Envelopes are tough.
Goddess.
She also doesn’t speak English, which means you are pretty hardcore to be in your 80’s, have never been to L.A. before, don’t speak the language, and go to the Oscars anyway…And be classy as all hell.
I posted this a couple times on Facebook in months leading up to the Oscars, but never here. But, since Argo won Best Picture and I am bitter about that, it should be posted here.
Instead of keeping its eye on the big picture of revolutionary Iran, the film settles into a retrograde “white Americans in peril” storyline. It recasts those oppressed Iranians as a raging, zombie-like horde, the same dark-faced demons from countless other movies— still a surefire dramatic device for instilling fear in an American audience. After the opening makes a big fuss about how Iranians were victimized for decades, the film marginalizes them from their own story, shunting them into the role of villains. Yet this irony is overshadowed by a larger one: The heroes of the film, the CIA, helped create this mess in the first place. And their triumph is executed through one more ruse at the expense of the ever-dupable Iranians to cap off three decades of deception and manipulation.
Argo makes the Iran hostage crisis, one of the most cataclysmic episodes in U.S. foreign affairs in the last 50 years, a mere backdrop to a silver-lining subplot—one that even Robert Anders, one of the Argo hostages, admitted was a “footnote.” The film thus distorts and belittles an event that transformed U.S. history. Ironically, the larger narrative of the hostage crisis would make for a more compelling movie from both a plot and action standpoint: A great filmmaker could make an amazing sequence of Operation Eagle Claw, a failed rescue mission that resulted in two helicopter crashes, several dead U.S. soldiers, and a subsequent overhaul of U.S. military operations. Imagine the last act of Zero Dark Thirty, but with an unhappy ending.
Ang Lee juggles two very precious items at our #VFOscars bash. #Regram from .@emenicheschi.
I mean, that’s pretty much what I would do after getting an Oscar, honestly.
Emmanuelle Riva at the Academy Awards (which was also on her 86th birthday).
She looks great, and I am still extremely disappointed that she didn’t win Best Actress.
And Seth MacFarlane makes a “Hollywood is controlled by Jews” joke.
Among all his other distasteful jokes…Including the Rihanna and Chris Brown one.
Amour won Best Foreign!
If that’s the only thing it wins tonight, I won’t be happy, but I won’t be completely infuriated.
David Lynch at the nominees luncheon for the 59th Annual Academy Awards, 1987
Cinema’s Best Directors to Never Win the Best Director Academy Award
I concur.
Also, Michael Haneke. Because the Oscars rarely recognize foreign directors in the main awards. The White Ribbon, man…
Amour (2012) directed by Michael Haneke.
Things will go on, and then one day it will all be over.
If this doesn’t win stuff on Sunday, I will BURN things.
Just about the cutest picture ever. Emmanuelle Riva and Quvenzhané Wallis, the youngest and oldest Best Actress nominees ever.
I am so happy about all of this. And look how adorable they are!
Wallis is 9 years old, and Riva is almost 86.
Welcome back, Ridley Scott
It feels good to have you doing sci-fi films again.
Michael Fassbender, since you were utterly robbed by not even being nominated for an Oscar for Shame, it would be lovely to see you nominated for Prometheus. Though, knowing how the Academy Awards historically have not held sci-fi films in consideration for the bigger awards (it was a HUGE deal with Sigourney Weaver was nominated for Best Actress for her role as Ellen Ripley in Aliens)…It may be unlikely.
