2018 Oscars

[Muda69]

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/25/697599611/with-no-host-directing-traffic-green-book-drives-away-with-best-picture

Quote

It turns out the Oscars telecast doesn't need a host.

Sure, the headline coming out of Sunday's Oscars is that Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody were big winners — Green Book won three including best picture, and Bohemian Rhapsody won four including best actor for Rami Malek. (That despite the fact that both films had decidedly mixed reviews.) That Bohemian Rhapsody's credited director, Bryan Singer — fired part of the way through filming — has been accused of a wide range of sexual misconduct seemed to bother the voters not at all. In fact, no one even mentioned Singer. It was as if the film had not been directed by anyone at all, so neatly was he excised from the story of the film's baffling march to the Oscars.

......

And Spike Lee is a a sore loser.

 

[foxbat]

3 hours ago, Muda69 said:

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/25/697599611/with-no-host-directing-traffic-green-book-drives-away-with-best-picture

And Spike Lee is a a sore loser.

 

Haven't seen The Green Book or BlacKkKlansman, but if it's similar to the mix between DMD and DTRT, then I feel for him.  I liked DMD as a movie, but "felt" more with DTRT ...  it left much more of an impression on me than DMD.  I've watched DTRT many, many times since the first viewing.  I've only watched DMD once since my initial viewing in a movie theater.

[swordfish]

4 hours ago, Muda69 said:

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/25/697599611/with-no-host-directing-traffic-green-book-drives-away-with-best-picture

And Spike Lee is a a sore loser.

 

Yes he is.....Not a good example of a role model.

https://deadline.com/2019/02/spike-lee-green-book-storms-out-oscars-blackkklansman-jordan-peele-1202564402/

UPDATED with details from backstage: While he didn’t take the stage like Kanye West did years ago on the MTV Video Music Awards when Taylor Swift won an award that he felt should have gone to Beyoncé, BlacKkKlansman director Spike Leedid the next best thing when the Best Picture Oscar was won by Green Book.ed

Our Pete Hammond reported from the Dolby Theatre that Lee clearly was furious, got up and walked toward the back of the auditorium in a huff. He then turned back and appeared to get into an intense conversation with Jordan Peele, who was behind him. Lee paced the aisle and stormed to the back of the auditorium. When he came back, he turned his back to the stage during the speech.

[foxbat]

2 hours ago, swordfish said:

Yes he is.....Not a good example of a role model.

https://deadline.com/2019/02/spike-lee-green-book-storms-out-oscars-blackkklansman-jordan-peele-1202564402/

UPDATED with details from backstage: While he didn’t take the stage like Kanye West did years ago on the MTV Video Music Awards when Taylor Swift won an award that he felt should have gone to Beyoncé, BlacKkKlansman director Spike Leedid the next best thing when the Best Picture Oscar was won by Green Book.ed

Our Pete Hammond reported from the Dolby Theatre that Lee clearly was furious, got up and walked toward the back of the auditorium in a huff. He then turned back and appeared to get into an intense conversation with Jordan Peele, who was behind him. Lee paced the aisle and stormed to the back of the auditorium. When he came back, he turned his back to the stage during the speech.

Reminds me of Mike Pence at a Colts game, except that there wasn't an usher to force him back in the seat and it wasn't a per-orchestrated stunt.

[gonzoron]

30 minutes ago, foxbat said:

Reminds me of Mike Pence at a Colts game, except that there wasn't an usher to force him back in the seat and it wasn't a per-orchestrated stunt.

The "real" Green Book story is a documentary on the Smithsonian Channel tonight.

[foxbat]

15 minutes ago, gonzoron said:

The "real" Green Book story is a documentary on the Smithsonian Channel tonight.

I remember those things.  Quite a shame that they had to exist for general safety in just being a citizen.

[gonzoron]

18 minutes ago, gonzoron said:

The "real" Green Book story is a documentary on the Smithsonian Channel tonight.

https://www.smithsonianchannel.com/shows/the-green-book-guide-to-freedom/0/3467847?fbclid=IwAR1719kMGVBMgdJVAgfLYtgobxMbv1fSI5uDGVwLUNglwJHZRf2E3_HCEDI

[Muda69]

Stop Counting Women: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/opinion/sunday/women-directors-quotas.html

Quote

I recently joined the board of a small nonprofit organization. I can’t say for sure that my ovaries got me the gig, but I think they were at least part of my appeal. That uncertainty isn’t pleasant, but it’s less unpleasant than not being invited to join the board at all. The same is true for nearly every television or conference panel I’m asked to be on. Political journalism has long been male-dominated, libertarianism doubly so. For many professional women, doing gender-balance math is a tic, a reflexive response to being in too many rooms with too few other women.

That reflex was on display in January, when the announcement of Oscar nominations set off the annual ritual of counting up female nominees and then lamenting the ways in which women have been slighted. In recent years, the Hollywood commentariat has institutionalized my counting reflex.

In a typical example of the genre, The Atlantic declared “female filmmakers were entirely neglected.” Bustle told its readers, “Don’t celebrate too much” over women’s success in the documentary category, but focus instead on how their numbers in the directing and cinematography categories were shockingly low. At the Golden Globes, even as she clutched her best supporting actress trophy, Regina King scolded Hollywood for not doing better and vowed “to make sure that everything I produce” is going to be “50 percent women.”

Women are, of course, more than capable of producing Oscar-worthy cinema or panel-worthy insights. However, the notion that the lack of perfectly equal representation is obvious evidence of injustice is wrongheaded and counterproductive.

I understand why people want to keep tallies. While some gender imbalances can be explained by individual or group preferences, the shortage of women in so many areas of public life has been allowed or ignored or tacitly excused for so long that it may take hard numbers to open people’s eyes.

And there’s something seductive about counting. We count sheep to fall asleep. We celebrate anniversaries and birthdays. We track stock prices. We log miles run and dollars spent. To count something is to see it, to understand it, to have the illusion of control over it.

But people who want to lose weight initially learn to count calories in order to recalibrate their perceptions about how to make healthy choices. The goal isn’t a lifetime of squinting at labels. The goal is to develop a new set of habits and instincts, to make good decisions that feel natural and unforced. An occasional audit is vital, but continuous mortification can be crippling and wasteful. People who routinely go on about their diet rules — or worse, freely share their thoughts about co-workers’ lunch orders — are more likely to provoke resentment than to convert the reluctant. In the same way, the real work of recalibrating representation must be done privately and incrementally, one day at a time.

Counting is a form of mental labor, just like remembering when it’s time to buy laundry soap or send out birthday invitations. As such, it is predominantly — though not exclusively — performed by women, who shoulder the mental load of tracking, fostering, supporting and promoting other women. Keeping those running tallies of gender imbalance is like other emotional labor: It’s exhausting and distracts from more substantive work, and some people are skeptical it needs to be performed at all.

It can also be difficult to see the forest when you’re busy counting the trees. Not every cracked glass ceiling is a victory. Recently, major newspapers trumpeted the fact that women hold all of the highest positions at the Central Intelligence Agency. The chief executives of four of the nation’s five biggest military contractors are now women; Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defense arm of Boeing all have #ladybosses. It’s hard to imagine our feminist forebears seeing female dominance of the military-industrial complex as an unmixed blessing.

...

But consider “Roma.” If there is any justice in this world, it will win the Academy Award for best director on Sunday. This wrenching, beautiful film is set almost entirely in the world of women; it delicately engages class and race, stares unflinchingly at the darkness and light of motherhood, and yet it shows up on the wrong side of the gender ledgers: The director is Alfonso Cuarón, a man.

It is all the more troubling when the gender accountants are legislators or regulators with the power to do more than just name and shame. Technocrats on the right and left are quite certain they know all kinds of things: the right number of children to have, homes to own, degrees to obtain, pills to take, miles to drive, women to employ. Precise numerical goals create a false sense of clarity and certainty.

The absolute best way to ruin the gradual organic process of moving toward a society where men and women can both pursue the work they want — safely, with fair salaries and equal opportunities for promotion — is to freeze and polarize the conversation by imposing a bunch of rigid laws and policies. California passed a bill last fall that mandates the presence of at least one woman on the board of any publicly traded company headquartered there, with increases in that number under certain conditions.

“We are tired of being nice. We’re tired of being polite. We are going to require this because it’s going to benefit the economy,” said a co-author of the legislation, Hannah-Beth Jackson, a Democratic state senator from Santa Barbara, in a floor speech. This line of argumentation is typical, and baffling. Could it really be true that increasing female board representation is irrefutably good for business yet won’t happen unless companies are forced to do it right now?

In Norway, where a requirement for 40 percent female board membership became law in 2008, there’s some evidence that strict quotas may be counterproductive. Fewer companies chose to undertake initial public offerings in the period after the policy took effect and there was no measurable change in the affected companies’ performance or improvement in the prospects for women lower on the corporate hierarchy. In Kenya, lawmakers are debating a bill to enforce the so-called Two-Thirds Gender Rule, a constitutional clauseprohibiting more than 66 percent of the legislature to be the same gender.

In the case of any kind of quota, there are obvious trade-offs between one category (gender) and others (race, sexual orientation, disability status among them) that arguably deserve more consideration. As usual, the law is a lagging indicator. Gender is easier (though not always easy!) to notice and tally in ways that other statuses aren’t. In a perfect world, there would never be a roomful of white men deciding whether to pick a woman instead of a person of color for a “diversity slot.” We do not live in a perfect world.

Underlying all of this is that there is something deeply off-putting about slotting people into categories by gender, about sussing out the precise nature of their genitals and their hearts before deciding if their presence on a masthead or a list of finalists is just.

Being a token woman or winning the women’s trophy is better than nothing. But it’s also reductive and demeaning. Our unease over this was reflected in the mockery Mitt Romney got for his “binders full of women.” Though the idea of a president carefully curating lists of women to hire for top-level positions (rather than, well, other activities) doesn’t seem so bad looking back, does it?

The courts grappled with the problems of quotas during the college admissions affirmative action wars of the 1990s. (Like most of America’s wars, this conflict is continuing, but many people have stopped paying attention.) They settled on a compromise that does a shockingly good job of mirroring the way people actually function when left to their own devices. Hard quotas aren’t permitted, but giving some consideration to balance and diversity is fine.

In the meantime, the powers that be at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have actually laid the groundwork for sustainable improvements. They have tried to fix unbalanced inputs rather than mandating equal outputs. In 2018, they invited a record 928 new members, on top of 774 the year before, half of whom were women — up from 100 to 200 new additions in a normal year. As recently as 2014, Oscar voters were 76 percent male (as well as 94 percent white and on average 63 years old).

We’re too far from parity for anyone to claim the current system is just. It’s equally unclear that a 50/50 result is the only acceptable outcome.

On Oscar night this year, I will wince when only men are the nominees in some ostensibly coed categories. But I’m going to try my best to celebrate victories for women when they come and leave the counting to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

 

[foxbat]

1 minute ago, TrojanDad said:

Interesting...I wasn't aware Mike Pence was a candidate for an award at the Colts game......

Nice deflection

Nope .. just a prop.