OK, so it’s been a week since the Academy Award nominations were released – a week since the wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments began over the supposedly egregious snub of “The Dark Knight” from the major (read: non-technical) awards, with the exception of Heath Ledger’s nomination.

What – no best picture? No best director?

Really? How about most super-duper movie ever in the history of undiscriminating fanboys? (More…)

Watching Carl Reiner’s “Where’s Poppa?” (1970) when it aired on Turner Classics recently, it struck me that this film – and a couple of others released between 1968-70 – represented kind of a mini-golden age for outrageous comedy, with roots in Sid Caesar’s TV shows of the early 1950s.

Consider: Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” was released in 1968, Woody Allen’s “Take the Money and Run” in 1969 and Reiner’s “Where’s Poppa?” (perhaps the most gleefully vulgar of the three) in 1970.

Watching them now, they’re all still exceptionally funny: still oddball and off-kilter in ways that influenced filmmakers for years to come. From the distance of 40 years, given the way mores and attitudes have changed, they seem almost quaint by today’s standards.

Yet I’d argue that, without these films, we wouldn’t have had the Farrelly brothers, the Judd Apatow machine or a lot of other comedy that’s fairly commonplace today. (More…)

Who was robbed in Thursday’s Oscar nominations?

Sally Hawkins: Winner of the Golden Globe and the New York Film Critics Circle awards, Hawkins gives the year’s best performance – brave, funny, touching. Working with Mike Leigh, she carved the role out of her own feisty, life-filled spirit. It’s an amazing creation, delivered by the tiny, towering Hawkins – the portrayal of a lifetime. But she’s not nominated – and Angelina Jolie is? For the overwrought, overheated, overacted “Changeling”? Obviously, tears count for more than smiles at the Academy. And apparently the subtlety, the complexity and the sheer imagination of Hawkins’ work was overlooked in favor of Jolie’s shamelessly tear-stained performance. Or maybe they just were overwhelmed by her skill on roller-skates. It’s telling that “Happy-Go-Lucky” was also overlooked in all major categories except original screenplay.

“The Wrestler”: Yes, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei received acting nominations. But the movie itself – one of the fiercest, most moving, most resourceful independent entries of the year – was shut out in the major categories. (More…)

Are we having fun yet?

Well, as a matter of fact, yeah.

Of the 18 films I’ve seen in the past four days, I didn’t walk out of any. Didn’t even have the urge to; it probably has more to do with the choices I was making than the overall quality of the festival. I was looking for specific kinds of movies and, having identified them, found that they fit the bill of what I hoped they would be.

After four days at Sundance, I’m heartily sick of self-reverential Sundance intro, in which filmmakers such as Steven Soderbergh, Morgan Spurlock, Davis Guggenheim and John Waters share Sundance memories on the occasion of the festival’s 25^th anniversary. Not that they’re offensive – but there are only about three or four of them and, after seeing more than a dozen films in a short time, I’ve go them memorized. It happens every year; these were, initially, more interesting than some previous years. But they got old in a hurry.

At some future point, I’ll go off at length about how obnoxiously selfish and self-involved it is to read/send e-mail and text messages in a screening. Despite repeated announcements prior to screenings here, it was epidemic at Sundance, principally among agent/studio types who apparently believe there’s no movie too moving or thought-provoking to keep them from ruining it by distracting the people around them with their lit-up iPhone screens. Douchebags and dickheads.

Anyway, it’s late on Monday night, I’m on a plane back to New York first thing tomorrow – but I’ll be posting a couple of interviews over the next couple of days. So here’s a rundown of my last day at Sundance, a day that included a very agreeable hour spent talking to the folks from “Big Fan”: Patton Oswalt, Kevin Corrigan and director Robert Siegel. (More…)

Ah, the joys of connectivity – finally restored via Ethernet cable in my hotel room. Sitting here listening to a download of the song “Work the Wound” from “Passing Strange,” courtesy of a giveaway postcard I picked up in the press office.

To be honest, after a morning spent writing and posting in the lobby of the Marriott before my first screening, I barely had time between screenings yesterday to write, let alone post to my website. I had enough time to have a beer in Coach’s, the bar/bistro upstairs from the Racquet Club screening venue, get my reviews written for next week’s Star and send them off. Nice strong WiFi signal up there – and at the headquarters Marriott.

But in trying to make it from venue to venue for four screenings on Sunday, there was barely time to boot up and find a signal, let alone then take the time to write and put it in the kind of shape I’d like before going public.

Like I’ve got all the time in the world here this morning. It’s 6:50 a.m. Monday and I want to get this up, shower and head off for my last day in Park City, beginning with a 9:15 screening of “I Love You, Philip Morris,” the unsold gay-themed film with Jim Carrey.

Still, I had time to wonder (because I haven’t really been keeping up with what’s being written about what’s going on here): Which current event are writers finding mirrored in the films of this festival? As a former newspaper writer who was expected to file that kind of b.s. analysis, I can only imagine: “These films reflect the swelling hope of the coming Obama presidency” or “You can feel the fear and tension of the collapsing economy reflected…” or – well, you name it. It’s probably out there. (More…)

Ahh, Saturday, here in Park City, I think it was the Fourth of ….

OK, enough with the clever 70s Chicago references (particularly because that band was so criminally lame; we used to say that, if you let one of their songs play in your car, it took 3 hours off the life of the car radio).

Anyway, a five-movie day. Seeing five movies in a day at Sundance (and doing an interview: director James Toback) means a couple of things. You’re lucky (to get into everything that you want to see – and to make it around Park City with enough speed to get there in time). And you’re exhausted by the end of the day. Both obtain in this case.

I felt even luckier. For one thing, I actually got a couple of meals in, including a terrific plate of pulled pork at a semi-fast-food BBQ joint for dinner. For another, got to hang and chat with the outrageously talkative Toback (who can say more in 10 minutes than most people can say in an hour – and do so articulately), as well as with the always-entertaining Jeffrey Wells, author of the Hollywood Elsewhere blog (www.hollywood-elsewhere.com).

On the other hand, wound up staying up until well after midnight on the phone with tech support for the wireless provider for this hotel where I’m staying out at Kimball Junction. No solution, ultimately, was provided except the suggestion, “Get yourself an Ethernet cable.”

Which I’ve now done at 5:45 a.m. – to no avail. Still no connectivity. I’ve left a phone message at the service provider – but the voicemail message says that they’re not even open on Sunday.

On the other hand, having watched Senor Wells in action – his laptop and digital camera always poised no matter where he is, his senses seemingly attuned to the presence of a Wifi signal – it may behoove me to finally truly join the ranks of the digerati and shlep my laptop with me today so I can actually post this. I’ve tried to avoid the urge to post when and wherever I pleased –  but that may just be the antiquated print-media beast that still lurks within me, digging in its heels.

So, later today, an experiment: posting as I see things. Meanwhile, many thanks to the lovely ladies Lina Plath and Clare Ann Conlon of Frank PR, who lent me a laptop from which I could post yesterday in their suite at the headquarters Marriott. (More…)

Sorry for the appearance of this. Posting from a borrowed computer because no wireless signal at my hotel this morning and I don’t want to shlep my laptop around.

So Friday at Sundance: one day, four movies, four different venues.

8:30 a.m., “Tyson,” at the Racquet Club: James Toback has taken a bold step with his documentary about former heavyweight champ and long-time problem child Mike Tyson. He let Tyson tell the whole story in his own words. More amazingly, given the alternately inspirational, aspirational, knuckle-headed, pathetic, revolting and tragic nature of Tyson’s story, Tyson bares all. Almost. (More…)

Whoever said that getting there is half the fun wasn’t trying to get from New York to Park City, Utah, on a cold January morning.

Oh well, at least my US Airways flight out of New York yesterday didn’t land in the Hudson River. (More…)

There was a time when I thought of the Oscars as kind of the High Holy Day of my profession. Now it’s more like the Belmont Stakes, the final race in an endless awards season that gets longer, more diluted and ultimately more meaningless.

Speaking of meaningless, The Golden Globes were last night. I didn’t watch. OK, I’ll admit: I made predictions for Tom O’Neil’s Gold Derby website, with my picks as to who will win the Golden Globes. I did it for the basest of reasons: I can always use the exposure for this website, which I get from appearing in that venue.

But, having admitted that, I’ll also say that, in general, I hate the whole horse-race aspect of awards season. For that matter, I hate awards season. But first things first.

One of my favorite documentaries last year was Chris Bell’s “Bigger Stronger Faster,” mistakenly tagged as “the steroids movie.” While the subject of steroids was central to Bell’s thesis, he was really looking at the whole culture of winning that permeates American society. It’s a mentality that ultimately claimed his older brother, Mike “Mad Dog” Bell, a would-be pro wrestler who struggled with drug addiction before his death in December.

That mentality isn’t just about winning – it’s about making a fetish over the run-up to the actual announcement. It’s about the tout but not about gambling; rather, it’s about distraction, about focusing on the trivia for everything from the Super Bowl to the Academy Awards to the presidential election. In each case, the discussion is never about substance, it’s about minutiae.

Just the other night, I saw Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, complaining on “The Daily Show” that TV news tends to focus on superficialities of politics, rather than the substance. This, from a White House that counted on the media to do just that. Say what you will, but the Bushies lived and died by talking points that rarely, if ever, had much connection to reality – or substance. And the media swallowed it whole.

So it went with the 2008 presidential campaign – a fact that Barack Obama somehow overcame or rode herd on. So it is, at an ever-increasing pace, with Oscar coverage – and the rest of the trophies doled out during “awards season” (which makes it sound as though they grow on trees, which they seem to).

At the end of the election, the media decried the media, as they always do. They lamented their own tendency to focus on errata and trivia, on the most ridiculous details, rather than the substance of the issues. Yet even when they did report on the issues, the media’s take most often focused on how those issues were playing with the electorate – the horse race – rather than on the candidates’ positions themselves.

The horse race is always sexier. And it also dominates, because the media no longer believes its primary mission to be public service: Rather, its mission is to its shareholders. So report the horse race; that’s what draws readers and ratings – and advertising revenue.

So it is with the Oscars and other awards. (And really – the Golden Globes? They were a joke for decades – until one of the networks discovered it could make money by televising them. Suddenly, the joke that is the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was legitimized as genuine kingmakers, whose awards actually have currency.)

I spent more years than I can remember writing about the Oscars for newspapers. Predicting the nominations, commenting upon the actual nominations, predicting the winners, commenting upon the actual winners. Back when the Oscars happened at the end of March, that meant that, by the time the awards show rolled around, I’d been writing about the same movies for at least three months (for the end-of-year films), if not longer. The day I left newspapers was the day I vowed never to write one of those analyses again.

When they moved the Oscars up to the end of February, it didn’t shorten Oscar season – it just pushed it back into the old year. I was reading predictions involving films such as “Revolutionary Road,” “Benjamin Button” and “Defiance” (all of which opened around Christmas) back in October and November, before anyone had seen them. Hell, they were talking about Oscar contenders when I left for the Toronto Film Festival in September – before anyone had even heard of “Slumdog Millionaire.”

What always bothers me is that the discussion rarely has anything to do with the substance of the work so much as its ability to serve as an awards magnet. The two rarely have much to do with each other.

All of this, of course, is beside the point. Every year, more and more media outlets buy into the madness and offer their audience the awards-season equivalent of tout sheets. I was struck this year by the fact that the New York Times put out its own Oscar section on Jan.4 – almost a month before the nominations come out. Of course, if you could charge a premium for a special-section Sunday movie ad, you’d do it too.

(On the other hand, if the NYT had to provide refunds to every sucker who bought a ticket to the unwatchable, endless “Synecdoche, New York,” because of Manohla Dargis’ incredibly misleading review, they would have to run two more special sections.)

It’s pointless to complain, at this point. The Golden Globes are already over – the same week as the People’s Choice and Critics Choice awards. It’s 10 days until the Oscar nominations are announced and six weeks until the Oscars themselves.

They’re almost at the starting gate. Yawn.

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The son of a friend, a bright young man in his mid-20s, complained to my wife recently about the morally reprehensible nature of the show “24,” which returns to the air with a four-hour premiere on Fox Sunday and Monday.

It’s unconscionable, he told her, that a show should exploit the public’s fear of terrorism. (Hey, someone’s got to do it after the Bush administration skulks away.)

He didn’t even mention the show’s regular use of torture as an interrogation technique which, at least on “24,” always produces actionable intelligence. There is, at a minimum, anecdotal evidence that American forces in Iraq and elsewhere use the show as a role model when questioning suspects. This, despite evidence that so-called heightened or aggressive questioning usually produces the opposite of useful information. But I’m sure he meant to.

So – right on, young brother! Fight the corporate media oligarchy.

Meanwhile, I’m afraid I’ll have to feed my “24” jones. (More…)