Oscar -- land lubber?
George Clooney made a joke without reading the teleprompter. If you tell your girlfriend you want to have a threesome with Daniel Craig, she will love you forever. Ennio Morricone is every bit as weird as his music makes him out to be.
These are lessons to live by, but what is up with Oscar's snub of our beloved Leviathan films? Our only respite was the nominiation of Poseidon for Achievement in Visual Effects -- and this, I submit, is hardly enough. Has Hollywood turned its artifically-tanned, Tai-Bo-sculpted back on the movies of the sea?
We've had infrequent success at the "Academy" "Awards" -- for best picture in '43 with merman-manatee-human-squid Peter Lorre's stunning Casablanca (with passable support from Bogart and some floozy), and again in '54 and '57 for On the Waterfront and The Bridge on the River Kwai. And since then? As little recognition as a Great White Shark gives a Scallop. Hollywood's elite traded water -- whether salty or fresh -- in favor of champagne, whiskey, red wine, Pomegranate juice, or Woody Harrelson's oxygen bar.
And so I watched last night's spectacle with mild disgust, as victory was awarded to a film set in Boston which failed to visit its beloved Aquarium. Jack Nicholson dressed as a seal, though, which was compensation -- perhaps even compensation enough to make up for the Academy's historical and continuing neglect of the cinema of the deep (although it is hard to expect more from those who define themselves as the ultimately and absolutely shallow).
These are lessons to live by, but what is up with Oscar's snub of our beloved Leviathan films? Our only respite was the nominiation of Poseidon for Achievement in Visual Effects -- and this, I submit, is hardly enough. Has Hollywood turned its artifically-tanned, Tai-Bo-sculpted back on the movies of the sea?
We've had infrequent success at the "Academy" "Awards" -- for best picture in '43 with merman-manatee-human-squid Peter Lorre's stunning Casablanca (with passable support from Bogart and some floozy), and again in '54 and '57 for On the Waterfront and The Bridge on the River Kwai. And since then? As little recognition as a Great White Shark gives a Scallop. Hollywood's elite traded water -- whether salty or fresh -- in favor of champagne, whiskey, red wine, Pomegranate juice, or Woody Harrelson's oxygen bar.
And so I watched last night's spectacle with mild disgust, as victory was awarded to a film set in Boston which failed to visit its beloved Aquarium. Jack Nicholson dressed as a seal, though, which was compensation -- perhaps even compensation enough to make up for the Academy's historical and continuing neglect of the cinema of the deep (although it is hard to expect more from those who define themselves as the ultimately and absolutely shallow).
Labels: movies
posted by Allan Hazlett | 2:32 AM
3 Comments:
Sir, I must protest your snub of the Best Picture of 1997, the last feature film directed by He-Who-Shall-Lead-Us-Beneath-the-Seas-of-Saturn's-Moons, the magnum opus of James Tiberius Cameron, the titanic Titanic. Perhaps the Academy has yet to recover from its immensity?
Perhaps we need to institute our own annual ceremony to bestow the LEVIATHAN AWARDS. I nominate James Cameron's other masterpiece, "Aliens of the Deep," for "Best Documentary of a Successful Hollywood Producer's Ability to Get People to Pay for Him to Make Million Dollar Underwater Sea Pods so He Can Pursue His Weird Dream of Finding Martians at the Bottom of the Ocean."
Speaking of Captain James Tiberius Cameron, however, I have been sorely disappointed in his more recent exploits. Turning his back on the sea, Mr. Cap'n Cameron has been lubbing the land but good, digging up what he claims to be the "real" coffin of Jesus. Now, if he happened to find this coffin while looking for the lost city of Atlantis, that's one thing. But to abandon the deep for landlocked religious icons is hardly acceptable.
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