January 23, 2018--The Statuette Please . . .

At last night's Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony, after an evening of political correctness by an all female corps of presenters and thank-you speeches by winners, when receiving SAG's lifetime achievement award, Morgan Freeman commented about the statuette given to recipients--

"I wasn't going to do this," Freeman said at the end of his remarks, "I'm going to tell you what's wrong with this statue. It works from the back; but from the front it's gender-specific."

The audience laughed and cheered.

The SAG statuette, known as "The Actor," depicts a nude male figure holding two masks--one of comedy, the other of tragedy.

The gender specificness, however, isn't all that specific. The male genitalia is more a PG-13 sort of a lump than anything full-frontal R-rated.

Not all that unlike the Oscar whose maleness is less apparent since all the specifics appear to have been surgically removed. He does, though, hold a nearly body-length Crusader sword that also serves as a fig leaf. The symbolism speaks for itself.

The Golden Globe statuette, on the other hand, is totally non-gendered. Unless one wants to view the spherical "globe" as somehow female.

But there is a simple solution when it comes to Oscar and The Actor--give winners a choice of statues.

There should be male and female versions. And while we're at it, African American as well as Caucasian ones. Maybe even an Asian  choice. Clothed and unclothed. And thinking ahead to the possibility of a Muslim winner, the Islamic female statuette should of course veiled. On the other hand that won't work since Muslims do not permit paintings and sculpture that represent humans.

So maybe my solution isn't so simple after all.

Left to right: Oscar, Golden Globe, "The Actor"

January 11, 2017--Meryl Streep's Golden Moment

Meryl Streep needs to reread her C. Wright Mills if she wants to be the self-assigned point person to defend Hollywood from accusations of elitism.

She seized her lifetime-achievement moment at the Golden Globes on Sunday to not only attack Donald Trump appropriately for his grotesque mocking of a physically handicapped New York Times reporter but also to offer a heartfelt retort to those like Trump who regularly accuse leaders of the entertainment industry of being out-of-touch elites.

She posed and answered her own question--

What is Hollywood anyway? It's just a bunch of people from other places. 

I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola Davis was born in a sharecropper's cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. 

And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in Ireland I do believe. And she's here nominated for playing a small-town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania.

She may think of herself and Sarah Jessica Parker as just plain folks; but to the rest of us, and in Mills' The Power Elite, she and her Hollywood colleagues are solidly part of the elite. In fact, since 1956 when The Power Elite was published, Hollywood stars, sports heroes, and music superstars have become even more elite and influential.

Think Beyonce, think George Clooney, think Bono, think LeBron. And think Meryl Streep with her amazing 30 Golden Globe and 19 Academy Award nominations. And of course her $7.0 to $10.0 million a pop fee for a few months work on a film or two a year.

But as Mills points out money is not the only way to enter the exclusive ranks of the elites. He shows how the "Metropolitan 400" (members of "notable families"), "Chief Executives," the "Political Directorate," and "Warlords," among others, comprise the elite in a country, the U.S., that prides itself as being classless, elite-less.

Another thing Streep failed to note after speaking emotionally and with self-congratulations about herself and an assortment of her fellow performers' modest beginnings is that one needn't be born into the entertainment elite--what Mills calls the "Celebrities," who at the time included the likes of Bob Hope and John Wayne.

Being an elite is less where one begins but where you wind up.

In the case of Meryl Streep and most of the other actresses they wound up on stage at the Globes in $5,000 Valentino gowns and millions in Cartier diamonds. Like just plain folks on a Sunday night in downtown Gary, Indiana.

Most significant, since hers was a political statement, Streep failed to show any recognition of her own exalted status and, politically more important, any awareness of how the Trump electorate is largely made up of people who resent and reject elites of all sorts, from the entertainment industry to the mainstream media to the professional class (especially college and university professors) and of course government officials.

If her plea was in part for unity, these omissions make what she did and said even more divisive. But I'm sure she came away feeling good about herself.

                                         

January 14, 2106--Pithy

I don't know what compelled me to stay up late enough to watch all of the Golden Globes. Probably masochism.

With the exception of a few smartalecy barbs from the host, Ricky Gervais, I found it to be excruciatingly boring. And, of course, in my snarkiness, having seen only one or two of the movies and TV shows nominated, I disagreed with most of the awards.

Hung over the next morning, doing our own postmortem, ahead of the E channel's acidic Fashion Police, Rona and I, since we agreed, wondered out loud about why it was such a snore.

"I think mainly because the winners--and they have an endless series of categories including one for actors who were in a single episode of a TV series or movie made for television--in their acceptance speeches were so bland and unclever."

"Good point," Rona said, "It's almost as if their PR people told them to be intentionally bland so as to avoid controversy and not offend anyone or any 'demographic' that might then boycott their films. Like they did to Marlon Brando when he refused his Oscar to protest our treatment of Native Americans."

"For me, in the past, where I do a lot of my living, one of the things I used to look forward to were the pithy remarks of the winners. Some were even memorable like in 1974, when David Niven was presenting an Oscar, a naked man streaked across the stage. Nonplussed, Niven quipped, 'Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings.'"

"It's true, presenters and winners were often witty and pithy."

"To change the subject," I said, "Pithy is such an interesting word. It has a sound close to the way I understand its meaning. Not onomatopoetic exactly, but something close to that."

"I agree. I wonder about its etymology. For example, does it share a common root with pith helmet or a pit?"

"Google's the way to find out," I said. And sure enough it does have an ancient and interesting history. It goes back to at least the year 900 and the modern English version derives from a number of ancient languages including Proto-German and Old English. The common roots all originally meant the soft, spongy center or core of plant stems."

I rattled out, taxing Rona's patience, "And, further, Google says, as you suspected, that too explains pith helmet. It was originally made from the dried center of an Indian swamp plant, the Aeschyonomene aspera. Not to be found in your Maine garden. And pit indeed shares a similar history, as the hard core or stone found in the center of many fruits."

"So a pithy remark," Rona said with caffeine surging in her system, "pierces to the core of something."

"One more meaning of pith, which would reenforce what you said, is when it is used to describe piercing the spinal cord in order to kill."

"Ugh. I think it's time to change the subject again. It's bad enough I'm still recovering from the Golden Globes."

"Where this all began."

"On the other hand," Rona said, "Isn't the history of language and the creation of words about as interesting as it gets?"

"What did you say?" I was still fanatically googling.

"How interesting language is. Perhaps the most remarkable of human creations."

"Do you know what the 23 oldest English words are?"

"They probably include mother."

"It says right here that they may be as much as 15,000 years old. From the time of the last Ice Age."

"Is mother on the list?"

"No surprise, with a prescient nod to Martin Buber, I and thou are. And also there's we, hand, hear, bark, fire, and ashes."

"And mother?"

"Of course. Then there's spit as in to spit."

"What a life they must have had back then."

"Pretty basic. Fire and ashes."

"I wonder what Ricky Gervais would have to say about that."

"Spare me."

January 13, 2016--Big Short

I was working on a piece about the recent Golden Globes awards and realized that we had seen only one of the nominated movies. So I stopped typing and we went Boca to see The Big Short.

I liked the book but hated the movie.

It's not an easy story to bring to life. So many moving parts, so much technical financial information. The book did a decent job of it, but the movie for each of us was a mess and not engaging. Perhaps we would have felt differently if we hadn't read the Michael Lewis book.

They should have hired Lewis to write the screenplay because to me that was at the heart of the problem with the film. The performances were decent, though the Christian Bale character was represented as a caricature and that's an easy task for an actor.

Also, I wish they'd take handheld cameras away from directors who use them to impart a quasi-documentary quality to their films. All the shifting and juggling makes me nauseous.

I'm sounding grumpy to myself so I'll stop. I'll finish the Golden Globes piece and post it tomorrow. A hint--I also hated that show but promise not to be too grumpy.