March 8

Because The Hurt Locker made so little money (so far) and Avatar made so much, there will be (already is) some of the usual grumbling that the Oscars are out of touch with the mass audience. But movies, as Louis Menand brilliantly elucidated in a 1995 essay on Pauline Kael for The New York Review of Books, are "not truly a mass art form to anything like the degree that television and popular music are." Therefore, the Oscars actually do reflect the consensus taste of the frequent movie-watching audience -- which I belong to and you do, too:

One of Hollywood's best-kept industrial secrets is that the movies are entertainment for educated people....This was a finding that surprised the studios when, in the 1940s, they first undertook to analyze their audience: frequency of movie attendance increases with income and education. Even today, when people complain that they don't make movies for grown-ups anymore, the percentage of people who say they are "frequent moviegoers" is more than half again as great among people who have gone to college (31 percent) as it is among people who have only finished high school (19 percent). The belief that education makes people snobbish about movie-going is the opposite of the case: 20 percent of people who have been to college say they "never" go to movies, but the figure is 39 percent among adults who have only finished high school and 57 percent among adults with even less education than that. Movie-going is a lot more expensive than television-watching, of course, and no doubt this helps to account for the difference. But the numbers make it clear that film is not truly a mass art form to anything like the degree that television and popular music are. Movies since the Thirties have been designed for the people who have the money and the leisure to afford them.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1959

Along those lines, I always wonder what Oscar producers and advertisers think they are up to when they trot out the likes of Taylor Lautner and Zac Efron, or heavily promote new movies with Robert Pattinson and Miley Cyrus. The demographic that responds to those performers is not watching the Oscars and never will. Trying to reach them is a waste of effort.

Mo'Nique's shout-out to the first black actor to win an Oscar, Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, was heartfelt and touching. It appears that Mo'Nique not only wants to play McDaniel in a biopic, but owns the option to do so. It strikes me as a wonderful idea. You go, girl!

http://andthewinneris.blog.com/2010/03/08/not-a-coincidence/

As someone who carped at the idea of Sandra Bullock receiving an Oscar nomination (not that I've seen The Blind Side yet), I've got to give her props on several fronts. She gave the best acceptance speech of the night (along with Michael Giacchino for his Up score). She looked absolutely incredible; that dress was a knock-out and completely suited her. And, not only was she the first performer to win an Oscar and a Razzie in the same weekend, she actually showed up to accept her Razzie in person, which is seldom done and shows what a good sport she is. She acquitted herself well on every front, and accepting praise gracefully is part of what makes you worthy of it. So I withdraw my earlier objections!

This just in, and hard to believe (although maybe not, these days): Variety is letting veteran reviewer Todd McCarthy go (theater critic David Rooney, too) to save money:

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2010/03/mccarthy_goes_d.php

I could and often did disagree with McCarthy strongly, while still respecting his enormous film knowledge and being utterly grateful to him for his involvement in such invaluable projects as the book Kings of the Bs and the documentary film Visions of Light. This is a disgraceful move on Variety's part. Yet who among us is not perceived to be expendable these days?

Here is a film that I doubt Todd McCarthy ever reviewed, the South Korean Super Batman & Mazinger V, which Todd at the blog Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill! describes his peculiar relation to:

I know that Super Batman & Mazinger V is just one of many patchwork, copyright-flaunting children's films made in South Korea during the 80s and early 90s, but there is something about its combination of lazily disguised knock-offs of both American and Japanese nerdy pop cultural icons that seems so specifically designed to lure me in that I wouldn't be surprised if it was part of some kind of trash cinema based sting operation with me as its target.

http://diedangerdiediekill.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-batman-mazinger-v-south-korea.html

On the opposite end of the cimematic/cultural spectrum, Samuel Wilson at Mondo 70: A Wild World of Cinema takes in the neglected German New Wave director Werner Schroeter's 1980 Palermo or Wolfsburg:

http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2010/03/palermo-oder-wolfsburg-1980.html

I was lucky enough to attend a couple of screenings of a Schroeter retrospective at the Goethe Institute in San Francisco in the late Eighties. seeing Council of Love and Day of the Idiots. I shall never forget the golden shower in the latter film; Schroeter is one unbuttoned film-maker, both in his aesthetics and in his content. The retrospective also included screenings at the Roxie Theater, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Pacific Film Archive. There are details here (scroll way down):

http://www.archive.org/stream/sanfranciscocine88sanfrich/sanfranciscocine88sanfrich_djvu.txt

Among notables born on this date are composers Carlo Gesualdo, Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, and Alan Hovhaness, jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., literary critic Leslie Fiedler, non-fiction writer John McPhee, bluesman Mississippi John Hurt, jazz pianist Dick Hyman, Monkees member Mickey Dolenz, children's writer Kenneth Grahame, painters Anselm Kiefer (Germany) and Tom Roberts (Australia), poets Joao de Deus (Portugal) and Juana de Ibarbourou (Uruguay), academic Neil Postman, and actors Aidan Quinn, Claire Trevor, Cyd Charisse, Camryn Manheim, and Lynn Redgrave. Oliver Wendell Homes Jr. is memorably portrayed and analyzed in an excellent book by the aforementioned Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (which also focuses on William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey). Holmes, deeply affected by the Civil War in which he was a Union soldier, had a pessimistic cast of mind thereafter and, although married, declined to have children on the ground that this is not the sort of world he would want to bring them into. I must agree with him on that; even if I had ever been so inclined, having children would have required more of an optimistic perspective on society and the future than I have been able to muster since my late twenties. Fortunately, I was disinclined, so I never had to feel a tug-of-war on this point.