It’s a special edition of the podcast as Chris Ryan and I invite Mark Harris, Grantland’s esteemed Oscarmetrician, into the studio to postmortem Sunday night’s DOA ceremony. Mark shared his insight into behind-the-scenes award horsetrading, the enduring power of Harvey Weinstein, the canned uplift of The Artist, and why it’s never a bad thing to give a statue to Meryl Streep. He also answered big- (motion) picture questions about whether cinema has ceded its cultural primacy to the meth-cooking savages of television and which actor is a shoo-in for gold in 2012. (Hint: One of the stars of 21 Jump Street should probably clear some space on the mantle.)
After 30 minutes, Mark fled to a deserted island that doesn’t allow Blu-ray players. In his absence Chris and I talked Emma Stone, the great new NBC series Awake and Chris’ upcoming move across the country and inevitable transformation into a Hollywood insider. Enjoy!
Two weeks ago, Chelsea Fagan and I joined forces to discuss which Grammy nominees and winners were attainable/unattainable. The process was challenging, but at the end of the day, writing about Rihanna, Bruno Mars, and Adele isn't that difficult. We all have that Adele figure in our lives, everyone knows someone like Rihanna, and we all know how hard it is to shake a "Bruno Mars" from our friend circle. But the Oscars are a different beast. They are for adults, by adults. (FABA, if you will.) People with car loans and mortgages and pasts win and lose Oscars. This is one of the many reasons this was a more challenging task, but we did it, because that's what we do.
In the second installment of our "Celebrity Attainability Exercise in Futility," we tackle the Oscars and 10 of last night's most important figures.
WINNERS
1. Jean Dujardin, Best Actor, The Artist
Chelsea Fagan: I must take a moment to be a hipster here and say that some of us have been in love with Dujardin since Un gars, une fille all of 13 years ago. Some of us haven't just now hopped on the Ofthegarden train and realized how eminently unattainable he is in the past few weeks. That being said, the man is beyond adorable in every sense of the word, and has the comic timing/dashing good looks combination of an Old Hollywood star — one who you imagine might permanently smell of good Scotch, subtle cologne, and Cuban cigars. He dances, too. The man dances. If you were to meet him out, I guarantee you'd have a few stiff drinks and talk about how much better Paris is than New York, and you may trick yourself into thinking he's into it, too, but he'd leave you hanging right when you thought you had sealed the deal. He is a mirage of French charm.
The end of any Oscar season also marks the end of all of that season’s narratives, and when those wrap-ups are unexpected, you retrace your steps and try to figure out which signals you missed. In this case, there’s not a lot of retracing to do, since even the surprises of Oscar night didn’t feel especially surprising. (For those of you who kept score, I went a mediocre 14-for-24 in my predictions — but of the 10 awards I got wrong, eight went to movies I said would be the runners-up in two-way races.) The biggest of the official “upsets” was in Best Actress, where the complicated narrative of Viola Davis and the history of African American Oscar contenders and the opportunities they do and do not receive proved to be no match for the simpler story of Meryl Streep, which was that a 29-year wait for another Oscar was more than long enough.
Oh, have we met before? I'm sure we have, though perhaps not under these exact circumstances, not so dramatically, so intensely. But there you were, tentative at first as you were thrust out onto the red carpet like a shy Oscar date being pushed out of a limousine, but once the initial, dizzying assault of flashbulbs faded into a dazzling bath of celebratory light, you found your footing. You were more than self-assured. You were radiant. Just a few feet away, a grasping hand, underfed arm and bony elbow joined in a posture of sassy defiance, but no one noticed: all focus was already on you as you snaked out of the tailored dress slit. "She needs a sandwich," hissed the naysayers whose eyes briefly danced across that left arm, but when they finally realized you weren't retreating back into the inky folds of the gown, that you were here to stay, there was no more rancid bile, just awe. Oh, what a leg, indeed!
Oh boy. In a year where Hollywood was already on extra-thin (and OK, fine, mildly complex) ice with its adulation of the "Why won't anyone think of the white people?" rewrite of history in The Help, the 84th Academy Awards were already going to be a bit of a potential racism minefield. But for that buildup, it's almost impressive that the producers of the show came so correct in the opening minutes of the telecast, barely missing a beat before marching confidently into a cluster bomb no one in the audience even realized might be there, announcing confidently in the show's opening montage, "For real, we might give a couple black people some Oscars tonight, but check this shit out: Billy Crystal in blackface."
Hey, the Oscars were last night! Assuming that your crippling sense of television FOMO also forced you to sit through the entire telecast, you probably already know that The Artist was the night's top dog — the little French silent black-and-white flick that could took home Best Picture, Best Director (Michel Hazanavicius), and Best Actor (Jean Dujardin). If you were more focused on, say, appreciating your party host's painstakingly crafted movie-themed cupcakes than you were on the award for Best Sound Mixing, you can check out the full list of winners over here; you can also circle back with us here at Grantland for the full staff Oscars reaction later today. For now, though, let's continue the competitive spirit of awards season for just one more morning. So, how did the Oscar nominees do in celebrating triumph or confronting defeat?
And, inevitably, here's Sacha Baron Cohen's in-character response to his Oscar "ban" (if we're willing to define the word "ban" to mean "being politely asked not to show up on the red carpet in despot drag to proposition Angelina Jolie in an Wadiyan accent while swatting her with a riding crop"). God bless him for giving us something, no matter how absurd, to talk about besides how many backflips Jean Dujardin will have Uggie execute upon winning their fifth Oscar. Here's hoping he ignores the no-fun rule and causes a scene so outrageous and uncomfortable that he attempts to ride off the red carpet on Jonah Hill's back as security gives chase.
[UPDATE: The Academy has given in and will allow in-costume shenanigans. How weird that they decided extra publicity might be a good thing! But they played this totally wrong. They obviously should have staged a red carpet "crash" and surfed the buzz-waves of speculation about whether or not they were in on the stunt for days. Oh, well, back to talking about Uggie stunts on Monday.]
The Academy Awards spectacular is only a few nights away, and the big question on everyone’s mind is: Who am I wearing? (That’s a secret between me and my wardrobe dude, Rodney.) What I can tell you is how to make a few jermajesties off the gala event.
Most of the categories are already decided. The Artist for Best Picture (-900). Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) for Best Director (-600). Christopher Plummer for Best Supporting Actor (-4000). Octavia Spencer (-2000) for Best Supporting Actress. All are cost-prohibitive locks. But luckily I was able to find a handful of profitable opportunities that will fill your pockets with loot you can lose in a few weeks on the play-in game of the NCAA tournament. Have I ever steered you wrong? Nevermind. I miss football.
Oscars drama! Deadline is reporting that Sacha Baron Cohen — who co-stars in Hugo, which is up for Best Picture — had his tickets to this Sunday's Academy Awards pulled. Apparently, the Academy learned Cohen was planning on arriving on the red carpet in costume as his character from his upcoming Middle Eastern autocrat satire The Dictator, and got peeved. Later in the day, facing blowback from their stodgy ways, they publicly reversed course, saying Baron Cohen was not banned from the ceremony, but that they were holding out on hooking up the tix until they got assurances he would not get dressed up for the event. As an Oscars spokesperson told Deadline, “We would hope that every studio knows that this is a bad idea. The Red Carpet is not about stunting.” (Side note: Who is this slang-literate Oscars spokesperson? Young Buck?)
The Hollywood Prospectus podcast is now weekly and free to cover any topics in the pop culture universe. To celebrate, Chris Ryan and I talked ... mostly about TV! Our conversation ranged from The Simpsons’ 500th episode to whether a Friday Night Lights movie is a good idea (we even supplied some better ones; you’re welcome, Peter Berg!). We also touched on the glories of Eastbound & Down, the sorrows of Life’s Too Short, the finale of Downton Abbey, and the continued zombie stagger of The Walking Dead. There’s even some talk about the Oscars and why, just maybe, we don’t care so much about them anymore. Listen now, and if you happen to know Josh Lucas (or his agent), tell him to listen, too! We’ve got the perfect part for him!
By Mark Harris at
John Shearer/Getty Images/Hollywood Film Awards
The Oscars, as I hope we’ve established by now, are not simply a beauty contest. But when it comes to the half-dozen categories that reward visuals, that can be hard to remember. Here’s this year’s rundown:
Best Art Direction
Nominees:
The Artist Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 Hugo Midnight in Paris War Horse
As I hope I’ve made clear by this point in our Oscar journey, I love awards. I cover them, I handicap them, I tweet them, I do useless math about them, I would happily volunteer to accept them if the actual winners could not attend, and I watch them. On Sunday I got really excited about the complicated, layered irony of Bon Iver winning Best New Artist at the Grammys even though I’m about 80 percent sure that I don’t know who he is. So when I propose the elimination of an award, please understand that it’s with a heavy heart. That said, when it comes to the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, my strong feeling is, to quote Padma Lakshmi: Please pack your knives and go.
On February 26, we are, I think, likely to see Viola Davis walk to the stage to accept a Best Actress Oscar for playing a maid. It will have been about 26,000 days — is that a lot or a little? — since Hattie McDaniel won an Academy Award for her role as Gone With the Wind’s house slave Mammy and tearfully expressed the hope that she would “always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry.” How far we’ve come. How far we haven’t.
The bankrupt Eastman Kodak company has asked out of its naming agreement for the Kodak Theatre, the current Home of the Oscars, potentially desecrating 10 proud, corporate-sponsored years of awards-hosting tradition. Should its request be granted, the venue's going to need a new name, and quickly. So rather than allow the Academy and the owners of Hollywood's favorite tourist-clogged malltertainment destination suffer the embarrassment of a blank marquee, we're here to help line them up with potential sponsors and names.
• Grauman's Chinese Oscardome
• The B of A Reasonable Access Fee Debit Card Theatre
• The David Geffen Oscar Playhouse
• In-N-Out Arena
• The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce Hall of Sad, Costumed Panhandler Justice
• The Steven Spielberg Automatic Bid Pavilion
• GoDaddy.com's Visit Our Website to See Some Bullshit Involving Meryl Streep in a Bra OscarTittytown
• Armen's Hollywood T-Shirt and Bong Stall Awards Annex
• The Better Luck Next Lifetime, Brett Ratner Amphitheater Sponsored by Verizon
• The Weinstein Company Oscar Museum and Conference Center
