Gold Crush

I haven't seen Beasts of the Southern Wild, though I hear it's excellent, nor have I seen Amour, though I hear it's excellent as well and I admire Michael Haneke as a director. What I will say following the Oscar nominations announcement made just a little while ago, though, is that while I'm not against making sure that smaller movies get a shot at the gold -- you've gotta be fucking kidding me, right?

This year's Best Director category manages to pull off a pretty impressive feat, glaringly snubbing not one, not two, but three extraordinarily talented directors who all saw their films nominated for Best Picture. It's heresy that Kathryn Bigelow didn't get a nod, likewise for Quentin Tarantino and, from what I hear, Ben Affleck.

I got yelled at a little last year because I criticized the Academy's fawning over The Artist, a movie that I considered to be more a foreign film than anything else, but I admit now that I was kind of an ass about that. Amour, however, really is a foreign film -- entirely in French and directed by an Austrian, which, while certainly not precluding it from putting Haneke in the running for Best Director, should at least be taken into consideration when people like Bigelow and Tarantino are other possible contenders.

Beasts of the Southern Wild, meanwhile, I'm sure is every bit as good as they say. It's still directed by a 30-year-old and considering the subject matter, its elevation over so many others by the Academy -- and here's where the knives will come out -- smacks of the usual white liberal condescension Hollywood is too lacking in self-awareness to actually pride itself on. I'm absolutely all about seeing the little film that could do, but when it's always a sure thing that Harvey Weinstein's promotional machine and backroom politicking will win the day for at least one film -- this year it's Silver Linings Playbook -- and it's all but a guarantee that Spielberg will pick up a nom for a beloved historical epic what you're left with is a lot of deserving people having to fight it out.

It's true that not everyone will get a seat, but Jesus -- leaving Bigelow and Tarantino without one makes me wonder if I should start taking the Oscars about as seriously as I take the Grammys.

(Incidentally, I couldn't care less about Les Miz, but if you count the snubbing of Tom Hooper, then it's four talented directors who got screwed.)

Thirty Shades of Grey

Today's column for the Daily Banter takes a look at the debate over torture and Zero Dark Thirty, which opens in wide release in two days.

Here's the opening shot:

"Just before the limited release of 'Zero Dark Thirty,' I wrote a column for this site that took to task those who hadn't seen the film yet but were already howling about its portrayal of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques -- torture by any other name -- and their effect on the manhunt for Osama bin Laden. The criticism ranged from those who believed that by taking no moral stance on torture and instead simply presenting it as a fact of the times, director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal were in fact issuing tacit approval of torture, to those who couldn't fathom how any critic could detach him or herself from the content of the film and laud it despite knowing that it seems to falsely link torture to the capture of Bin Laden. My point at the time was simple: shut up until you actually see the movie and know what the hell you're talking about. I hadn't seen 'Zero Dark Thirty' and therefore knew I couldn't comment on it with any kind of intellectual honesty so I was willing to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt until such time as I had the chance to take in what I assumed would be a complex and potentially unsettling moviegoing experience for myself.

Well, yesterday I saw 'Zero Dark Thirty.'"

Read the Rest Here