elsewhere that Argo is wildly inaccurate. God knows I don’t give a damn about historical accuracy, but even for those whose tastes run towards the swashbuckling, the last twenty minutes—when gritty tension explodes into cartoonishness—were too much for me.

The movie is remarkable not because it’s great, but because it’s well-made, clever and exciting—three things Hollywood does far too rarely these days. That’s nifty, but not transcendent. Put the weight of best picture on this flimsy little movie, and it falls right to pieces. Argo is a good movie, but if it’s the best of 2012, then Hollywood is in worse trouble than I realized.

(Let us take this moment to gaze upon the evening’s finest gif. Watch that for ten or fifteen minutes, and proceed to the next paragraph once your brain begins to function again.)

​You can go read the rest of that harebrained rant over at Bullett​. On Astor Place Riot, ​I'd like to talk a little about gifs. Specifically, this one:

It's pretty good, isn't it? You can't look away.​ It's strange, repetitive, endless—showing you something bizarre that you might not have noticed if you were watching it in full speed. It is, in short, everything a gif should be. And it's the first good gif I've seen in months. 

Animated gifs have been around for so long that, when I was in high school they were considered passe. In the last couple of years the form has made a comeback, and with ubiquity comes laziness. After any major event, cesspits like Buzzfeed​ and supposedly worthwhile news outlets like the Guardian​ flood their front pages with crap like this, overloading our web browsers and dulling our capacity for rational thought. 

Does anyone think a page of forty or fifty sluggishly-loading animated gifs is funny? Or are we being held hostage by traffic-hungry web editors who haven't had a good idea since 2009? An endlessly-repeating, half second video clip can be mesmerizing, even beautiful. Anything less is a waste of your bandwith.​

With that, I give you the only two other gifs I've loled at in the last six months. For the sake of your browser's sanity, I'll link to them.

Buttfumble​

Owl trapped in car grill

Also, holy hell—the Chrome browser spellcheck is okay with "loled." Civilization is dead, isn't it?​ Why didn't anybody warn me?

Here's A Week Old Story About 'Star Wars' Fandom

Hey you!

You like pictures, don't you? Pictures of awesome imaginary space stuff? Then why don't you stroll over to Bullett​ for more pictures like the above shot from one man's unbelievable 140 square foot Hoth diorama?

Click through the above slideshow, and you’ll see he’s got built-in explosions, built-in laser fire, built-in smoke and enough action figures to populate a completely unnecessary remake of Small Soldiers. Squint at the pictures and, because the original film was made with models, it’s easy to pretend you’re looking at screenshots.

What kind of man would devote himself to such a creation? Big surprise: he’s a goofball. In a video released to his friends on the forums, Barry shows off his “dio,” spending less time on technical specifics than he does on nerdly jokes about being a pornstar. He’s geeking out in a totally safe space, refusing to even take the time to brag about the incredibly awesome thing he’d made. He built this for him, and you’re welcome to take a look at it.

​The words are whatever. But the pictures, oh my. The pictures are divine.

To Break the Oscar Habit, Just Say No

As a kid, I lived for Oscar night. I filled out a ballot, I read up on history, I became incensed over who won and lost, even though I'd seen almost none of the movies. For a long time, I felt the same way about Saturday Night Live​. At some point, to lessen the heartache that comes with watching a beloved institution slide into meaninglessness, I cut my losses. More on Bullett​. 

Just as schoolchildren the world over have accepted the roundness of the earth and the deliciousness of pizza, everybody knows that Saturday Night Live is terrible. That doesn’t mean that nobody watches it. Like cigarettes, inactivity and (sadly) pizza, Saturday Night Live is a bad habit, and one that must be broken for a person to lead a healthy weekend life. The show’s relentless badness—and the fact that there are sometimes other fun things to do on a Saturday night—makes breaking that habit fairly easy. Quitting the Oscars is much harder.

I wrote in December about my resolution to avoid Oscars preview coverage, which is as entertaining as a horserace with no horses. This was fairly easy to stick by. On Sunday, I will keep a promise I made to myself the year that James Franco staked a claim to being the worst Oscar host of all time. I will find something better to do on Oscar night.

Seriously, folks. Respect yourselves. Skip the telecast. Watch movies instead. You love movies and—unlike the Oscars—they love you right back.​

Million Dollar Concept: Sleepytime TV

An overactive radiator has made sleep a luxury for me the last few weeks. By six AM, oppressive dry heat forces me awake, and I stagger out of bed as crispy and delicious as a supermarket rotisserie chicken. Because I can get five times as much work done from 6 AM to 10 AM as I can from 10 AM to 5, this is not such a bad thing. I've had an uncommonly productive winter—writing, reading and consuming oatmeal at an unprecedented rate—but I have also been indulging in a more dangerous habit. I have been thinking about morning television.

It should be the insomniac's friend. The news is soft, the anchors are smiling, and everyone is drinking coffee. (Or pretending to, anyway. What's in the mug, Scarborough?! What's in the mug?!) This format makes sense for happy viewers. But who is happy in the morning? I ask this as a borderline-morning person—someone who doesn't mind getting out of bed to type words on a computer, but who does not want to have to smile while he's doing it.

I think there's a market for sleepyfied morning television. Instead of wide-eyed weathermen and giddy anchors, I want to see people on TV who look like me. The on-camera personalities should be fresh out of bed, hair mussed and pajamas wrinkled. I want yawns, coughs and bleary-eyed, awkward silences. I would like a few members of the news team who fucking hate being awake at this hour, and aren't afraid to let their coworkers know it. And, whenever possible, I'd like one of the correspondents to be hungover. I want a news show that says, "Hate to be awake? So do we."

The news reports can be mumbled or altogether silent. I see a segment where the lead anchor scans the papers quietly, and then half-heartedly attempts to explain something interesting that he read—something like a concussed Pat McKiernan. As the morning wears on and the caffeine takes hold, the anchors can become a bit more lively. By ten AM, they're either wide awake or on their way back to bed.

The show to pair this with, of course, would be drunk nightly news. At six o'clock the anchors are just starting on their second round, and everyone is feeling good. "Terrible news from Afghanistan," says our overly confident chief political correspondent. "And I am here to tell you all about it."

By the ten o'clock news, though, the smiles are beginning to droop. Most of the hooch is gone, and coherence has followed it out the door. The anchors are necking, the weatherman is drawing dirty pictures with his telestrator, and on-camera interviews are becoming unnecessarily aggressive. The sports report is incredibly emphatic, and even if by the end we're not sure which team won, we know that "The Knicks are fucking awesome this year, and the Mets are goddamned bullshit." Because the crew has been drinking too, it's hard to tell what's really going on. But we're positive that everyone's having a good time.

The next morning, we sound the alarm for the morning show, confident that we won't be subjected to any false smiles, and that everyone will be authentically giddy if they find that Mario Batali is coming to show them how to make the perfect breakfast pizza.

Embarrassing Dating & Embarrassing Congressmen

And while I'm posting clips, there are two more that I was too busy—read: lazy—to share with you good people. Ze first comes from Narratively, one in a collection of vignettes about the pains, horror and strife that come with dating. It's an incredibly embarrassing story from an incredibly embarrassing time: the middle of my freshman year of college.

It seemed I was the only person on campus not getting laid hourly during my freshman year at NYU. The trouble was a steadfast commitment to a long distance girlfriend whom I loved too much to cheat on.

Long distance relationships are tricky because long distance sex is unfeasible, for now. So I dreamed up a Valentine’s Day surprise to return to her bed as soon as possible.

She expected me back in Nashville late February 14th, but I decided to cut class and go home a day early. I’d tell her to step outside her house, where I would be waiting for hugs and kisses. It would blow her goddamned mind.

You'll never guess it, but complications ensue. While I'm bothered by the Narratively editors insistance on splitting my work up into tiny little paragraphs, I think the story turned out well. They're fun dudes to work for, and I'm hoping to do more of it in the future. 

The second post is another one at Bullett, this time about the already-forgotten controversy over historical inaccuracy in Lincoln. It's mostly worth it for the alliteration of "Kushner Krushes Kongressman." At the end, I reach some conclusions about the truth, which I hate.

It’s silly to demand accuracy in film. The IMDB comments section for your average historical drama is populated by whinging history buffs who don’t understand that movies are not supposed to be textbooks. Anything that must be sacrificed for the sake of the story should be sacrificed. When I first heard of Courtney’s ire, I was naturally sympathetic. It seems like such an easy thing to get right, and Lincoln’s grotesque run time turned me against the movie long ago. But Kushner has a way with words, and he talked me into it. If he changed those votes on purpose, then he had a good reason. The historical record is meaningless. Storytelling is king.

Enjoy your Tuesday, you wonderful literate person, you.

Tuesday Morning Conspiracy Theories: Netflix Edition

Like most other good New Yorkers, I used this weekend's snow-splatter as an excuse to spend three straight days half-naked and fully hungover. By the time cabin fever had set in, I was full of chili and ideas. Namely, this snowstorm was no accident. I explored my theory yesterday afternoon, at Bullett.

As last week’s blizzard bore down on the northeast—and by the way, have you ever noticed how storms are always bearing down on places in news ledes?—New York City hunkered down, Broadway auctioned off tickets in a firesale, and Weather.com turned into Kent Brockman. In the city’s media landscape, fear reigned. But somewhere in the shadowy land of Los Gatos, California, the overlords of Netflix were smiling. For them, everything was going to plan.

Essentially, I think the entire thing was a Netflixian plot to make sure that everybody gorged on House of Cards. And I think that entire show is a plot by the pork farmers of America to make sure that the nation buys more ribs. Seriously, the ribs in that show look goddamned amazing. Pork barrel politics in the most literal sense.

In short, I am issuing a plea for ribs. Please cram as many as you can into your USB ports and email them my way.

"Smash" is Awful And So Is My TV Recapping

Buzzfeed is on a good roll right now. This week's piece about how media reporting has changed for the worse generated a whole bucketful of discussion, including this borderline manifesto from Tom McGeveran, of Capital New York. Because I'm only a pretend reporter, I'll refrain from throwing in my opinion on the shift in media reporting. But, as a pretend reporter, I have massive opinions on pretend things—like Smash. The Buzzfeed article that most amused me this week was about that show's trainwreck of a first season, and the bitter behind-the-scenes feuds that led to its trainwreckiness. 

I've got tons of opinions about that—mainly that, while the article is brilliant, I suspect that Rebeck isn't the monster it makes her out to be—and you can read them here. I have also, for the sake of linkbait SEO metric development (LSEOMD), included a TV recap. Because my girlfriend will make her ANGRY GIRLFRIEND face at me if I watch the entire show, I have restricted my viewing to the first sixty seconds. Ahem:

:01—Apparently this episode is called “On Broadway.” I know that because there’s a title card that says “On Broadway.”

:05—It’s Katherine McPhee! Dressed up as Marilyn! In black and white! She still doesn’t look the part; she still can’t sing. I wonder if the whole season will be in black and white. That would be a poor decision of Rebeckian proportions.

:19—It’s not black and white any more. Rats.

:22—Marilyn McPhee is singing a song inside of what appears to be a diner. Presumably she is on stage…possibly on stage on Broadway? Hopefully the other people are dancers who can dance better than she can, and I will get to watch them dance.

:39—I did not get to see any dancing…yet. A title card has informed me that this is the Boston closing night. This show will never reach Broadway! Or will it?

:46—All of the actors are running around backstage, presumably to avoid the extreme McPheedium of this first sixty seconds. Almost over now, guys!

:51—Now I see dancing!

1:00—There was a shot outside the theater of K. McPhee giving M. Hilty a dirty look. I guess those two haven’t made up during the off-season! How nice to know that that tedious rivalry will continue into season two. McPhee’s song continues, still blandly bland, and I turn the TV off when the timer hits sixty. The last thing I hear is, “And if a duckling never swims, she’ll never become a swaaaaaaaan.”

Phew. That's enough for me. If this feature proves as linkbait awesome traffic driver viral game changer (LATDVGC) as I hope it will, perhaps it will become a weekly thing. But probably not.

I Figured Out The Best Thing About Busby Berkeley

42nd Street was on TV this morning, and I watched it while I worked. I'm familiar with Busby Berkeley movies through random clips, which I sometimes put on just to marvel at the madness and the beauty of old Broadway choreography. But I realized, as 42nd Street tapped on, that I'd never seen one of his pictures straight through. It was a hell of a lot better than I'd expected. 

For one thing, it was funny—sexy and crude in the way that only pre-Code movies can be. The endless scenes of hoofers hoofing outdid All That Jazz. The party sequences made me want a highball, which is all you can ask of a roomful of fictional drunks. And the dance numbers shone, in context, much better than they do in the sad little prison of a YouTube window. Berkeley is famous for his hallucinogenic dance sequences, but I'd never considered how liberating they could be after an hour and fifteen minutes of semi-realistic Broadway toil. 

Escena final de 42nd Street de Lloyd Bacon

What I'd never noticed about the title dance sequence before is how gradually it moves past what is actually possible on a Broadway stage. Rather than leaping straight into fantasyland—the way that SIngin' in the Rain and An American In Paris do, say—it happens gradually. We start with a woman in front of a curtain, and then pull out to reveal a couple dozen dancers. From there, the scope gets bigger and bigger, until it becomes clear the reality of the film has broken down. Along the way, your brain argues with itself, trying to rationalize the increasingly impossible space. By the time the woman jumps out the window, chased by her homicidal husband, your brain simply gives up and explodes.

Busby Berkeley—the original psychedelic.

She's Cute! She's Funny! She Sings! That's It.

I have to say, I'm really liking New Girl. That's more a testament to the sad state of network television than it is to the show, but really, it's got something going for it. It's a low-stakes, low-key comedy, with enough good acting to carry the sometimes-weak material. This guy and that guy are particularly talented. The woman in the picture above, I fear, is not pulling her weight.

Have dinner with the parents of a toddler, and children’s movies tend to appear on the television. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up watching Elf, an inoffensive entertainment whose Broadway analogue I have recently written about elsewhere. In between Will Ferrell shenanigans, you may notice something adorable. Something snarky. Something cute, with a bit of a fuck-you edge. Its name is Zooey Deschanel, Actor—and it is something we don’t see much of any more.

Read the rest at Bullett.

I know that Zooey reads this blog, and I hope her feelings aren't hurt by this. Consider it constructive criticism. She's a talented actress, and it makes me sad that she isn't being given the chance to showcase it.

'Mean Girls' Musical Makes Me Say 'Yeah.'

There's gonna be a Mean Girls musical!

Maybe!

Wow!

Is it just me, or were people talking about the SAG Awards more than usual this year? I’m all for the Screen Actor’s Guild as an institution, but I don’t really give a damn about the big awards shows, much less the small ones. My carefully cultivated web bubble was punctured last night by aimless jabber about who was wearing what at SAG. Perhaps this is a sign of cosmic upheaval in Hollywood—perhaps it’s because I started following lifetime achievement award-winner Dick Van Dyke. (Yep, he’s alive, he’s a friend of dolphins, and he’s married to a woman who hadn’t been born when his show went off the air. Way to go, Dick!)

Among the SAG-chatter came one compelling tidbit: Tina Fey’s long-rumored Mean Girls musical is, apparently, nearly a sure thing.

Tons of details if you just click here. Actually, there are no details. None at all! Nobody knows anything! There is no timeline for this project, no guarantee it will happen, no information at all as to what it may look like when it does. Probably there will be some dancing.

Dancing! Wow!