Everything About the Oscars

 It's always a trip when Hollywood goes off on one of its periodic jags. That's what happened, I suggest, at this year's Oscars. Last night, we went to see Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Actress, Director(s), Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress. To me, it was mildly entertaining in terms of mixing reality and imagined reality, plenty of martial arts action, and some introspection into the lead character, Evelyn Wang, played by Michelle Yeoh.

But in my jaundiced view, this was not Best Picture material. I didn't see all or possibly even a majority of the nominees, given that there are now ten every year, but I did see All Quiet on the Western Front and Tár. I would've picked either of them before Everything etc.  

All Quiet is the second remake of an original c. 1930 pic based on Erich Maria Remarque's famed World War I novel. The 1930, produced less than two years after Remarque's novel was published in 1928, featured a well-regarded performance by Lew Ayres. Most opposition to the 1930 picture was in Germany by the Nazis who aimed to sabotage its release with disrupting its showings; they unfortunately succeeded. The 1979 remake, with Richard Thomas, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasance, and Patricia Neal, was a TV film that had a limited theatrical release and was generally well-received.

The current German production version has been well received in the U.S. and, in fact, everywhere, except Germany. German critics felt it took excessive liberties with the plot of the classic novel and in general, were not impressed. I thought it was somewhat long, just as Everything etc. was. However, All Quiet held my attention and seemed very well made for a war film that focuses mostly on action scenes.

 Tár was very compelling because mostly of Cate Blanchett's bravura performance in the title role. She is a female conductor who has made it to the highest level of the musical world--I believe she is supposed to be conducting the Berlin Philharmonic as the picture opens. She plays a complex character who may or may not have sexually harassed a younger woman and who proceeds to get into conflicts with her wife and some other colleagues. She effectively is canceled and at the end, is starting to rebuild her career. Blanchett is fantastic and really deserved the Oscar this year, not that Yeoh wasn't excellent.

Hollywood has a tendency to embrace trendy productions that come off as wild and woolly. I admit that some of the camera work and the quasi-imagined scenes are compelling, yet, to me, Everything as a whole did not deliver on its apparent objectives. Rarely does any picture that wins a slew of Oscars deserve all of them. Some years see Hollywood expressing some discernment in recognizing one performer for acting and a different film for directing, for example. 

The "industry" received deserved criticism for its failure to cast black and Asian performers over the years, and for racist depictions as well. This year, the Academy membership, rightly expanded in terms of ethnic presence, seemed  determined to show that Hollywood had reformed. Movies made by Asians, especially Japan, and Europeans have often proved to be far more accomplished than traditional Hollywood fare. 

I've previously written here that Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans was good but not great. Judd Hirsch, a fine actor, did deserve a supporting actor award for his cameo as the lead's (young Spielberg) real uncle, for which he was nominated.

In my view, the best movie, which wasn't nominated for Best Picture, was the British production, Living, with Bill Nighy, a fantastic actor who was nominated for Best Actor and never mentioned by anyone during the Oscarcast, except to show him as a nominee who was present in the theater. He gave a fabulous performance as an English civil servant in the postwar early 1950's who realizes that he has never allowed himself to enjoy life after he gets a diagnosis from his physician that could not be worse. This was far from the only great picture or play that he has starred in. 

The Academy surprised many by nominating Andrea Riseborough for Best Actress for starring in To Leslie, a film which got zero attention but somehow, her performance was seized upon by some big-name performers, including Blanchett, who promoted it in the closing weeks before nominations were decided. I haven't seen her picture but although I suspect she was excellent, I've now seen Nighy enough times to regard him as the finest unawarded actor of our time.

Whatever Happened to Dilbert?

 The only comic strip I read every day until a week or so ago was Dilbert by Scott Adams. It reminded me of the old Doonesbury. Both had an incredibly good ear that enabled them to come up with perfect zinger for the last panel. And nobody covered the territory Dilbert did: the people in the cubicles at work and all the b.s. that people in corporate settings put up with every day. You were almost guaranteed a good laugh each morning.

So, then Adams goes rogue and puts out some YouTube video that has a bunch of totally racist screeds and this is the most classic cancellation situation. By the end of the weekend, he had lost about two-thirds of his 2000 or so newspapers that carried his strip. They got one line out of him while all this was happening: "By Monday I won't have a paper left."

Today, the Washington Post had an article about the whole business. It picked up on earlier stuff, including a shorter piece in the Times. The line they took was that he had been playing on the edge for quite a while and now he finally went over. He had introduced a black character and apparently had started presenting some unacceptable stuff around him. There was more, too. 

I suppose I took some minor notice that he had been pushing the edge, but I guess I didn't want to see it. I just liked his strip and anticipated what great punchline he would come up with in that last panel. And right to the end, he usually did. 

It turns out that his politics had become increasingly right-wing. He was a Trumper. I've seen this happen to people. Something starts to go somewhere inside them and their resentment pushes them to go off the right-wing deep end. Usually, however, they really obviously lose their cool. He didn't--at least from my standpoint.

People have come back from this kind of fall. But all the signs so far are that if he isn't doubling down, he's making no effort to apologize, at the least, and do the required public penance testifying that he's seen the light. There have been plenty of cases where people have pulled this kind of stunt and saved themselves, but I don't think he's interested in that or that he even cares.

Why? Maybe he's made so much money over these bountiful years that he doesn't need to work anymore. He put out two books at least, he was honored with awards from his peer cartoonists, and I figure he did well on those books and other projects. I'll keep wondering, though, why he decided to do this right now. I can't believe he thought he'd get away with the stuff he put out on the video.

The bottom line is: what about me? I just miss every morning,as I now pass the comics, an unusually sharp source of a light moment with material drawn from the workplace, something I studied in college and something I've learned something about in the various workplaces I've inhabited over the years. 

I was enough of an enthusiast that I went to hear Adams at FOSE, the Federal Office Systems Exhibition, more than a few years ago. It was a trade show for government people in DC at the Convention Center that mostly was filled with salespeople pushing IT systems and related stuff. He did about an hour's turn before an audience of a few hundred people. He was funny and he seemed to enjoy showing some strips that he had never published because they went over the edge.

Not that I expected his current imbroglio based on this presentation. I could see how he couldn't put this stuff in the strip in the paper, but if it had been as bad as his video, they wouldn't have let him present this at the show and he probably would have self-destructed all those years ago.

His ear for corporate-speak was superb and the villainous yet comic personalities of the boss and the super-boss were right on point. He said in the FOSE presentation that his favorite character was Wally, the bald-headed guy with a single hair who was always figuring out how to get along without doing any real work.

I guess he achieved the goal of being Wally--except Wally was funny.