Oscar moments 2012 & other items
My four favorite Oscar moments:
1) Alexander Payne and "Community"'s Jim Rash ("Dean you later") both being given a statuette for their collaborative script adaptation of "The Descendants."
2) Jennifer Lopez's dress cut in front almost to her belly button. I like how she and Cameron Diaz quoted Edith Head on stage-- "(a dress) should be tight enough to show you're a woman, but loose enough to show you're a lady"-- while Lopez was wearing
this.
3) The camera cutaway to the cringed look on Steven Spielberg's face when the Iranian director accepted his Oscar for Best Foreign Film, saying, "At a time of talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this award to the people of my country, the people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment."
4) Chris Rock being awesome. Rock, introducing the award for Best Animated Film, referenced his own experience working in the genre, "If you're a white man, you can play an Arabian prince... If you're a black man, you can play a donkey or a zebra."
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Firing shots over patriotism and birth control, this is how the Republican Party ends-- not with a whimper, but with a bang. Let's go to our sideline reporter Matt Taibbi, who has an update on the self-destruction, now late in the second half of the game.
Matt...
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Mitt Romney, a man who wears magic Mormon underwear to bed, thinks drug testing welfare recipients is a great idea. I agree. Now I'm assuming that he wants to start with bankers and stockholders that get a federal bailout...
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The "class war" exists. And it's at least as old as the first moat.
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I have never watched a single piece of television programming on the USA cable network. Not a movie. Not five minutes of a movie. Not an episode of a show, or part of an episode of a show. Not in 30 years. It hasn't been on purpose. It's just crappy-looking programming all the time.
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Can we get Jimmy Carter to referee this whole Elton John/Madonna thing? It's gotten entirely out of hand... the sniping back and forth, now
competing post-Oscar parties? It's so obvious that they're really in love with each other.
Might and Braun
Ryan Braun, guilty until proven innocent, has had his 50-game steroid suspension for this season eliminated through legal appeal, apparently because of embarrassing-awful testing procedures by the league. Not good news for Braun's division-neighbors, the St. Louis Cardinals, competitively, but color me thrilled.
The steroid hunters are pissed, of course. The Brewers' Braun had a pre-Division Series test turn up positive this winter after winning the MVP award in November for the National League, and the specifics don't matter to this bunch. Fans, and most sports journalists, know nothing about the testing process of course, how often players get tested, how they're tested, what substances they're tested for, what the alleged substances do, how accurate the tests are, what could conceivably cause a false positive, none of it. The process has had no transparency to it whatsoever over its almost first near-decade, and a majority of the major and minor leaguers that have tested positive and faced suspension have been foreign-born players from non-English speaking countries that are decidedly not stars of the caliber of Ryan Braun.
Players have everything to lose by juicing, and little to gain other than recovering faster from injury, which everybody should be rooting for. Heightened testosterone does nothing to increase bat speed or the ability to increase the frequency of contact between a bat and a baseball. A scientific link between steroid use and statistical performance in baseball, or any sport for that matter, has never been proven by scientific study. Yet many are convinced that Ryan Braun is a cheater whose entire career should now be considered illegitimate, despite those facts and this verdict.
Let's be clear-- Braun has not been exonerated on a mere technicality, an undotted 'i' or an uncrossed 't', as it were. A three-member panel cleared the slugger, who has passed 25 other drug tests during his career, including three last year, because of what was considered to be substantial doubt about the physical handling of the particular test. It has been acknowledged that Braun's sample sat in a Wisconsin man's refrigerator over a weekend last fall when Major League Baseball's local pee collector in Milwaukee didn't know the shipping hours for the nearby Fed Ex/Kinkos.
The CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency called the panel's decision a "kick in the gut," and termed it "the technicality of all technicalities," but then that organization is also opposed to vitamins, and the man wouldn't have much of a career without the cottage industry of drug testing that now surrounds sports at almost all levels. Major League Baseball, with its typical and almost preternatural impulse to defame its own stars and its own product in a way that no other organized sport does, "vehemently disagrees with the decision," according to a media release. Nabbing a league MVP for committing performance fraud immediately following the 2011 playoffs was proof positive that baseball team owners take drug testing seriously, even if said-MVP does play in far away Milwaukee. As Gabe Feldman of the Tulane Sports Law Center points out though-- if the "chain of custody" of urine samples is a mere "technicality," it wouldn't be mentioned 33 times in the league's drug policy. What does an impure handling process also say about the alleged purity of the chemical analysis? How many lesser players than Braun, down to the lowest levels of the minor leagues, haven't had the same legal backing to challenge the accuracy of their positive test?
Of course, club owners are all for drug testing. They're not subjected to it. Nobody comes to the ballpark to see them, though they keep roughly $5 billion of the league's $8 billion annual profit. Their business couldn't exist without players. Yet it could do just fine without them, and they know this fact down deep. The union's mistake, as its first executive director Marvin Miller has always maintained, was agreeing to drug testing in the first place. Unions should never be bargaining away Constitutionally-protected privacy rights, and it should never be an employer's job to be policing drug use. Miller has predicted that a player will ultimately wind up in prison as a result of testing, and the Department of Justice went to the wall to try to do just that to Barry Bonds (at least in a related perjury case). Incidentally, your government can't order random drug testing of individual Americans. Congress can't do it, the president can't. Why is Major League Baseball even concerning themselves with this? Its teams haven't suffered financially during any part of the so-called "steroid era," in fact they've thrived. The argument that fans equate steroid charges in the media with unfair competition runs counter to the reality of gate receipts, and television, radio, and internet profit. Oh yeah, but there is that little fear among club owners that the league's antitrust exemption might be removed if they don't bow to Congress at every turn. At some point, somebody in power in Washington might capriciously decide to right that odious wrong.
This was a happy week in baseball. Spring workouts began in Florida and Arizona, the reigning NL MVP was, indeed, exonerated,
by definition, of the alleged use of banned performance enhancers, and the league's outrageously intrusive drug policy got dented like a middle-in fastball off the bat of Ryan Braun.
The Descendants
When this blog debuted in December of 2004, the first entry I posted was a tribute to film director Alexander Payne, an Omaha native who makes nuanced, well-observed, and humanist films, enlivened by wit and vulgarity. His movies have always felt personal to me. The first three, "Citizen Ruth," "Election," and "About Schmidt," took place just across the state line here in Iowa, and where about people and places I knew. Then the Oscar-winning "Sideways," the film whose prospects I was boosting online back in '04, moved in setting to California's Santa Barbara County, where my dad's brother and his family coincidentally live.
Seven long years later, Payne's follow-up to "Sideways," "The Descendants," is up for Best Picture, and thought by many to be the money favorite. This one felt personal too as it has to do with a man (George Clooney) having to decide the future of a plot of land that's been in his family for generations, a decision not unlike one the Moeller cousins will have to make some day.
I'm pulling for some big "Descendants" victories on Sunday night, for best picture, actor, screenplay, director, whatever else it's up for. You've probably heard a vile rumbling that the picture panders to Academy voters. There's a tearjerker of a scene involving Clooney near the end that's been accused of Oscar-stroking. If you've seen the film, however, you have to admit this is hooey. The movies that pander are uplifting, inspirational-- like that crap "Million Dollar Baby." They play like an epic. The characters are more endearing, less boring, more superhuman than human. If a viewer was caught up in the emotion of "The Descendants," it's because it was written and performed as small, specific, and real.
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The Oscars telecast will suck this year, Billy Crystal or not. I have nothing against Crystal (except for his love for the Yankees). I loved the guy as a teenager, but now have little interest in his stage and screen work even from that time period. The show will suck, as it almost always does, because the audience in the Kodak Theater sucks. For a comedian at this point, playing this house of stiffs has to be considered on par with playing the White House Correspondents Dinner. Over two decades, the two best broadcasts were the ones hosted by David Letterman (in '95) and Chris Rock (in '05) because those two entertainers made the most direct attempts at puncturing the pomposity and self-congratulation of the setting. Want a good show? Bring back one of these two, or give us Ricky Gervais or Sacha Baron Cohen. Or Louis C.K. Or Larry David. Or Donald Glover.
Why I didn't donate $50 today to the ACLU
The national board of the ACLU needs to rethink its support of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling in 2010. America's leading defender of First Amendment rights and of some of the nation's most unpopular speech-- opponent of censorship in all forms-- has been arguing for some time that limits t0 campaign contributions violates free speech rights, a position that puts the group in the same legal corner as Justices Scalia and Thomas. But where does "speech" end, and "corruption" begin?
With the spending caps effectively removed by our highest court, we've seen the campaign contributions of just a handful of individual Americans dwarf much of the rest of the nation's combined, and in a very short time. Newt Gingrich's sugar daddy is Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate who cut Gingrich a check for $10 million this month on top of millions he's already contributed to Gingrich PACs. Foster Friess, an investment manager who believes that women should put aspirin between their knees to avoid getting pregnant, gave Rick Santorum a million dollars the day after the New Hampshire primary.
What democracy do we have left when elections are sold at auction? The First Amendment has no meaning without a democratic system. My speech and your speech have no meaning when it can't be heard, and that's what these outrageous financial contributions are doing-- they're diminishing... drowning...
our speech. The Supreme Court-- and the ACLU-- are effectively arguing that money amplifies speech. If it does, it's doing it to the point of distortion.
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Quote/paraphrase of the week: from a commenter on Deadspin, "ESPN Boston. That's like saying Fox News Conservative."
Talkin' Softball
Good golly, what can you say about a winter during which the St. Louis Cardinals stand as World Champions and it never really snows? That's pretty great.
And now I'm declaring an early end to the season. What the hell-- if Republican presidential campaigns can transport us back in time to an age before the sexual revolution, then I can pretend the next four weeks don't exist. The Cardinals held their first official workout of 2012 yesterday in Florida and the new season dawns.
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It was 20 years ago tonight-- February 20, 1992-- that "The Simpsons" aired a baseball-themed episode called "Homer at the Bat" featuring nine baseball greats or near-greats. Around the horn they were Roger Clemens, Mike Scioscia, Don Mattingly, Steve Sax, Wade Boggs, Cardinals Hall-of-Famer Ozzie Smith, Jose Canseco, Ken Griffey, Jr., and Homer Simpson, er, I mean Darryl Strawberry. Tonight, Deadspin's Erik Malinowski has the inside story, recalling that magical evening when "The Simpsons" bested "The Cosby Show" in the Nielsen ratings for the first time, and bettered CBS's coverage of the Winter Olympics just for good measure. It was a very different time than the one we live in today. The first George Bush was president, long "rabbit ears" were needed to dial in Fox Television where I lived in rural Iowa, Steve Sax was still a well-known ballplayer, and "The Simpsons," up to that point, had only aired 51 other episodes.
BP "wants (its) life back"
BP was responsible for the worst off-shore drilling disaster in U.S. history in the spring of 2010. In 2011, the multinational corporation posted a $24 billion profit. The trial begins February 27th in New Orleans, and President Obama is
rushing to make a settlement. What will it entail? Will the public interest be protected? I know what
would serve the public interest. A trial.
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Unspoken in the news reports about Rick Santorum's rise to the top of the polls in the Republican race is that voters have kind of stopped participating in the process.
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Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter died today of brain cancer at the age of 57. He caught more big league games than all but three men. He was the best player on the best team in the history of two franchises. He rocked a perm. This is what his last at-bat looked like in 1992.
Whitney
Last Friday, my cable television and internet provider confused me with a neighbor that had moved to New Orleans and asked to terminate her service. Tonight, after six days of near-silence in the house (save for some "Moonlighting" episodes on DVD), I'm back online. I was probably the last to know about the death of Whitney Houston. I didn't find out until Sunday night. What a terrible loss.
I've linked
this before, but here is Whitney on Letterman promoting her first album a quarter century ago. Watching the magic here, at this point in her career, is what I imagine it would have been like to see Muhammad Ali ascend to the top of the boxing world against Sonny Liston in '64. Disciplined, beautiful, undeniable. A performer fully aware of her substantial power.
