The Chris Moeller Archives

Save the Movie Stars

My first reaction when Jon Stewart was named this year's Oscars host was that producers obviously wanted an edgy host all along, they just wanted a white one. After all, they had the best man for the job last year in the fearless Chris Rock.

Now I'm rooting for the overpraised Stewart, however, after having read this laughable prognostication from one of Hollywood's finest. Tom O'Neil, whoever he is, longs for the "affectionate," establishment-friendly poking of a Bob Hope or Johnny Carson of years past. Stewart, he believes, is just "another cocky New Yorker" like Rock or David Letterman, who didn't hold "a sense of awe for the augustness of the occasion"-- in other words, they didn't pay the proper respect to the LA film elite that keep the world affixed to its axis.

This hyper-linked article could not be more explicit in its demonstration of Hollywood's alienation from its movie-mad public, and the reason why, in 2006, we, the moviegoers, have abandoned in droves corporate Hollywood and its unending chain of sequels and remakes, in favor of inspired independent features. O'Neil believes that Academy outsiders provide catastrophe potential of "Cecil B. DeMille-sized epic proportions" to the proceedings, when actually it's today's Cecil B. DeMille-sized film budgets and phony pageantry that is wreaking havoc on the business to "Cecil B. DeMille-sized epic proportions."

As O'Neil attests, Chris Rock lit a fuse when he chided Jude Law in last year's monologue, but only in Hollywood, and within O'Neil's world of privileged access and shameless promotion, does anyone think Rock came off worse than Law's public crusader, Sean Penn. And only from the inside of the industry looking out would anyone argue that the Oscars' primary audience is seated in the auditorium, and not in living rooms across America.

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Now, about those limousine liberals on the East coast, i.e. our politicians and media elite...

Blogger Steve Gilliard gets it right in his summary of the NYC transit strike:

What Bloomberg and many white New Yorkers forget is that the heart of the city's revival is not the Eurotrash and hipsters of Billyburg, but the working class and middle class union workers of the city's minorities. It is the TWU members and Con Ed (natural gas company) and Verizon workers who not only keep this city running, but who also invest in the city's neighborhoods, demand better schools and send their kids to the city's colleges. They make New York work, where so many other cities failed. Unlike Washington DC, they didn't flee to the suburbs, leaving behind only the poor. Even the city's housing projects have large numbers of working people.

A truer description of the principles of living and breathing progressive government has never been articulated. You don't have to live in New York City to recognize the factors at work in the city's renaissance.

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Finally, staying on the topic of urban preservation, my bro tipped me to this feature (site pass required) about the status of Bruce Springsteen's hometown along the New Jersey coastline. Wealthy Manhattanites are moving on the resort town, but it's blue-collar artists, musicians, and idealists who would ultimately maintain the area's uniqueness and enable it to thrive. As journalist Robert Santelli points out, "No music community is going to spring up with condos and BMWs in the driveway."

posted by CM @ 12:17 PM