Tag: academy awards
#EndorseThis: Jimmy Kimmel Trolls Trump At The Oscars

#EndorseThis: Jimmy Kimmel Trolls Trump At The Oscars

Jimmy Kimmel’s first time hosting the Oscars came with many surprises, including candy and cookies falling from the ceiling and an epic Steve Harvey moment when Moonlight was almost robbed of its Best Picture Oscar. What came as no surprise, however, were Kimmel’s hilarious jabs at President Trump as he opened the telecast.

“I want to say thank you to President Trump. I mean remember last year when it seemed like the Oscars were racist?” Kimmel reminisced. “It has been an amazing year for movies. Black people saved NASA and white people saved jazz. That’s what you call progress.”

Kimmel couldn’t ignore the Meryl in the room, singling out the “overrated” Streep for an ironically Trumpian riff that concluded with a standing ovation for her.  Later in the show, hoping that the president would be watching, Kimmel tweeted “U Up?” at Trump. But it was his follow up tweet — #merylsayshi — that had the audience roaring with laughter.

Kimmel knows that if anything can get under Trump’s thin skin, it’s being mocked and ridiculed by Hollywood celebrities. The whole monologue is well worth the click.

IMAGE: ABC Television Group / Flickr

5 Best Anti-Trump Statements At The Oscars

5 Best Anti-Trump Statements At The Oscars

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

President Trump’s ongoing feud with the media was on full display at the 89th annual Academy Awards, where stars and presenters shared spirited reflections on the new administration’s first month.

Here were the top 5 jabs:

Jimmy Kimmel

“I don’t have to tell everybody the country is divided right now,” the host remarked before offering an offhanded thank you to the sitting president. “Remember last year, when it seemed like the Oscars were racist?,” he said, a dig at 2016’s “Oscars So White.”

“That’s gone, thanks to him.”

Kimmel also slammed Tump’s tweeting and immigration ban as part of his shtick.

“Some of you get to come on this stage and make a speech that the President of the United States will tweet about in all caps during his 5 am bowel movement,” Kimmel said, adding he was glad that “Homeland Security let  [French actress Isabelle Huppert] in tonight.”

Kimmel also pointed out “overrated” Meryl Streep in the audience; a label that drew ire and confusion when Trump described the actress as such following her controversial Golden Globes speech.

“Nice dress, by the way,” Kimmel told the actress.”Is that an Ivanka?”

It was a clear nod to companies like Nordstrom dropping the first daughter’s line this month.

Ashar Farhadi

The Iranian director received Best Foreign Picture for his film “The Salesman,” but instead of attending the high-profile event, Farhadi issued a statement reflecting on President Trump’s travel ban, which included his home country.

“My absence is out of respect for the people of my country and those of the other six nations whom have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the U.S,” his statement read. “Dividing the world into the ‘us’ and ‘our enemies’ categories creates fear—a deceitful justification for aggression and war.”

Gael García Bernal

The “Mozart in the Jungle” star from Mexico presented the award for Best Animated Feature Film and slammed Trump’s border wall plan in the process.

“Flesh and blood actors are migrant workers. We travel all over the world, we build families, we construct stories, and we build life that cannot be divided,” García Bernal said. “As a Mexican, as a Latin American, as a migrant worker, as a human being, I’m against any form of wall that wants to separate us.”

Cheryl Boone Isaacs

The President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences celebrated the Oscar winners by hinting at Trump’s ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries.

“Tonight is proof that art has no borders, art has no single language, and art does not belong to a single faith. The power of art is that it transcends these things,” Issacs said.

Viola Davis

Davis is now the first African-American to win an Oscar, an Emmy (in 2015, for How to Get Away with Murder), and a Tony (Fences in 2010 and King Hedley II in 2001). In her Golden Globes speech, the Fences star took a more subtle approach upon receiving her award for best supporting actress.

“People ask me all the time: ‘What kind of stories do you want to tell, Viola?'” she said. “And I say, exhume those bodies, exhume those stories. The stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition, people who fell in love and lost. I became an artist — and thank God I did — because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life,” she explained.

Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.

IMAGE: The 89th Oscars broadcasts live on the ABC Television Network. ABC/Eddy Chen via Flickr.

And The Oscar For Most Stunning Actress Goes To …

And The Oscar For Most Stunning Actress Goes To …

We are here not to discuss the complex #OscarsSoWhite controversy but to address another sore point with perhaps similar origins: the #OscarsSoGorgeous phenomenon.

At the risk of running afoul of some ardent fan clubs, let us note that the Academy Awards for best actress tend to favor the young and beautiful, often for playing the down and out. Some older actresses survive the nominating process, but observe how many wouldn’t be there had they not established their careers on earlier goddess roles.

This helps explain why there are so few good parts for women who are dark and short — or, for that matter, white but less than spectacular. As with the lack of black nominees, the perpetual dearth of non-beautiful actresses surely reflects the socializing preferences of the white men in charge.

This is not to disparage Jennifer Lawrence’s acting talents, which many say are considerable. But it seemed odd that she was chosen to play the lead in “Joy,” a performance for which she has been nominated as best actress. “Joy” is based on the true story of Joy Mangano, a hard-luck working mother who found success inventing and selling homely mops.

Now the real Mangano is a fine-looking woman with strong Mediterranean features. But she was not born porcelain-skinned and blue-eyed. She did not pursue her dreams with a team of hair stylists maintaining the highest standards through her deepest indignities.

The Hollywood version lingers on endless close-ups of Lawrence’s mug — a picture of northern European perfection, currently a “face of Dior.” Of course, Lawrence has been on the cover of Vogue, which calls her “Hollywood’s blockbuster blonde.”

In 2006, Julia Roberts won best actress for “Erin Brockovich,” a real-life story about a blunt, working-class girl’s legal victory. Nothing wrong with the real Brockovich’s looks, but Erin was never the Roberts-level babe who could dominate the glossies from the lowliest fan mags to Vogue.

Roberts broke into stardom in “Pretty Woman,” playing a character who was supposed to be beautiful. Had Roberts not already achieved stardom as a dazzler, would she have been cast in the meaty role of a vulgar crusader?

The 2003 Oscar went to former model Charlize Theron for her role as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in “Monster.” Fan magazines at the time marveled at how teams of makeup artists were able to turn a stunner into an ugly wretch.

You’d think that roles to play these tortured women would create opportunities for extraordinarily talented actresses of ordinary appearance, but that’s not how Hollywood usually works. Hollywood demands that female actors do double-duty as thespians and glamour queens.

On Oscars night we see how, when it comes to gender, Hollywood actors inhabit two entirely different planets. The men romp into the Dolby Theatre, while the women must run the gauntlet of red carpet humiliation. You see them freeze in cheesy poses, every detail of their facades followed by a week of microscopic critique.

At the ceremony itself, the male winners joyfully bound up the stairs to the stage. The female winners in spikes gingerly climb the stairs, no doubt terrified that a heel could lock into a long hem.

So this is a night to pity the bombshells as well as the great female actors who never had the chance to win the great parts. Why even bother with this dated vision when we can stream fascinating stories of three-dimensional women on our own screens day or night? And small wonder the Oscar audience numbers have been tanking.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.

Photo: Jennifer Lawrence poses backstage with the award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for her role in “Joy” at the 73rd Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, California January 10, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

2016 Golden Globes Nominations Blur The Boundaries Among Genres

2016 Golden Globes Nominations Blur The Boundaries Among Genres

By Josh Rottenberg, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

When it comes to comedy, there is the kind of funny that makes you go “ha!,” and there’s the kind of funny that makes you go “huh?”

This year’s roster of Golden Globe nominees in the comedy or musical category encompasses both definitions. It’s reflective of the distinctive identity of the Globes themselves — the only major award that separates drama and comedy — and the complicated nature of some of today’s movie comedies from filmmakers such as the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson.

Among the major Hollywood awards shows, the Globes have the biggest tent, taking in traditional Oscar fare — which has increasingly come to mean smaller, darker independent fare — and the kind of populist movies that the Motion Picture Academy generally overlooks, as well as a few outliers that may not have been on anyone’s radar. This year is no exception, especially in the comedy or musical category.

Alongside two broad crowd-pleasing movies clearly aimed almost entirely at getting laughs — Melissa McCarthy’s Spy and the raunchy Amy Schumer rom-com Trainwreck — are three films that, to varying degrees, stretch the definition of what might be considered a comedy: Joy, The Big Short and The Martian.

All have comedic elements, but none is what you’d call a nonstop laugh riot, nor are they designed to be. Two of the films — David O. Russell’s Joy and Adam McKay’s The Big Short — can be seen as commentaries on the corruption and depletion of the American economy — while Ridley Scott’s The Martian is a sci-fi adventure in which the fate of Matt Damon’s stranded astronaut is at stake.

The films in the drama category are for the most part more traditional award season bait — Carol, The Revenant, Room and Spotlight — although the fifth nominee, Mad Max: Fury Road, is the kind of high-octane action flick rarely acknowledged this time of year.

Whatever the Globes may lack in predictive power for the Academy Awards (as can’t be repeated too often, Globes nominations are made by a small group of members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, not film industry professionals), they frequently make up for in their surprising array of nominations, and a Globes win can imbue a film with a sense of momentum as the awards season rolls on.

That’s especially relevant for The Big Short, which has solidified its standing as an Oscar force to be reckoned with in recent weeks, with a slew of nominations and critics awards. It was directed by one of the industry’s most successful comedy filmmakers, McKay, who also brought us Anchorman and Talladega Nights.

But the film’s subject matter — the 2008 financial crisis — couldn’t be more serious, and alongside many moments of darkly hued comedy, the film delivers a sobering look at the greed and corruption that led to the brink of an economic doomsday.

McKay told The Times recently that he had been looking for years for an opportunity to push beyond the traditional boundaries of comedy.

“The studios like certainty, so I’m a comedy guy and they’ll let me make any comedies I want,” he said. “But there was a little bit of resistance on different types of projects. I just love movies. I’ve always admired Danny Boyle — the way he’s able to jump genres at will.”

The inclusion of Scott’s The Martian raised eyebrows among many who felt that calling the film about an astronaut fighting for survival alone on Mars a comedy bordered on category fraud.

“A comedy’s a film whose #1 goal is to make people laugh,” Spy director Paul Feig tweeted in response. “If that wasn’t the filmmakers’ top goal, it’s not a comedy.”

For his part, Damon said in an interview last fall that comedy was an essential ingredient of the film from the start, as his character, Mark Watney, uses his wry sense of humor to keep his desperation at bay.

“That was one of the things Ridley and I talked about in our first meeting: How do you hold on to the terror and danger and the enormity of what the stakes are for this person and also retain the humor?” Damon said.

The fact is, the Globes’ nominations may simply be reflecting the fact that, both in film and on television, once-rigid genre distinctions are blurring more than ever — something McKay, for one, is happy to see.

“I don’t think genres are as restrictive as they used to be,” he said. “I’d like to keep not obeying the genre so much. The movie I always think about is Something Wild. That had a shocking tone shift halfway through, but it worked.”

The broad spectrum of films nominated by the HFPA is best reflected in the directing category. Five filmmakers who made vastly different movies — including George Miller’s gonzo action film Mad Max: Fury Road, Alejandro Inarritu’s western The Revenant and Todd Haynes’ period romance Carol — will face off.

But while Tom McCarthy’s ensemble drama Spotlight is among the few certified Oscar front-runners, some are predicting the HFPA may give the award to Ridley Scott in part to recognize his entire career.

The acting categories will see Hollywood veterans such as Lily Tomlin, Al Pacino and Jane Fonda face off against relative newcomers such as Schumer, Paul Dano and Alicia Vikander. In a nomination that surely struck a nostalgic chord with older moviegoers, Sylvester Stallone proved a Globes contender for supporting actor in a drama for his understated performance as Rocky Balboa in Creed — 39 years after his last Globes nod for the original Rocky.

“I remember reading that Eugene O’Neill’s father (actor James O’Neill) played the Count of Monte Cristo for 30 years — and I’m past that,” Stallone told The Times of his history playing the perennial underdog boxer. “It’s the one character I actually wanted to follow in perpetuity until maybe his final demise. There’s just something about this journey.”

Now that that journey has taken Stallone to the Globes, could it soon take him all the way to the Hollywood title fight that is the Oscars? Stallone laughed off the prospect.

“My God,” he said, shaking his head. “Listen, I’ve been more than blessed with my share of good fortune.”

©2016 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr