A COUPLE OF LIVE ONES. While we're on artistic subjects, I think we should acknowledge a couple of fallen heroes. Sydney Pollack was a director of, let us say, likeably modest talents; I have always prefered to think that what I saw on his face as he accepted the Oscar for Out of Africa from Billy Wilder, John Huston and Akira Kurosawa (!) included some embarrassment. But he had his moments, and real charm and skill as an actor. I can't compete with David Edelstein's magnificent summation at New York magazine, but I will add that the very thought of Pollack laying it all out for Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut ("Okay. I think I should also tell you that I was there at the house." Tom Cruise: "Well, what an amazing coincidence." Pollack: "The words practically right out of my mouth") gives me the giggles, and I think he precisely caught the mordant Kubrick tone that baffled so many of the film's critics. It stunned me to learn that he'd been acting since the "Playhouse 90" days. Every time I saw him in a movie or on TV I thought, oh, here's Pollack slumming again. Maybe that's what they mean when they talk about making it look easy.

Also, word just came that Harvey Korman has passed. Korman was always willing to go too far, and on the Carol Burnett show you can often see how eager he was to crack up his fellow players. I still recall the impeccable timing of his reaction to Burnett's gushing Shirley Temple routine: he brought his fingertips to the bridge of his nose and, turning a beat into a drum solo, muttered, "Please, madam, I have diabetes." Blazing Saddles was his apotheosis. The movie pitched its tone on the border of hip and vaudeville, and while Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder worked the hipster angle, Korman came on with a fusillade of stutters, mad walks, lazzi and double-takes straight out of the Orpheum circuit. It played as well with stoned teenagers as it did with elderly variety-show fans. Hail and farewell to the last of the great schtickmen.

EVERYONE'S A WINNER! I am usually very bad at picking Oscar winners, and though I've seem more entrants this year than usual, I expect to fare as poorly as ever. But talking big on subjects I don't understand is my stock in trade. So I invite you to lift your self-esteem by comparing your picks to mine.

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men. Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis. Best Actress: Ellen Page. Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem. Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton. Best Director: The Coens. Best Original Screenplay: Juno. Best Adapted Screenplay: No Country for Old Men.

(I'm all about Julie Christie, but every Oscar show needs a shocker, Juno is well-liked, and youth must be served. I still can't figure out whether Swinton was good or awful, but she sure was acting. Diablo Cody is the new Callie Khouri.)

Best Animated Feature: Ratatouille. Best Art Direction: Sweeney Todd. Best Cinematography: Atonement. Best Costume Design: Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Best Film Editing: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Best Foreign Language Film: The Counterfeiters. Best Music (Score): Ratatouille. Best Music (Song): "Raise It Up." Best Makeup: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Best Sound Mixing: The Bourne Ultimatum. Best Sound Editing: Transformers. Best Visual Effects: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Best Documentary Feature: Taxi to the Dark Side. Best Documentary Short: Freeheld. Best Animated Short: Madame Tutli-Putli. Best Live-Action Short: Tanghi Argentini.

(I'm totally groping here. I figure the big lush romance and the big summer movies require craft awards, Elizabethan clothes are wicked cool, and Michael Moore is fat. The shorts I judged, as I expect most voters do, by their synopses. Everything else is juju.)

THEN WHO ARE YOU? Despite honorable ancestors like Kiss Me Deadly, we strongly identify the paranoid thriller genre with the 1970s, when Hollywood disillusionists postulated in widescreen that everything was a fraud and anyone who got too near the truth would be killed.

When bummers went out of fashion, we still got paranoid thrillers, but they were generally more uplifting and mainstream, like the John Grisham (and Grishamesque) dramas that show up every season with horrible conspiracies, happy endings, and big stars. The hero is usually shown to be on some sort of quest for personal redemption as well as for survival, as befits the modern idea of blockbuster entertainment that makes you feel good about humanity because Tom Cruise rediscovered his sense of purpose.

Michael Clayton is of this sort, but more serious about the redemption angle. [Muted spoilers herewith.] Things still go bump in the night and the deck is still stacked until the hero pulls his ace, but we also get more than the usual amount of information about the hero's personal problems, and a stronger invitation to relate to them.

Clayton, once an assistant DA in Queens, has been for years a "fixer," "janitor," "bagman" (his words, and others') for a big law firm without making partner or even getting the kinds of cases he says he prefers. Clayton hasn't found success because he doesn't really want it: something in him is always rebelling against the amoral system in which he's enmeshed, and he screws himself with debts and bitter self-mockery.

Why not just quit? The debts provide an excuse. But as the details of his work and life mount, we get that Clayton doesn't quit for the same reason many of us don't quit. It's what he knows. He's good at it even if he isn't proud of it. Clayton has a fuckup brother whom he disdains, but with whom he nonetheless disastrously co-invested his "walk-away" money. In a simpler script the blown savings would clearly be a convenient accident that motivates the hero, but here they suggest the complicated psychology of a man for whom duty and responsibility have become means for perpetuating self-disgust.

When one of the firm's "bulls," Arthur, goes off his psych meds in the middle of a big case, Clayton is assigned to fix the situation. Arthur's madness is related to his guilt over a really loathsome case he's been working for years. The madness is his way out, and he senses that Clayton needs one, too. In their desperate conversations, Clayton keeps insisting that Arthur won't listen to him, but Arthur has something to say to Clayton, and it's only when reality begins to resemble Arthur's delusions that Clayton begins to listen.

The dread in Michael Clayton starts before any crime is done. The law offices are properly creepy, the lawyers and their big-time clients are scum. Most conversations drip with cynicism, mendacity, or both. Arthur's breakdown spurs the violence, and the violence wakes Clayton up. In old-school paranoid thrillers, the revelation of conspiracies alerts the hero, and us, to the fraudulent grounds under which we've been living. But it's a new kind of world; he, and we, already knew about the fraud before the story began. What he and we want to know is the answer to the question Arthur poses when Clayton, desperate to normalize the situation, tells him, "I'm not the enemy." "Then," responds Arthur, "who are you?"

The paranoid part of the formula is rich, but the thriller part is less so. The fulcrum of the conspiracy is Karen Crowder, newly-risen head of the odious client company whose case has deranged Arthur. In a tic-ridden performance that is either perfectly awful or awfully perfect, Tilda Swinton shows Karen to be an absolutely demolished personality who glues herself together with corporate bullshit. When the case and her career are jeopardized, she's sufficiently freaked out to go with criminal solutions (there's a lovely scene in which she haltingly matches euphemisms with a contract killer).

Karen is Clayton's opposite: if he's got too much soul to succeed in a soulless world, she's got so little that she becomes a perfect medium for the worst consequences of soullessness. But Karen's not the problem, and by having Clayton take her on, the film ties up the thriller without resolving his dilemma -- as the long, anomic coda seems to admit. Despite its "happy" ending, the film leaves us rattled. Is it because the filmmakers cleverly shifted the burden of resolution onto us, or because they couldn't craft one that suited the movie? We may be forgiven for thinking that having George Clooney take down a yuppie bitch might be a cop-out.

This is Tony Gilroy's first directing credit, and he has maximum support in every area of craft. James Newton Howard's score gently gooses the mood-shifts; as he showed with There Will Be Blood, Robert Elswit has a great eye for pockets of murk, even in sterile environments; Gilroy's brother John cuts the film to suit the patience of its style. Clooney is perfect for the movie. The script's wealth of character detail suits his easy-does-it approach. He doesn't hit the emotional cues too hard, letting the story tell him rather than vice-versa. It's odd: Michael Clayton is ambitious, maybe too ambitious for its own good, but its best features come from artistic restraint.

There, my Oscar duty's done (sorry, but even duty can't drive me to see Atonement). Predictions later.

MY OSCAR SLOG CONTINUES. The biopic is of necessity a limited genre. To succeed, it must stay tightly focused on the pains and triumphs of a subject sufficiently famous to command our attention. In most cases, this keeps the filmmaker from connecting the story to a broader vision, which is why so few of them are works of art. The rare exceptions usually involve a historical figure who has obtained the status of myth, which leaves the filmmaker free to project his own story onto the audience's received impressions of the hero. (See Rossellini's The Rise of Louis XIV or Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln or Stone's JFK. Among the rare exceptions to the formula I would include Preston Sturges' The Great Moment.)

Still, lower-order biopics, from The Story of Louis Pasteur on forward, can be entertaining, and La Vie En Rose is a fine example. Edith Piaf's art and suffering are legendary, and the film mainly amplifies them, from her pathetic beginnings as a whore's child shunted through brothels, to her apotheosis as a great singer whose songs fulsomely reflect her pain, to her wretched, broken end.

The second-best feature of La Vie En Rose is a time-jumping narrative that links all the stages of Piaf's suffering, so that her spirit and attainments are never viewed far from their context. History is always closely linked to destiny, which is not a brilliant philosophical idea but which provides a lifeline that is easy to follow.

Its best feature is Marion Cotillard as Piaf. She picks up seamlessly from the equally fine child actors who play her younger self, brilliantly imagining what their terrors and enforced self-possesion would become in adulthood: a sad monster you'd want to protect if you could get close enough to do it. Her mood swings visibly recall her earlier dramas, which are glowingly evident in her spindly, uncomfortable body and her open, ever-sorrowing face. Her childishness is by turns ugly or appealing, and never leaves her, even in decay and at the threshold of death. If Piaf had not already been a legend, Cotillard's performance would have created one for her, which is to say she achieves the rare gift of great mimicry that is also great acting.

UPDATE. Much astute criticism in comments, and some proposed higher-grade biopics. I don't think The Madness of King George is about G3 so much as it's about what a great thing hereditary monarchy was, at least compared to what replaced it. The hallucinatory Ken Russell biographies are closer to the mark. I should mention Fellini's Casanova, which is about a lot of other things too, including hilarious summations of the French, Spanish, Italian, and German national characters. The central character, seen at one point expounding on one of his own books in front of a page from it stuck with excrement to a prison wall, certainly embodies something larger than himself. Western Civilization, maybe.

BLOOD SIMPLE. There Will Be Blood may be the strangest Best Picture Oscar nominee since -- well, ever. Like the Oscar-nominated oddballs The Elephant Man and The Piano, it's soaked in enough rich period detail to satisfy Ismael Merchant, but it takes a relentlessly eccentric approach to storytelling -- it fact, the plot (independent oilman Daniel Plainview scraps out a big claim in turn-of-the-century California) is more like a private agony writ huge. John DeFore astutely calls it "both an epic and a miniature" -- though it has a great scope of events and scale of ambition, only a few of the characters matter, and actually maybe only one of them really does. And we barely get to know him, because there is not that much to know.

Plainview is all ambition -- "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people." Of course we may expect such a creature to attract unsought obstacles. The biggest of these is Eli Sunday, a deranged charismatic preacher whose father's oil-rich land Plainview has swindled for himself. Plainview could buy Sunday off with a small show of respect, but this he refuses to give.

Why? We suspect that Plainview sees something like God in Sunday, and though it is little spoken of, we have reason to believe that for Plainview God is the force that seeks to thwart him: that kills his men, blows up his wells, broke his leg. (Here be spoilers.)

Sunday seems to believe the same thing. But though they are locked in struggle, the two men don't have the same ends. Plainview wants dominion over the earth, Sunday dominion over men. (Later, we'll see that each wants a little of the other, too.) When circumstances give Sunday an opportunity to kill Plainview's plans, he doesn't do it -- he prefers to use it to torture Plainview at his weak point, his anguish at "abandoning" his adopted son, and thus exact a more personal revenge that exalts his own power to save souls.

Plainview submits to save his claim. The oil flows, the fortune is made.... but There Will Be Blood.

This leads to an ending many critics find problematic. I disagree. It's formally audacious, but the whole film has been that -- this is just a new, shocking type of audacity. Suddenly it's years later, we're in a little room, and under bright lights Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano (Plainview and Sunday) act their asses off in a chamber drama/cage match. And there's Blood!

I suspect the arguments over the ending have less to do with the tone shift than with an unease with the whole film that the mini-gotterdammerung ending throws into relief. For me, the ending satisfactorily fulfills the story. But what about that story?

In reducing it to its crucial elements, I fear I may have skewed the impact of the film as a whole. The struggle with Sunday is important, and that character is beautifully realized by Dano: full of mad energy in preaching and in rage (and reminiscent of a young Gene Wilder when his voice frantically scrapes the top of its register), but dazedly calm when the fit is not on him. His Biblical mood swings are an intriguing foil for Day-Lewis, who gives us a more clinical psychological reality, in which the madness appears in streaks suppressed by his drive to get the job done -- until there is nothing suppressing it at all.

I can't quite put my finger on when it becomes clear that Plainview is depraved. The madness of his drive is clear from the time he drags his shattered leg to the assayer's office rather than to a doctor. And even his first speech, to a community whose land he wishes to drill, shows us how strange he is. I have seen Day-Lewis' voice compared with John Huston's; my buddy Bob heard Jack Palance. I heard a man who is sure of himself but hiding something so deep that it has calcified his speech, albeit into pleasing patterns.

It's a good choice, as they say, and it affords Day-Lewis enough vocal headroom to play bravura when he needs to. But while his confrontations with Sunday are key, they are few, and the rest of the ample time leaves us with this man and the weaker characters, whom he can do nothing but negate.

When he is briefly drawn out by a visit by a putative "brother from another mother" (the excellent Kevin J. O'Connor), Plainview only relaxes enough to explicate his already obvious contempt for humanity -- and, in the end, his anger at being made to trust. The closest thing to a love-object in his life is his quasi-son, adopted in infancy from a dead comrade. Little "H.W." grows into an affectless, close-mouthed boy who shadows his father and seems to accept his guidance as love, until an accident leaves him deaf; then he begins to act out viciously, and Plainview sends him away. This leaves Plainview with an obvious psychic wound which Sunday exploits, and which drives him to extravagant anger at people he imagines would "tell me how to raise my family." But it is clear -- even when the boy returns and Plainview smothers him with affection -- that he realizes that he has given the child no real love at all, because he has none to give.

What Plainview has been hiding (until the end, when he has nothing left to hide) is an inability to empathize with any other human being. When we begin to understand this, the film achieves a kind of emotional stasis: we can have terror, terror in abundance, but no pity. Which is to say, we cannot have tragedy. So when the final release comes, it is pure grand guignol: a blood-letting battle of monsters.

For all the extravagant brilliance of his production (every craft aspect of which is stunning), Paul Thomas Anderson has been brutal about withholding the emotional release that such a big movie leads us to expect. It's a chilling sort of grandeur and I can understand why a lot of people find it repulsive. I can't imagine it will find a lot of love at the Oscars, even for Day-Lewis, whose performance peels the fucking paint off the walls. A Gordon Gekko may invite us to sneaking empathy with his lascivious cruelty, but Plainview gives no quarter and can expect none.

JUNO THE ALONE. The Best Picture Oscar nominees have developed a twee-indie slot, filled in 2004 by Sideways (which I considered here); last year by Little Miss Sunshine, which I admired with qualifications; and now by Juno. The hallmarks are high quirk, small scale, and some intellectual flourishes which mark them as upscale entertainments.

Juno goes a little further than its predecessors. For one thing, the twee is laid on with a trowel. The Kimya Dawson soundtrack assures more toothache than heartbreak (though I really hope she goes to the Oscars dressed like a bumblebee or something), and the Wes Andersonian sidebars and psuedo-naive animations indicate that Academy voters are finally warming to New Cool.

Certainly having a pregnant teen who isn't a beaten-down victim and in fact appears in control of her situation is a new one; Sharon Curley had great spunk in The Snapper, but she was grounded in an old-fashioned working-class reality and reacted to it, whereas our current heroine is exceptional in nearly every way and brushes off the social implications of her act as nuisances. She's as much a goddess as her namesake, and such social comedy as Juno provides is based on her and her family's steadfast indifference to other people's expectations. Her frank talk at the Lorings' -- "Maker's Mark, please" (flashes thumb) "Up" -- is funny enough that the other characters barely need to react. Despite some commentary we've heard about the movie, this very successfully removes society as a factor in her journey: her mission to deliver the baby to the appropriate couple is not a social policy decision but pure self-assertion by a precocious 16-year-old who trusts her own instincts completely.

It's to Juno's credit that she finally encounters disappointment in an unexpected way, handles it in a manner consonant with her character, and changes her mind about something important. (Spoiler alert.) When the couple she's picked don't live up to her expectations, she takes (private) time to absorb the loss, and gives the baby to the now-single woman she knows will care for it. If one were to try and put a message on it, it would look more like a plea for single motherhood in a world of inadequate males, and very much beside the point.

The mind-changing is dramatically interesting. (You still reading? I'm still spoiling.) Juno's most important relationship, on the story's terms, is with Bleeker, her best friend and father of her child. If her pregnancy isn't a significant problem for her in any other way -- her friends and parents are accepting, other people don't count, and the destiny her great intelligence and confidence indicate for her seems totally unaffected -- it's the sticking point between her and him. She shields Bleeker from the consequences as an act of love, but this has the effect of pushing him away, and -- classic turnaround! -- dim as he is in many way, Bleeker understands it better than she does. In fact, she doesn't have a clue, even when he tells her, and only the breakup of the Lorings brings her to the conclusion that Bleeker is important to her, not as the father but as the boy she was meant to be with.

If this sounds sentimental, that's because it is. Juno's pregnancy is a McGuffin that complicates her unconscious search for romantic love. Once this sinks in, the movie suddenly feels very slight. Though the tart, teenspeak dialogue and unusual premise make Juno feel hip and wised-up, Juno's gynecological coming-of-age basically leads to a life-lesson straight out of an after-school special. Through most of Juno -- and especially during the development of the troublesome relationship of Juno and Mark Loring -- we expect that the flip tone and emotional distancing of the characters are covering for something deeper. But as it turns out, not so much: everyone's a child, and not much capable of growth. Juno's final discussion with her father (which, significantly, she ends by deceiving him) and her profession of love to Bleeker return us right back to the breezy place where we started, only now Juno and Bleeker are for-reals gf and bf, playing emo bullshit on acoustic guitars. It's kind of a relief, but not a revelation.

Revelation's a lot to ask, though, so let us be content with the excellencies Juno offers. The dialogue really is snappy, and the actors sell it beautifully. It probably says something that the fine supporting cast is mostly from prestige TV shows: they have a great feel for lines that might have choked actors who aren't used to thinking fast. (I'm especially fond of Michael Cera and hope he gets the film career fate has perversely denied that other talented skinny-boy Topher Grace.) Ellen Page so dominates as Juno that I really suspect the movie wouldn't work at all without her. I haven't seen the other nominees but I wouldn't be shocked if she won the Oscar because her performance is so clearly indispensable. She's got the genius-child bull-headedness, and the charm to make us like it.

OCCUPATION. Though I'm an old film nerd, there are a lot of esteemed directors whose works I've completely missed. I'm a little ashamed of it, but I must admit now that I was unfamiliar with Jean-Pierre Melville before tonight, because I've just seen Army of Shadows and can't contain myself.

As you might expect from a film about a French Resistance crew, it is one harrowing, nerve-tearing incident after another. There is no attempt to frame them with an overarching narrative; the men (and one woman) do their jobs, get caught or fail to get caught or escape. Between the exploits there is a patient attention to everyday activity that sustains the tension; when you are fucking with the Nazis, just eating a meal or walking down the street is a prelude to more terror. And the actors observable carry the weight of their occupation, in both senses, at every moment, and their seriousness doesn't get tiresome because it is palpably appropriate. What they're doing is heroic, but there is no lingering over that for effect, and when someone gets emotional it has to be tamped down for the good of the cause. (We get a clue that this will be the method at the beginning, when our hero coolly endures some chatter from a jolly Vichy gendarme. Later, the clasping of a hand is allowed to linger, under extraordinary circumstances, but that too must be put aside.)

Though the heroes are out of uniform, this is one of the best war movies I've ever seen. The two top Resisters' visit to London, where they meet DeGaulle and endure a blitz (and the central character, Gerbier, hitches a ride back to France with the RAF and makes his first parachute jump) gives a sense of the wider conflict within which they operate. This is war seen from deep inside, where the planning is endless and everything can go wrong and one can no longer be interested in what came before or hope too much for what may come afterward. "Struggle" and "conflict" are not conveyed by gritted teeth and flexed muscles but by silent attentiveness to opportunity and the occasional run for freedom or quick, bloody strike (and, in one hair-raising case, the dilemma of killing a man without disturbing the neighbors). The clarity is bracing. It makes Saving Private Ryan look like a soap opera.

I want to see more Melville soon, though my accursed taste for contemporaneity may postpone that so I can see a few more of this year's probably-shitty Oscar nominees.

MAYBE IT'S JUST ME, but a Perfesserverse in which the commentary is focused on...

1. All the evil liberals who were insufficiently respectful of Dick Cheney's non-assassination;
2. Non-stop assaults on Oscar-winning non-candidate-for-anything Al Gore and the comical idea that we should do anything about global warming except build a few more Three Mile Islands;
3. "Lefty bloggers seem especially anxious to go after righty bloggers these days";
4. Whistling past the stock market crash;

...sort of reminds me of the last forty minutes of L'Eclisse mixed with the TV studio scenes from Dawn of the Dead. And maybe some Junior Samples bits from "Hee Haw."

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's just me.

UPDATE. Fixed link, switched out George Romero film.

PRE-EMPTIVE SELF-HUMILIATION. In the past I have made Oscar predictions online -- predictions that have been, without fail, spectacularly wrong, so much so that I have been told that professionals count on them each year as a negative example.

This year I will keep it simple and just tell you my guesses at the top winners: The Departed, Scorsese, Helen Mirren, Will Smith, Alan Arkin, and whatshername that kid. There is an impeccable logic to picking Smith -- everyone in Hollywood loves him and, since he is destined to spend the next 20 years playing action heroes, this is their only chance to give a pre-menopausal Big Willie a statue. Impeccable logic, and almost certainly wrong.

That's how it goes with me and the Oscars, which is why I devote most of my writing to insignificant topics like politics.

ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM. Patrick Ruffini, promoted by the Perfesser:

When things don't go well in Iraq, we see the endless B-roll of chaos and carnage. When things are on the upswing, we tend to hear more about Anna Nicole Smith.

As a paranoiac, I am sympathetic to crackpot conspiracy theories, but this idea that the Anna Nicole Smith coverage is motivated by treason, rather than by a desire to profit from the public's well-established thirst for celebrity crap, strains even my childlike faith.

I mean, it's not like the days when the press was covering up the Clinton scandals. Now there was message discipline! I bet most Americans never even heard of "Whitewater."

Tip to Ruffini: haven't you wondered why Hollyweird has scheduled its Oscar show right in the middle of our great victory in Iraq? Get digging, citizen!

MOVIE NIGHT. Finally saw Walk The Line. Back when Joaquin Phoenix was announced as the Johnny Cash avatar, I spent a long night explaining to an uninterested bartender why Phoenix was a poor choice. They should have scoured up a backwoods retard to play JC, I drooled. I admired Phoenix from Quills and Gladiator, but I didn't see anything in him that could sound Cash's simplicity.

I was awful wrong. Phoenix is wonderful. He obviously worked like hell on the voice, and did right by it: he not only got the lower register, but also the aching gulf it came out of. When he did "Folsom Prison Blues" for Sam Phillips (and that was a great little performance, there, by Dallas Roberts -- he made Phillips a pedant, a prophet, and a promoter all at once, which Phillips had to have been), Phoenix seemed to be singing in slow motion, digging open with effort a hole in himself to reveal his deepest sorrow. And, drunk as I was when I expressed it in that bar, the filmmakers seem to have shared my feeling about Cash being a retard. The movie Cash can't hardly help himself: he does everything out of blind need. From the start he comes on to June as if he has no social skills whatever, and even after his desire has been purified by abstinence and discipline, when he proposes -- "Muhrry me, June!" -- it's still a raging hard-on that can't brook convention, common sense, or anything else.

There's a lot more to Johnny Cash than a love story, but the love story is great, and who doesn't like a great love story? Much as I admire Reese Witherspoon, though, I don't see this as any kind of pinnacle for her, Oscar or no. Back in her Freeway-Election period, I would have imagined Witherspoon capable of anything. Then came those stupid Legally Blond movies, and I think she's still sort of stuck on that note. Her June Carter is solid but nothing out of the ordinary. I liked her best when she first softened toward Cash -- it may have just been a gap in the writers' characterization, but when she let him into her hotel room (here the framing of the scene helps a lot), it was a welcome glimpse of mystery -- how is it that someone so forcefully pulled together lets herself slip? By and large, though, Witherspoon's June is too formulaically conflicted, according to how bad or good Johnny's coming off at the time. The newspaper headline JUNE CARTER MARRIES STOCK CAR DRIVER is more interesting than most of her performance. Witherspoon needs a quantum casting leap. But who in Hollywood will give it to her?

As for the resolution, I like it fine. It may be a family-Bible resolution, but it's still a resolution. I especially like Cash's Christian handling of his asshole father -- I was annoyed by it, but on the film's terms it made perfect sense, and those, as Charles Foster Kane once observed, are the only terms anyone understands. I understand the charge that Walk the Line is just a form of "effective ventriloquism," and that Cash's life has more riches to yield, but to me the important thing is that it is effective, and its effectiveness is earned from the start to the finish of the film. Movies can do worse, and usually do.

POST-OSCAR RIGHT WING STYLEE: PAJAMAS MEDIA STRIKES BLECH! Let's see how the coolio conservatives responded to this year's Oscars:

Beginning to wonder how long it will take Jon Stewart to crack an anti-Bush joke.

[snip]

Waking up with George Clooney next to me would make it very easy for me to get out of bed.

[snip]

And so far, [Jon Stewart]'s making fun of Hollywood's devotion to the Democrats. So, I'll say good for him.

[snip]

"A return to glamour" is tonight's theme, says host John Stewart. Has he seen any of tonight's nominated movies? I know I haven't

[it was a joke, tanning-bed boy! snip!]

Clooney's award was payback for being robbed for his performance in "Return of the Killer Tomatoes["].

[snip]

YAY!! For March of the Penguins!!!!!! A well-deserved victory.

[snip]

J-Lo just spoke of forgiveness and resentment in a very angry tone: Which do you think she (and the Academy) really wants us to feel tonight?

[snip]

I love Sam Jackson, but hate it when Hollywood jerks itself off. Bo-ring.

[I should interject that there are intentional jokes embedded in this horseshit, in which right-wing bloggers pretend to be Hollywood celebrities making catty comments about the participants. Follow the link and prepare to laff ("prepare" meaning, in this case, drink a bottle of Jack Daniels and get Gilbert Gottfried to read it to you). snip!]

Robert Altman is the most overrated director in Hollywood history. There, I said it. He's so beloved by actors because he over-indulges them.

[fuck you. I mean, snip]

Compare Witherspoon's speech to Julia Roberts's from a couple years back. The gal has class.

[snip]

Here's the statistical rundown: Crash, with a theatrical box office of $53 million, is the lowest-grossing Oscar winner since "The Last Emperor," going all the way back to 1987. And that's in non-inflation adjusted numbers. The average box office for all of this year's Best Picture nominees was the lowest since 1984. I believe history will mark this year as the beginning of the end for traditional, big-studio Hollywood. Of course, I could be wrong. Of course, some say that year transpired long ago.

[Very astute. And what might the sell-by date be for a combine of Republican bloggers playing at red carpet? snippety snip snap!]

If you really want to know how these people think, why not go straight to Free Republic ("Looks like Brokeback got rear ended") and be spared the pathetic attempt to be hip?

TIME-LAG OSCARS PART SIX. Stewart is funny still, but he has also sort of faded into the background – in other words, he’s an emcee, not a star galvanizing the event. Makes sense in an Oscar year of small Hollywood movies. Montage films, elaborate gags, nice moments in the acceptance speeches, and a brisk clip – why, you’d almost think they planned it this way.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY. I’m losing the pool, but I’m a traditionalist so I like that one movie is sweeping the craft awards.

BEST ACTRESS. First time I saw her was in Freeway. Then I saw Election. Then she made a lot of movies that I had no interest in seeing, though I peeked at them because she was in them. I thought she was wasting her talent, but I’m sure she was just taking such opportunities as arose to build her audience and her power. Her speech looks and sounds like pleasant treacle, but her comments about her family and her emphasis on T-Bone Burnett show some spine, taste, and wisdom. I haven’t seen this one yet, but I will now.

BEST ADAPTED SCRIPT: Larry McMurtry has a good gig. His dual academic/redneck cred makes it possible for him to resist all kinds of pressure in Hollywood. And he uses it well here. "All are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book." Hear, hear, cowboy.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY. Quoting Brecht? ‘Sokay, America went to bed already.

BEST DIRECTOR: I liked Crouching Tiger etc. Lee's tribute to "all the gay men and womens" is very sweet, partly for being rote. Not having seen The Hulk I don’t have a full read on his artistic personality, but I’ll go to the theatre next week and get more information. Hey, Oscar is doing his job!

BEST PICTURE. Whoa. Big coup! Newspapers full of Oscar ink! Was Oscar scared? Who is Paul Haggis? Is this picture The Greatest Show on Earth, Chariots of Fire, Driving Miss Daisy, or An American in Paris, In the Heat of the Night, All the King’s Men -- that is, a cop-out or a split decision? Again, you’d almost think they planned it.

Now time to clean up my own vomit! Thank you, get home safe!

TIME-LAG OSCARS PART FIVE. BEST SONG. "How come they’re the most excited people here tonight?" Because they think it’s the Grammys. We’ve come a long way from "Sweet Leilani."

BEST SOUND EDITING. Thanks, sound editors everywhere say, for giving us a novelty film.

DEAD GUY MONTAGE. Clooney was a good pick to intro – if he’s not the appropriate new Hollywood guy to bid adieu to the old, who is? I’m sorry there is apparently no one left to mourn, with applause, Moira Shearer and Teresa Wright, and that John Mills has to take runoff from Chris Penn. But hard workers in every industry die every day, and being applauded or mentioned or not, "handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now."

BEST FOREIGN FILM. I picked this one! It had commercials! I saw them on DVDs! It looked heart-rending!

BEST FILM EDITING. Which one had boxing? That was Cinderella Man, so I picked it in the pool… Crash? Was there boxing? I have to go to the movies more.

BEST ACTOR: Omigod, I just realized Hillary Swank has two Oscars. They came close together, not as close as Katharine Hepburn’s first two, but pretty close. Will she wait twenty-odd years for her third? Is the lack of good female roles in movies the modern equivalent of "box-office poison"? Halle Berry’s coming out with another X-Men movie, which will be crap. Laura Linney can’t catch a break casting-wise. I hear Philip Seymour Hoffman was pretty good in Capote.

UPDATE. I always make this mistake: Hepburn won her second Oscar thirty-three years after her first.

TIME-LAG OSCARS BEER PART FOUR. ART DIRECTION: How do you portray the "climate of fear of McCarthyism" in art direction? With sketches! Keanu should be appointed Oscar Presenter Partner for life. I’ve never seen him better.

SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS MONTAGE. I love the eazy-flow music they use to bring out Samuel L. Jackson, but I really wish they’d mix things up by giving him something like the Yale Fight Song. Now what is Hollywood, that chancred whore, trying to tell us? They call me Mister Hollywood – and you shouldn’t hate me for making you think with movies you don’t go see! You like some of it, don’t you? Like when Jack Nicholson pushes those dishes off the table? That was cool, right? So gay cowboys are just like Tom Joad! Well, it’s Chuck Workman, probably, and it’s a nice warm bath of righteous both self- and unhyphenated for all us rebels & dreamers! And Jon Stewart deflated cannily! And whatshisname the President re-inflated deadly-ily! Uncomfortable truths! And please go to movie theatres, where you get "sound coming at you from all directions" (I thought they closed the Selwyn) and New Orleans and hey, wake up people, here’s Salma Hayek!

BEST SCORE: The best one of these medleys I ever saw starred Liberace, who opened the proceedings by announcing, "I made my greatest contribution to the movies years ago – I stopped making them!" and then pounded the keys to lead the Oscar Philharmonic in classics like Theme from "Beastmaster". Still, I won’t let nostalgia prevent me from acknowledging the good work on auditory view, though I doubt that any of these scores is improved by having Itzhak Perlman carry the melodies on his fiddle (and wrapping it all up with a cute little flourish)… oh great, more homosexualist propaganda and by a foreigner yet! Somewhere Roger L. Simon is chewing the rim of his fedora.


BOMBAST MONTAGE. Jake Gyllegehuillahall says, "there’s no place to see them like on the big screen" and the audience pat their palms as if they don’t want to look too eager to drag us wretches into the cineplexes for their benefit. Then another Chuck Worman joint. Point taken, and thank Skerner God of Wood the Hollywoodians have King Kong and The Matrix to remind people that you can still have a good time stoned and watching things go kablooey, and you won’t even get ringworm by leaning your head back on the theatre seat.

BEST SOUND MIXING: You get the difference between this and Sound Editing, right? This is basically Best Sound. They split off Sound Effects Editing years ago because… fuck, I forget why. King Kong! I might win this pool if everyone else in my office had a bad hangover on Friday.

ROBERT ALTMAN! Holy fuck! Robert Altman! Even Streep and Tomlin doing a stupid bit about overlapping dialogue (Hello? Howard Hawks?) and improvisation (hello Cassavettes?) can’t fuck this up. Or can it? Shouldn’t they be smoking joints? Big, fat spliffs would have sewn up the urban youth demo. What a pleasure, though, to see him honored. But what’s the ornery old coot gonna say? "I thought this award meant it was over…" Then he tells what he’s up to. Then he tells about his next movie. "It’s not over." And "to me it’s just one long film." Well, yes, auteurist that I am, I cannot disagree. Nice analogy of the sand castle. "Have a drink, watch the tide come in, and the ocean just takes it away… I’ve built about forty of them…" And a nice "one more thing… eleven years ago I had a heart transplant… the heart of a young woman, I think in her late thirties… I think I’ve got about thirty years left." God, I hope so.

ROBERT ALTMAN CONT. What did Robert Altman do? Worked in almost every conceivable genre: detective story, gambling drama, service comedy, space movie, westerns, English murder mystery, L.A. murder mystery, musical, filmed theatre, etc… Illuminated everything he touched. Let actors breathe. Let the soundtrack breathe. When Hollywood funding was not forthcoming he scraped it up himself and kept working. Made beautiful images. Warren Beatty dying in a snowbank. Helicopters descending on Los Angeles. The Last Supper in a Korean MASH tent. Michel Gambon smashing away a rocks glass. "Rufus Rastus Rawlston Brown, whatcha gonna do when the rent comes ‘round?" "Y’all settle down now – this isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville."

TIME-LAG OSCARS BEER PART FOUR. ART DIRECTION: How do you portray the "climate of fear of McCarthyism" in art direction? With sketches! Keanu should be appointed Oscar Presenter Partner for life. I’ve never seen him better.

SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS MONTAGE. I love the eazy-flow music they use to bring out Samuel L. Jackson, but I really wish they’d mix things up by giving him something like the Yale Fight Song. Now what is Hollywood, that chancred whore, trying to tell us? They call me Mister Hollywood – and you shouldn’t hate me for making you think with movies you don’t go see! You like some of it, don’t you? Like when Jack Nicholson pushes those dishes off the table? That was cool, right? So gay cowboys are just like Tom Joad! Well, it’s Chuck Workman, probably, and it’s a nice warm bath of righteous both self- and unhyphenated for all us rebels & dreamers! And Jon Stewart deflated cannily! And whatshisname the President re-inflated deadly-ily! Uncomfortable truths! And please go to movie theatres, where you get "sound coming at you from all directions" (I thought they closed the Selwyn) and New Orleans and hey, wake up people, here’s Salma Hayek!

BEST SCORE: The best one of these medleys I ever saw starred Liberace, who opened the proceedings by announcing, "I made my greatest contribution to the movies years ago – I stopped making them!" and then pounded the keys to lead the Oscar Philharmonic in classics like Theme from "Beastmaster". Still, I won’t let nostalgia prevent me from acknowledging the good work on auditory view, though I doubt that any of these scores is improved by having Itzhak Perlman carry the melodies on his fiddle (and wrapping it all up with a cute little flourish)… oh great, more homosexualist propaganda and by a foreigner yet! Somewhere Roger L. Simon is chewing the rim of his fedora.

TIME-LAG BLOGGING THE OSCARS IN REAL TIME-LAG! PAAAAART OOOONNEE BOYEEEE! Welcome to the Oscars, which all good Americans are supposed to hate for their liberal gayness. I’m actually grateful to have that all out in the open. I sorta had an inkling when I started following these things as a child that my interest was corrupt and vile. Sometimes, like when John Podhoretz gets into the Oscars, we forget that. But thank God or the flying spaghettini spaghetti sauce monster or whatever we decadent creatures are supposed to call it/him/her/Gaia, we have Roger L. Simon, an actual screenwriter, to tell people the real truth. I’ll give you the link later. Or you can go to his site and find it yourself, it ain’t hard.

Well, I don’t have cable, so this is how I get to see Jon Stewart. He’s hilarious. I should have realized that Jon Stewart would be a little ahead of his audience. It works fine because he’s usually a little ahead of his audience (but packs his TV auditors with homosexuals who will laugh at anything). The tentativeness of the laughs just add a little extra layer of hilarity – like Stewart cracks on Walk the Line and Joaquin Phoenix just inflates his face a couple of centimeters.

Music during acceptance speeches? That’s what Oscar has been missing! Now everyone sounds like piano-bar performers telling the crowd to tip their waitress.

BEST SUPPORTING DUDE: Clooney’s speech has humor, and righteousness and self-righteousness in equal measure (well, maybe a little more of the former). Obviously a depth-charge (ah ha ha ha! Git it?) on behalf of the homosexual agenda.

BEST SPECIAL EFFECTS: Does it say something about our culture that a very talented comedian must pretend ineptitude to get laughs? The metaphor for a closeted lifestyle is obvious.

BEST LONG CARTOON: The two guys wearing big bow-ties are obviously channeling teh gay! Why don’t they thank their life-partners?

DOLLY PARTON: Tomorrow when I sober up I’ll look around for links telling us how Dolly isn’t what she used to be since she got involved with the transgenderalist agenda. I am of course talking about The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Whorehouses in a musical comedy! These people will do anything to tear down our moral infrastructure.

BEST SHORT MOVIE: Who knew? I based my office pool pick on the pictures and synopses at oscar.com. I lost. That guy looks gay.

BEST SHORT CARTOON: See above, except it’s a couple accepting so the gay – oh wait, life partner check!

BEST "CULINARY CONCEPTIONS THEMSELVES": I should be writing this copy. "Novelist Jane Austen herself would have nodded with approval" – or maybe she would just be nodding!

Vomit break!

SHORTER CULTURE-WAR NUTS: What! No nominations for Jesus? This is the most left-wing Oscars ever! Giving awards to small movies, rather than multi-million-dollar epics like Marty amd Chariots of Fire? Further proof of liberalism! Real people will boycott Oscars in favor of Justice Monday! Reese Witherspoon's inevitable Oscar is the exception that proves the movie-traitor rule! And that's the trouble with these artist-people -- they politicize everything!

THE CULTURE WAR'S REAR ECHELON. Writing is a hard dollar in any case, so I can understand why a lot of marginal scribes have over the years flocked to National Review, the Claremont Institute, etc: they're always hiring, it seems. I have myself written utter hogwash for corporate clients, so I will not judge these factota on moral grounds. (Oscar Wilde could. When a friend of his whose hackwork offended Wilde shrugged, "A man must eat," Wilde replied, "In your case, I fail to see the necessity.") But as a professional, even as a mercenary, I find myself increasingly offended by the increasingly low quality of their work.

Not that it was ever good. During the Reagan-era goldrush of right-wing propaganda gigs, tractability trumped talent -- prickly Old Guard authors like Karl Hess gave way to faux-contrarian bloviants like R. Emmett Tyrell (who, with the aid of a thesaurus, impersonated an author just badly enough to convince the sub-literate that he was one, and thus emblematized his profession and his age).

But nowadays it's even worse. Consider that it took two authors to write this. Most of the piece summarizes the plot of a comic book -- and while this job is poorly performed, it at least gives the reader some tangible details and images; the passages that are (apparently) meant to analyze the comic book actually make it harder to tell what the thing is doing or trying to do:

If satire is the stuff of Jonathan Swift — intelligent, probing, witty, sharp, and scathing — then Liberality falls woefully short. It is, in fact, none of those things. Walking a blurry line between oblivious self-parody and conscious self-deprecation, it is a hysterical, hilarious romp through a nightmarish right-wing fantasy land...

Regardless of how Liberality's humor is intended, it's there in spades. On the back cover of one of the comic books, Hannity's metal fist clenches a squirming caricature of an Arab terrorist by the throat, holding him up in a gesture of triumphant contempt. Purposefully or not, it is the perfect culmination of this carnival of colorful absurdity.

How does this sort of thing get published?

Desperation is a possibility. Figure that every young toff who announces himself to the wingnut network by joining the local YAF or Protest Warriors chapter will eventually be recruited by agents of Scaife or Moon. These lads and lasses cannot be forever happy working in the mailroom. They know that to break out, they either have to blow George Roche (or his not-yet-disgraced equivalent), or publish something high-profile enough to make a name and a place on the path to editorships and junior analyst slots.

Think how many essays this must engender! And think what sort of people are writing them: Bible-college yearbook editors; clench-fisted debate-club nerds; and, probably more than anything else, political hacks who sincerely believe that literary greatness, like everyone and everything else they have yet encountered in their short lives, must fall to their energy and powers of persuasion.

For the most part these are young people who lack both the experience to comment sensibly on real-life experiences, and the patience or depth to comprehend theoretical abstractions. And, like nearly everyone else in these United States, they think that first-class writing is distinguished not by clarity but by opacity.

So they pick topics that will not get them called for ignorance -- because their editors don't know about them, and nobody else cares about them: comic books, movies, TV shows, celebrity bloggers, etc. On such bare themes the young Turks hang words, metaphors, subordinate clauses and apothegms in (their articles suggest) whatever order they happen to come to minds only hazily acquainted with the rules and traditions of English composition.

Like all amateur artisans, they lay their materials on thick. When they make a mistake or intuit how lost they are, they just add more. Eventually the accretion is so monstrous that it seemes singular: maybe, the budding authors muse, this is what they mean by style.

Such monstrosities pour over an editor's transom. The editor sighs; there is no money in the budget for remedial education, and he has no time to educate all the sprats himself. He keeps hoping they'll get better; but they don't. They spend their free time horsing around. The males try to mack on the females, and the females try to make each other jealous. The editor wonders why they didn't go into advertising. Maybe if Rupert Murdoch owned an agency...

Meanwhile his boss -- a moneyed crackpot who lives in a Georgian mansion in North Dakota and practices incessantly at his private rifle range to prepare for the coming Mexifornian invasion -- looks in: any new talent coming up?

The editor hands over some of the less deformed creations. The boss scans the copy of one, cannot make heads nor tails of it. This is not unusual, but it seems even worse today; maybe, he thinks, it's time for a new contact lens prescription.

Nonetheless he sees keywords of which he approves -- Hannity, Liddy, Limbaugh, Rand -- and that pleases him. That's usually as much as he needs to see when reviewing the magazine, certainly: he will trace the conservative signifiers just far enough to assure himself they are connected with flattery, and the liberal signifiers far enough to assure himself they are wedded to scorn.

In this respect, all is well with the article; if he cannot quite follow the through-line, he figures, it may be a "youth" thing. The kids have their own language; funny books, iPods and so forth. Who is he to judge? The boy wouldn't be aboard if he weren't right on the issues.

And his approving grunt cues the dawn of a brilliant career.

It may of course be simpler than that. Maybe the places are like monkey houses before the advent of humane zoo management: a chaos of screams, leaps, and masturbation. Maybe the cause is not so much editorial desperation as depravity. Maybe the stuff is generated by computer programs while the interns and tyros lay around the office smoking crack.

But speculating on it sure beats the snot out of reading it.

THAT'S THE WAY OF THE WORLD. In the New York Democratic primary this week, Freddy Ferrer was a few votes shy of the 40% he needed to avoid a runoff. His nearest competitor, Anthony Weiner, pre-emptively conceded the runoff to Ferrer. The New York Post -- which oversized GOP Chick-tract has always taken great pleasure in Democratic fractiousness (during the 1984 primaries, the Post ran a front-page picture of Mondale, Jackson and Hart shaking hands with the headline THE BEST OF ENEMIES) -- suddenly began complaining that Weiner and Ferrer were giving New York A KICK IN THE BALLOTS because the law will probably require an expensive runoff anyway. "[It] could cost taxpayers as much as $12 million," marveled the Post.

Since a forced rematch would cost the same amount, and since Ferrer and Weiner are trying to get the runoff stopped, we may assume that the Post's position is that Ferrer and Weiner should be compelled to fight just for the sport of it. (Funny, when Giuliani tried to postpone the 2001 election, the Post was all for it.)

WEINER WEASELS, proclaimed an editorial indistinguishable from the next day's "news" story, BACKERS TO WEINER: QUIT BEING A WEENIE, in which some Queens folks were encouraged to say bad things about Weiner ("His name should be Oscar Meyer").

The Post is considered a comical, almost folkloric species of journalistic fraud -- heh heh, cute little propagandist! Let me ruffle his hair JESUS CHRIST HE BIT MY FINGER OFF. But they are different only in tone, and not by much, from numberless publications (and their little, unpaid brethren in the blogosphere) similarly disposed against truth and good sense.

So when the President makes another passel of promises which, history teaches us, he probably won't keep, it is no shock when the usual gang of idiots runs up and starts dancing around the Leader, waving banners and blowing conch-shells; nor that, when our rock-ribbed conservative President proposes an astonishing outlay of gummint cash (that's our money, fellow libertarian pricks!), the conch-dancers begin talking excitedly about what we're going to -- get this! -- cut from the Federal budget to make up for the cost, which rather reminds me of cave full of vampire bats discussing which sort of soft drink they will buy once they have stopped drinking blood.

Those who find this sort of work overchallenging can always cook up another librul-media scandal -- even if their own transcript shows their charge to be an absurd stretch -- and wait for the sheep to bleat back.

Sometimes this whole gig seems like fire-watch in a land without firemen.