Did I Almost Forget about the Oscars?

I’ve been excited for the announcement of the Oscar nominations every year for more than half a century. I’m not sure exactly when and why it started but my earliest memory is being a really, really happy little boy when I heard Mary Poppins got a ton of nominations AND several months later literally jumping up and down screaming when Julie Andrews walked up to the stage to accept the trophy as best actress.

Thinking about it now I wonder:

How did they not know I was gay?

Well okay, that’s not the only thought I have in my head.

I am also recalling years when I rehearsed my own Oscar speech (in anticipation of a win even though I had yet to ever work on a movie); others when I was a reporter and actually had to get up at 5 in the morning to cover the damn thing live at the Academy (Note: Be careful what you wish for); and still others where I voluntarily woke up at 5 in the morning at home to watch it on TV and not miss a moment of elation or outrage.

And I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit that I was still doing that last one as a recently as, well, ahem, not that long ago.

Why?

I don’t know. Why do you care about the Super Bowl or the World Series; the NBA Playoffs, Wimbledon or Monday Night Football; Paris Fashion Week, the Cannes Film Festival, the Grammys or the winner of Eurovision?

Maybe you don’t or maybe you do but in life it’s nice to look forward to something.

Well, that ended this year. It’s not that I wasn’t tracking potential nominees but on the twice-postponed Oscar nomination announcement day I woke up, did my morning routine (Note: Use your imagination), hung out and, right before leaving the house at 11 suddenly thought, ‘oh right, the Oscars. I better…check?’

It was kind of surreal.

Perhaps it’s age or the movies, but I don’t think so. Maybe it’s the fact that parts of L.A. were on fire several weeks ago hastening the delay (Note: During which I did have to evacuate my house) so I got that and a lot of dates confused. Not likely.

Mostly it was because I was keeping my mind on a bunch of other announcements that didn’t involve a svelte golden statuette but an engorged orange (and profoundly non-statuesque) one.

But these announcements were actually orders for actions that were not democratically voted on. Things like:

Releasing more than 1500 violent criminals from jail who severely beat up cops and broke into and entered the Capitol building, where they hunted down members of Congress (Note: And occasionally stopped to smear feces on the walls and destroy offices) all in order to subvert the peaceful transfer of power to a new president they didn’t vote for four years ago.
Revoking President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 order that guaranteed people of color and women equal opportunity to be hired, trained and employed by any agency in the federal government or any company or person who has a contract with said government, and
A termination to birthright U.S. citizenship even though it is literally written into the 14^th amendment to the U.S. Constitution that anyone born in the U.S. IS a citizen of the U.S.

For further elucidation and analysis of said announcements and their implications you can also check out these articles in Axios and the NY Times. Or simply use the google with the key words: recent executive orders for the source of your choice.

As for the Oscar nominations, anyone who follows these things or longs for a little competitive glamour or excellence in their lives courtesy of the movies, or is simply slightly film obsessed, has their favorites and their inexcusables. For me, it’s Timothée Chalamet’s performance in A Complete Unknown because I’m not sure how anyone can sound and act exactly like Bob Dylan, pretend they’re a young guy in the sixties, croon a tune to a pretend Woody Guthrie and go on to sing with and make love to a fake Joan Baez without making it a complete parody. (Note: Also because his best actor Oscar for Call Me By Your Name got stolen by Gary Oldman seven years ago. And no, I don’t forget).

Was this the most important cinematic moment of the year? Certainly not. But for me it was the most impressive and, anyway, as we all should know by now, that’s not what the Oscars are all about.

Nor should it be.

Also… sorry Timmy but better luck next time

The importance monicker is usually most omni-present in the best picture category, which pretty consistently reserves slots for movies that say something about social issues (Note: Forgetting the fact that ALL movies are social comments on our world), as well as advance the best of technology, execution or contemporary messages to be had from movies during that year.

Personally, I think expanding the best picture category from a limit of five nominations to these days as many as TEN nominations (Note: It works through a weighted scale the Academy concocted that is too cumbersome to explain in anything less than a term paper) is somewhat equivalent to being awarded a yearly participation award in a small, local day camp.

“And you get an Oscar… and you… and you!”

Okay, perhaps that’s a bit much but AMPAS voting to expand the list of possible nominees in 2009 seemed more like a marketing tool for studios due to lagging box-office than anything else.

But in an age where our new 78-year-old POTUS just announced that Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight are to serve as his special ambassadors to Hollywood (Note: News to them, since it was relayed only in a tweet, but fitting since they all reached stardom in those regrettable, greed is good eighties), it’s a welcome relief.

See, unlike MAGA voters the vast majority of all 10 best picture nominees this year focused on stories about diversity, equity and inclusion in regards to immigration, race, trans/LGBT representation, ageism, economic inequality and/or religious persecution. And if you look back in history that tends to happen when political leaders spend their time taking away rights or lashing out at specific communities for power, or profit or simply because they can.

As I tell my students, movies are not life but, on the whole, they tend to absolutely reflect real life and the issues we, as a society are concerned about in that moment.

This is why this year I am thrilled to have as many as TEN, if not more, best picture nominees vying for the Oscar. I might be selling out my long-held views for political gain, but hey, at least it’s not to stay in office.

As for the list of this year’s films, they are: Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune: Part Two, Emilia Perez, I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys, The Substance, and Wicked.

I’d be happy with any of them winning. And not only because Gibson, Stallone, Voight had absolutely nothing to do with any of them, and they address rights and issues they and the guy they will be ambassador-ing for want to roll back and, preferably, erase.

Though, that helps.

A lot.

Jonathan Bailey – “Dancing Through Life” (from Wicked)

01.05.25

by notesfromachair

Sanewashing

A friend sent me this story from The Daily Beast. It’s about the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post refusing to publish a cartoon on its editorial page depicting multi-billionaires like Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, as well as others, kneeling at the altar of Trump and offering up bags of money.

But don’t take my word for it.

Here’s the cartoon:

It is well known both men, as well as many others in the M-Billionaire class, have donated $1 million apiece to the president elect’s inaugural fund and jetted down to Mar-A-Lago to spend time with him doing…stuff.

As for the cartoon, it was drawn by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who’s been employed at The Post since 2008.

But not anymore.

She quit in protest because in all her time there never once had the paper refused to publish one of her drawings. Tweaks, yes. Out and out refusal? Never. Here’s a link to her Substack with a more specific explanation:

One nixed cartoon is not necessarily concerning. But this is part of a clear trend. Just a few months ago Mr. Bezos overruled his own editorial board and refused to allow The Post to publish its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. In His own piece on His opinion page, he stated, seemingly out of nowhere, that the centuries old tradition of newspaper editorial endorsements “create a perception of bias” and “non-independence.”

Two editorial board members who resigned, as well as a slew of other reporters who also left or spoke out against his new policy, disagreed. As did, well, about 200,000 readers who cancelled their subscriptions.

But this was not limited to The Post.

L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, another M-Billionaire who was also pictured in Ms. Telnaes’ cartoon, similarly blocked that paper’s endorsement of Harris weeks before the 2024 election. Predictably, several members of his board, as well as two of its Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writers, resigned.

Not that it any of this ruffled the feathers of the aforementioned M-Bs, or as I now think of them – the new AOCs.

That would be – Aspiring Oligarch Class.

To whit:

Since P S-S’s announcement at the Times, he fired his entire editorial board, noting he plans to replace it with a new team of “more conservative voices ” that will make the publication he’s owned since 2018 a more “fair and balanced newspaper.”

To that end, he announced in December he’d be injecting an AI-powered BIAS METER into its coverage.

Because what could go wrong with that?

On one level, all of this is hilariously unfunny. On another, the Chair (Note: I defer to the third person when my blood begins to boil), who went to grad school in journalism at Northwestern in the post-Watergate era, has to marvel at the chutzpah.

For the one or two of you out there who don’t speak Yiddish or never went to the house of a Jewish friend or met one of their older relatives, chutzpah means extreme self-confidence or audacity.

The coincidental timing of both major newspapers suddenly deciding not to endorse, the large money contributions, and the total lack of concern of what the trained journalists they have working for them and, in many cases have long employed, have to say, IS a THING. It’s what they teach us in journalism school to sniff out (Note: That’s the technical term). In court, it’s called evidence. And when there are enough examples of it in enough places and at enough places, it’s called a trend. And if you google any of this subject matter, or even political contributions among billionaires, you will come upon numerous stories from REPUTABLE news sources (Note: Not “fake.” And not from a random podcast or on TikTok) with much more evidence.

Now of course, there is going to be blow back. Like David Shipley, editor of the WaPo’s opinion page, who stated re: the cartoon nixing that “not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force” and that HIS decision (Note: Bezos’ name was cleverly not mentioned) was made because a previous column had covered the subject and another satirical column was scheduled.

But is a cartoon a column? And what is the limit on covering a subject like a coterie of potential U.S. oligarchs being lined up among the billionaire class all across the country for the first time in history?

Imagine if Watergate had been covered that way? Or the existence of concentration camps during World War II? On second thought….

I often ask friends this rhetorical question re: money and power and the wealthy who wield them as a way to expand both with no real regard for the preservation of democracy, personal freedoms or even the mere existence of a habitable planet –

When is it enough?

The answer is also rhetorical but I’ll state it anyway. There aren’t enough billions in the world to make a scared individual secure, or an insatiable person filled up, or a person who is bottom line obsessed with their own self-interest suddenly become someone who will put you or anyone else in the word before themselves.

Money doesn’t do that. Nor does extreme, outsized power.

It takes a village of relentless truth sayers to hold them accountable.

Loudly and unrelentingly.

Like the people of Bedford Falls vs. Mr. Potter

The biggest note of hope in all of this is that The Daily Beast story linked above was written by an intern named Liam Archaki. He’s a rising senior at Amherst College with a double major in English and philosophy. Not even a journalism major. Also, he interns at The Christian Science Monitor – not one of those fake news, left wing rags the MAGA movement uses to describe credible – meaning vetted – sources of actual news.

See, like other credible online sites, The Daily Beast picks up stories from other reputable bureaus and syndicates. This is even something The Washington Post does. At least at this writing. Who knows what Bezos and some of the other guys have in store for us over the next four years. We could very likely see sources like the One America News morning show hosted by Matt Gaetz in an effort to cover “both sides.”

Sanewashing the most outrageous statements by publishing them in the name of a balanced agenda.

Travie McCoy ft Bruno Mars – “Billionaire”

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: donald trump

Did I Almost Forget about the Oscars?

Sanewashing