MUGGER: Sucked In
Maybe it was a reaction to the glut of droning and repetitious previews and reviews of President Bushs workmanlike State of the Union address (general consensus from the majority of pundits: it sucked), or the medias obsequious stalking of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but last week I was uncharacteristically drawn to coverage of the Oscar nominations. Normallyalthough it can be argued that nothing in the expanding yet shrinking media world is normal todayI ignore most of the Oscars debate and havent actually watched, at least for more than 30 minutes, the televised awards ceremony since the early 1970s when Marlon Brando horrified the entertainment establishment with his at least temporary embrace of everything native American.
(One bit of commentary on the SOTU I did get a chuckle from was Tom Shales smarmy Jan. 24 Washington Post television column. This is one to remember: Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) was caught by cameras reading [Bushs] speech too, but he looks so venerable and distinguished by now that its hard to get a bad picture of him. [Hes not running for senator this year; wait until the tabs print snaps of Teddy and his gut sailing shirtless on Cape Cod.] In fact he seems more and more to resemble Claude Rains as a veteran white-haired senator in Frank Capras classic Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Life imitating arts imitation of life. Never mind that the liberal lion is twice the size of the actor, but Rains was one of the bad guys in that movie. Is Shales simply shallow or getting in a roundabout dig at Robert Byrds apprentice?)
As it happens, though, one of my sons is far more passionate about cinema than say, books written before 1950, and even though at age 14 hes unsurprisingly drawn to indie projectsespecially those made for less than 100 buckshe sees an inordinate number of movies, at least by my reckoning, no matter what the budget or what critics have to say. (Of course, that would require actually reading a newspaper instead of simply clicking on to Rotten Tomatoes.) As a young filmmaker, Nicky also has such a respect for the craft that, with the exception of the horrendous remake of The Alamo, hes never walked out on a movie, no matter how awful. Over the holidays, Nicky, his younger brother Booker and I went to see The Pursuit of Happyness, a dog from start to finish, and he got really pissed off when the two of us tried to bribe him to leave early. I thought the offer of a new CD, so soon after Christmas, was pretty darn generous, but he just scowled, and the three of us sat through the miserable film, for which Will Smith inexplicably received a Best Actor nomination.
So, on the morning of Jan. 23, I got out of the shower and coincidentally The Today Show was cutting to Los Angeles at that very moment for the Oscars press conference. Theres no glory in admitting that I sat on the bed for the entirety of the industrys gratis commercial, but at least Tim Russert never appeared to present his analysis of what it all meant politically for the remainder of Bushs term and Nancy Pelosis tenure as Speaker of the House. What it meant to me, as usual, was the films I enjoyed in 2006 were passed overlike Inside Man, Clerks II and The Illusionistin favor of stuff like the convoluted Babel and Martin Scorseses sub-par The Departed. (I was pleased, however, that Bill Monahan, who wrote countless memorable articles for this weekly in the 90s, has the chance to go onstage, maybe without a cigarette and accept a Best Screenwriting trophy for The Departed.)
Helen Mirrens a doll and The Queen was fine by me, although not comparable to her starring role in the early seasons of Prime Suspect, and Eddie Murphy is also deserving for his role in Dreamgirls, an entertaining, if utterly flawed, musical. And even if Half Nelson was disappointingly flat, lead actor Ryan Goslings performance, like most of his work, deserves recognition, although Chris Dodd has a better chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination than Gosling getting chosen over Smith, Forest Whitaker, Peter OToole or Leonardo DiCaprio.
Anyway, the single weirdest article I read about the Oscars was Timothy Noahs Jan. 23 post on Slate, The Academys Fatty Problem, in which he argues that Richard Griffiths, the star of the abysmal, mind-numbing, vaguely creepy The History Boys, was ignored because hes somewhat obese. Maybe there is a prejudice against full-bodied actors when its time to hand out awardsand if so, thats not bound to change with all the absurd trans fat laws and removal of anything remotely appetizing at public and private school cafeteriasbut Noahs defense of Griffiths in this dreary film seems misplaced.
I like British films a lot (television too, like MI-5, the late John Thaws Inspector Morse series and Jimmy McGoverns The Street), but The History Boys was so completely a meandering clunker that even Griffiths decent performance as a jolly teacher who lived for frequent reach-arounds on his male students, while uncomfortable, couldnt trump the movies overall dreariness. Somehow, Noah, in his defense of this particular fellow and other weight-challenged actors, didnt even mention this particular aspect of the film. A better article on The History Boys, it seems to me, would focus on the critical raves it received from liberal reviewers, men and women who undoubtedly trashed the disreputable former Rep. Mark Foley, who at least, according to the hundreds of news articles last fall, did his underage trolling online.
There was one exception that I came across: Editor & Publishers left-wing Greg Mitchell, in a Jan. 15 column, wrote: [I]magine my surprise when I saw [The History Boys] recently and discovered that it presented a pederast as something of a hero Looking back at some of the reviews of the film, I was amazed at how little outrage or even criticism over the treatment of this character emerged. Can you imagine the response if that teacher repeatedly brushed an arm across his female students breastsand still turned out to be a hero? Given how the film ends, they might have called it The Dead Perverts Society.
Clicking over to high culture, theres little doubt that Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is an educated man, but also, in 2007, a dinosaur. On Jan. 23, the foreign sex-trade expert had a go at Bush and Iraqnothing unusual there, since Times editorial employees are probably given a quota each month for ridiculing the Presidentand attempted to draw literary parallels. He said: Maybe George W. Bush is the education president after all. Whatever one thinks of his No Child Left Behind initiative, he has made the classics powerfully resonant today.
So for those schoolchildren and university students out there struggling through Moby-Dick or the Aeneid, take heart! Theyre not just about white whales or Trojan wandererstheyre also about President Bush and Iraq.
And Art Sulzberger Jr. wonders why his newspaper is no longer at the epicenter of the, to borrow from David Dinkins, American Mosaic. Just how many schoolchildren does Kristof think are struggling with Virgil or Melville? Id bet the number is even smaller than Times readers who take the incoherent baseball musings of Murray Chass seriously. Too bad that thats the case, but in a country where a growing percentage of elite prep schools dont even offer Latin or Greek as an language elective, much less a requirement, Virgils gone the way of cloth diapers and tiny bottles of Squirt.