"I am tired of being called a shrieking harridan for pointing out inequalities so tangible and blatant that they are regularly codified into law..."

" I am tired of being told to provide documentation of inequality...."

As though feminist academics haven't filled books (decades of books) with answers to that shit already.... I am so fucking fatigued by this anti-intellectual repetitive shell game...

A famous man making sexist jokes on a primetime awards show watched by millions of people is so banal and status-quo in our culture, that to me—a woman professionally committed to detecting and calling bullshit on sexism—it just feels like a drop in the bucket. Luckily, there's nothing better than a depressing dose of apathy to remind you to FUCK THE BUCKET....

Just some item about the Academy Awards show over at Jezebel. I thought you should know.

"As a movie lover, she was honored to present the award and celebrate the artists who inspire us all — especially our young people."

After Michelle Obama got criticized for horning in on the Oscars, her communications director issues that as a response.

I loathe that kind of PR — so saccharine and insincere. Look at all the assertions crammed into that sentence. 1. MO is a movie lover. 2. MO was honored. 3. MO was honored as a movie lover. 4. MO presented the award in order to celebrate the artists. 5. Hollywood movie people are artists. 6. Artists do art for the purpose of inspiring everybody. 7. Hollywood movies are made for the purpose of inspiring people. 8. Hollywood movies actually succeeding in inspiring all of us. 9. Young people are especially inspired by movies.

It's such an inane load of nonsense that it seems low and peevish of me to point out so many distinct elements. It was only ever intended to waft over you as a vague fog of a feeling that something appropriately lofty and bland has been said. That's the only relevant meaning.

Oh, wait. Look at this. Something else is being said. We have here a professor of women’s history from Ohio University who has delved into the study of First Ladies. This comes not from the PR department but from academia. Professor Katherine Jellison says: "I get the feeling that she is for the first time maybe really relaxing and enjoying her celebrityhood."

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my celebrityhood...

"The Internet in its wisdom has provided GIFs of the best reactions" to the Oscar song-and-dance routine "We Saw Your Boobs"...

"... including Naomi Watts’, perhaps best described as 'the death of a smile'..."



"... and Charlize Theron’s, perhaps best described as 'ice-cold daggers hurled directly from the eyeballs.'"

The completely inappropriate use of Michelle Obama — piped in from the White House — to announce the Best Picture Oscar.

Wow. I'm just seeing this now. How awkward. I was embarrassed to watch the clip. Jack Nicholson — the greatest actor of the modern era (or something) — comes out as if he's going to announce the award, observes that it's traditionally one presenter who does the announcement, then throws it to a White House feed where it's Michelle Obama, dressed up in her ball gown, in the company of White House toadies in tuxes. And then "Lincoln" doesn't even win, so we don't get the stunning climax of all of history that was what the producers may have thought they were setting up.

Abysmal.

IN THE COMMENTS: Drago said: "Those aren't 'toadies.' Those are the military aides assigned to the President. They have no choice but to be there when 'directed.' And those aren't 'tuxes,' those are military dress uniforms." I stand corrected. I'm sorry. I was going to watch the video again to check that detail but there was no scroll bar on the video and I could not put up with watching it in real time. Why were military personnel used as props for an entertainment industry awards show?

"Were the Oscars always this sexist, or are we spoiled by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's Golden Globes?"

"Host Seth MacFarlane has been leaning on sexist punchlines all night, and people are noticing. Here are the transcripts, so you can calibrate your outrage and/or eye rolls accordingly...."

That's Maureen O'Connor at The Atlantic. Maybe she's just looking for traffic or a neat framework for presenting some of the jokes from last night's big show, but how can you judge how sexist the jokes are when only the jokes about women are taken out of context? What was said about men?

I know there was a big song-and-dance number naming lots of actresses and the movies where they bared their breasts, but what was said about male nakedness? All of those women chose to display their boobs — to use the word in the song lyrics (which you can read at the link above (video here)) — and they got whatever admiration or career advancement they got. Having taken the advantages offered — perhaps including ousting some other actress with more modesty or less impressive attributes — they're not immune from jokes at their expense.

We make fun of men all the time. It would be sexist to have a rule that you can only make fun of men. So, were there jokes about male genitalia? But male actors don't normally go waggling their willies around in big Hollywood pictures, so it's hard to say what the parallelism would be for "I Saw Your Boobs." (It looks funny to write "male actors," but "actors" is used these days for both sexes. Maybe we could use "mactors" or — I know, it's taken — "malefactors.")

Now, it might have been impolite or in bad taste to call out the names of actresses who were there, proudly seated at this ritual of self-celebration, and to sing out "I saw your boobs" at particular individuals, right when they wanted everyone to think they were such goddesses, in their lovely ball gowns, which were quite possibly designed to make a special show of the very boobage that the song was about.

But that's not the topic of sexism. That's the topic of whether you want the Oscars host to display respect and reverence to the assembled dignitaries or would you rather have some broad comedy that might appeal to the big TV audience? It's a question of taste and a desire to maximize the size of the audience, which was the same question that led to the baring of the boobs in the first place.

ADDED:  I don't really think Maureen O'Connor cares about sexism one way or the other. If she really thought McFarlane's jokes deserved condemnation, she wouldn't have written "are we spoiled by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's Golden Globes?" — which is also a joke about boobs. I'd condemn that joke for being so stale.

Who was the first person to equate "Golden Globes" and actresses' breasts? The Golden Globes were first presented in January 1944, so I'm betting the joke goes back to 1943. We needed some sexy laughs back in 1943. I'll bet just about anything you might say about breasts was either sexy or funny or both back in 1943. But today? It's hard to say something new. Maureen O'Connor doesn't seem to know how to say something new. McFarlane did. Gasping about how that might have been sexist is really incredibly dull. One thing that actually makes some people sexist is the unwillingness of (some!) women to laugh at themselves. Come on. Laugh at women. Laugh at men. We all deserve it.

"Live-Snarking The Oscars."

Nikki Finke.

(Me, I'm not watching. I just completely do not care. I used to care, but I don't anymore. I value my time in a way that doesn't leave a place for going to the movies, let alone watching the awards show. I really don't care who wins anything at all.)

"The best in business is on 'Argo' right now. She’s like Rahm Emanuel."

A non-random sentence from an article with the first sentence: "Political movies are expected to rake in the trophies at Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony."

So... "political movies" is supposed to refer to movies with political subject matter, but they win awards because people wage a political campaign for the award.

Too much politics! Remember when it seemed like movies were counterculture or art or something like that?

The "she" in the quote in this post's title is Sasha Stone, who's quoted predicting the award winners this year won't appropriate the occasion and make political remarks: "You don’t want to turn off half of America by making jokes about Republicans."

"Rehearsals sap my pep... tell me what I have to do and I'll do it."

Said the actress Clara Bow (in 1929), who did it like this:



... in "Kittens" (1926). And this:



... in "Wings" (1927), which was the first movie to win the "Best Picture" Oscar. Bow said it was "a man's picture and I'm just the whipped cream on top of the pie." When Bow was criticized for her bohemian ways and "dreadful" manners, she said :

"They yell at me to be dignified. But what are the dignified people like? The people who are held up as examples of me? They are snobs. Frightful snobs... I'm a curiosity in Hollywood. I'm a big freak, because I'm myself!"

In 1931, when she was 26, she got married and retired from acting. She moved to a ranch in Nevada, and lived until 1965.

I'm reading about her this morning, after clicking to her Wikipedia page from the Wikipedia page "Pin-up girl," which has a list of "Notable pin-up girls" sorted by decades, beginning with the 1920s. I was researching the topic of pin-up girls after Meade called attention to this current ad:



We had a conversation about the nature of 1950s pin-up style, and it got me looking for the classic Betty Grable pin-up, which I think it emulates — peeking back over a raising shoulder and smiling as if to say Go ahead and look at my ass. Grable's pic is the one pic that appears on the Wikipidea "Pin-up girl" page, but I was interested in seeing the first pin-up, and the first couple names on the 1920s list didn't click through to a pin-up style picture. Clara Bow's did. If you count this:



Tell me what I have to do and I'll do it. She's only 15 there. Can you just hear the photographer directing her how to arrange her fingers and where to move her shoulder and even her eyeballs?

Oscar nominations.

Here.

Observations: Quentin Tarantino punished. Who's Benh Zeitlin? Benh Zeitlin gets a director nomination and QT is out. Ben Affleck shunned as well.

"Zero Dark Thirty" punished.

The award ceremony is set up to be a solemn struggle between 2 inspiring models of virtue: Lincoln and Pi.

What is "Beasts of the Southern Wild"? Isn't that the question everyone's asking. Here:



"I see that I'm a little piece of a big big universe." Blech!

Obviously, it's Inspiration Year.

This is why I don't go to the movies.

Leave me alone, Hollywood.

Why didn't those Hollywood lefties pick "2016: Obama's America" for the documentary Oscars?

Here's some ripe PR. Dinesh D'Souza put out the bait and Slate took it:

A total of 126 documentaries were eligible for an Academy Award this year, and a selection committee recently narrowed those down to 15 hopefuls for five nominations. Dozens were snubbed, but the producers of 2016: Obama's America say their film's exclusion is evidence of something more sinister.

The anti-Obama film directed by Dinesh D'Souza was roundly panned by critics, though it rode word of mouth to a $33 million gross. D'Souza said the film's success would have resulted in a nomination if it weren't for Hollywood's bias. "Liberal political ideology, not excellence, is the true standard of what receives awards," he said.

Obviously, there's no reason why D'Souza's movie — even if it was popular — should be a finalist instead of those other movies — which we know little or nothing about, but which the selection committee supposedly watched and judged according to a set of principles about what makes a movie Oscar-worthy. Big box office is never the key to winning an Oscar, and in the documentary category, there are some traditional standards that skew toward more neutral, historical/scientific presentations.

I'm sure D'Souza knows all this. It was savvy of him to leverage the occasion to get attention for his film, and I suspect Slate knows that. Slate will get attention for debunking D'Souza, even as it give him the publicity he wants. Everybody wins.

ADDED: You can, of course, purchase the movie, but if I were recommending documentaries that weren't nominated for Oscars, I'd have plenty of others ahead of that. ""Grey Gardens" and "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" to begin with.

"[W]ith the recent passing of Ernest Borgnine (Marty, 1961) and now Celeste Holm (Gentleman's Agreement, 1947) today..."

"... who is now the longest-ago Oscar winner in each of the five major categories who's still living?"

For Best Actress, it has to be Luise Rainer (The Good Earth, 1937). She's still chugging along at 100+.

ADDED: I mostly know Celeste Holm from "All About Eve":

"I walked onto the set of 'All About Eve' on the first day and said, 'Good Morning,' and do you know her reply? [Bette Davis] said, 'Oh shit, good manners'. I never spoke to her again - ever."

Best and worst Oscar fashions.

A nice slide show, beginning with Jennifer Lopez at her best.

My favorite is Stacy Keibler (whoever she is). Her dress is a fabulous gold vortex. Put it next to Meryl Streep's drape-y gold thing. But Meryl won the gold thing that is the statuette. Keibler had George Clooney, though.

ADDED: The NYT has a slide show grouped by color, and you can see Streep and Keibler on one page.

"Sacha Baron Cohen just spilled 'ashes' of Kim Jong Il on Ryan Seacrest."

A tweet from the Oscars that I am not watching.

Cohen is promoting his movie "The Dictator" and appearing in character as Adm. Gen. Shabazz Aladeen, which the Oscar folk tried to keep him from doing.

ADDED: Video.

"As we round the corner into Sunday night's low-hype, low-suspense Academy Awards..."

"... is there anything you're hoping to see on Sunday? Any viable surprises that would delight you? Any level of expectation for Billy Crystal's hosting?"

I don't think I have ever been less interested in the Academy Awards than I am this year.

Are you excited about the Oscars?
	Yes, very.
	Kinda.
	Blah.
	I'm completely uninterested.
	I wouldn't watch the Oscars if you paid me.
pollcode.com free polls

Why are there 9 — not 5 and not 10 — Best Picture Oscar nominations and which are the real nominees...

... that is, the nominees that would be the nominees if, as in the old days, there were only 5 nominees. My 28-year old son Christopher Althouse Cohen does the analysis:

This year there are 9 nominees. There's a reason there are 9 instead of 10 (or 5). The category originally got expanded to 10 nominees after 2008, probably because a lot of mainstream moviegoers were upset that The Dark Knight was "snubbed" in favor of The Reader. The Academy figured that, if only there had been some more slots, The Dark Knight would have been nominated and the viewers would have been more happy.

The next year, there were 10 nominees, and it was a much more commercial lineup that included at least 5 box office hits (Avatar... District 9, Inglourious Basterds, Up, and The Blind Side). They probably liked seeing District 9 and Up nominated, but the critics largely didn't consider The Blind Side to be Oscar material. The next year, Inception and Toy Story 3 got nominated, probably because of the expanded category, but so did the not-particularly-good-for-ratings Winter's Bone and The Kids Are All Right.

The Academy probably thought the category was getting watered down, but they wanted to keep the category big enough so that some hit movies would keep getting in. So, they came up with some formula where there are at least five nominees, and other movies can get nominated (but no more than ten) if they meet a certain voting threshold. It happened to be 9 this year, but it could just as well have been 8, etc.

Here are the nominees:

The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight In Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse

So, let's figure out which of the 9 are the "real" nominees that would have made it into a normal, 5-nominee list, and which are the extra ones.
We just have to eliminate four of these movies. But first, there are two movies that are locks on the 5-nominee list, the ones that got by far the most nominations: The Artist and Hugo. Those have to be nominated, so really we just have 3 open slots and 7 movies to choose from.

The easiest to eliminate is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was such a surprise the journalists in the audience yelled out and gasped when they heard it announced. It only had one other nomination -- Supporting Actor -- and that too was considered a major surprise.

Now we're down to 6, and exactly half of these would have gotten nominated: The Descendants, The Help, Midnight In Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life, War Horse. That looks like a strong list, but since we can see what other Oscar nom's these movies got, it should be easier to whittle it down.

War Horse is the first of the remaining I'd remove from the list. It was considered a strong contender at one point, but Steven Spielberg didn't get a Director nomination, and even though it got six nominations, all of them other than Picture were in technical categories. It's never happened that a Spielberg movie got nominated for Best Picture without getting any other major-category nominations (though he did get snubbed in the Director category for The Color Purple).

I'd also get rid of The Help, because its other three nominations are all in acting categories. It didn't even get nominated for Adapted Screenplay.

So, finally, we have four movies left, one of which must be elimated: The Descendants, Midnight In Paris, Moneyball, and The Tree of Life.

Now the elimination is harder. The Descendants is probably the strongest of these. It just got 5 nominations, but they included Director, Actor, and Screenplay. Moneyball is the only one that wasn't nominated for Best Director. But almost every year when there were 5 Picture nom's, the Picture and Director categories didn't line up exactly. Moneyball did get a Screenplay nomination and two acting nom's, so it's fairly strong overall. What's most likely is that one of the remaining two -- Midnight In Paris or The Tree of Life -- would have been the movie nominated for Director but not Picture, and Moneyball would have been the Picture-but-not-Director movie.

Midnight In Paris is (from my count) the third Woody Allen movie to get a Best Picture nomination (after Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters), but it's his sixth Director nom, so it's happened three times that his movie got the Director-but-not-Picture thing (Interiors, Broadway Danny Rose, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Bullets Over Broadway). Midnight In Paris could have been the fourth one. But maybe not. Midnight In Paris was commercially successful in a way that those Picture-snubbed movies weren't. Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters were hit movies with broad appeal when they came out. Midnight In Paris was kind of a hit, technically his highest grossing movie ever. With the expanded category, it was considered something of a lock. The Tree of Life, however, does not have broad appeal, is clearly an art movie, and feels like the sort of thing directors love but that gets fewer votes from other branches. Keep in mind, the nominations in each category are chosen by their respective branches, but everyone votes for the Best Picture nominees. Both of these movies got three nominations each this year. Midnight In Paris got Picture, Director, and Screenplay; The Tree of Life got Picture, Director, and Cinematography. I think it's close between the two, but I would go with The Tree of Life as the one that would have gotten left out.

So, with that, here are the real nominations for Best Picture today:

The Artist
The Descendants
Hugo
Midnight In Paris
Moneyball

or, perhaps:

The Artist
The Descendants
Hugo
Moneyball
The Tree of Life

I'd go with the former.

"Were there any Oscar surprises?"

The nominations were announced this morning.

The nominees for best picture are “The Artist,” “The Descendants,” “The Help,” “Moneyball,” “Hugo,” “War Horse,” “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” “The Tree of Life” and “Midnight in Paris.”

I've only seen "Midnight in Paris," so I'm not a good judge of whether any of this is a good idea, though I will say I've seen the trailers for “The Help” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and believe them to be the kind of sententious treatment of an important subject that I avoid. All the others, except "War Horse," I could be prodded to see, except that I already feel overprodded about "The Artist," and I'm getting cranky. (Sorry, movies are mainly about emotions, and these are mine.)

The nominees for best actress are Michelle Williams (“My Week with Marilyn”), Meryl Streep (“The Iron Lady”), Viola Davis (“The Help”), Glenn Close (“Albert Nobbs”) and Rooney Mara (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”).

Is there an iota of suspense about that one?

"The Tasmanian Devil would look stoned standing next to Anne Hathaway."

James Franco explains his Oscar duddiness.

I talk with Tim Noah about the Wisconsin protests and a few other things.

ADDED: Meade makes an accidental appearance a little after 41:00, and I cover him up with a sheet of paper.

Oscars, anyone?

I haven't seen any of the movies, but I'm DVR-ing the show and will dip in from time to time. You can talk about it here and I might say something now and then.

For example, Jennifer Hudson has a smashing dress.

UPDATE: Man, this show sucks so bad.

UPDATE2: I'm IM-ing with my son Chris. I write: "is any celebrity saying anything pro-union or in support of the wisconsin protesters?" And he's all:

haven't heard anything

oh gwyneth paltrow mentioned you

in the middle of the song

she stopped and said you know ann althouse

needs to stop criticizing those protestors

LOL.

"No people of color have been nominated for Oscars."

"... You have a very powerful industry run by liberal Democrats, very rich liberal Democrats, and they have their top ten best movies, nominated best movies, and not a single person of color nominated for anything, not even best supporting stooge...."

Said Rush Limbaugh today, prompting Bo Snerdley to go on the air and comment:

Rush, there is something tremendously insidious and vile underneath this resegregation, resegregation of Hollywood. Our leading Hollywood producers -- and we all know who they are -- the Spielbergs, the bigwigs are simply look at black and Latino America in the face, especially black America, and you know what they're saying to 'em? They're saying, "Look, we gave you people enough. We elected him president. We did that. We don't have to put any of you people in movies anymore."

RUSH: You people?