NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

... about the "Day of Resistance" for gun nuts. Now please excuse me, I'm watching the Oscars (and doing okay with predix, and live-tweeting).

UPDATE. Oh speaking of Oscars, attend this especially Zhdanovite horseshit from Mark Joseph at National Review called "Lincoln’s Lost Opportunities":

First, there was the team that brought forth this film about the president who founded the Republican party, a team led by the blue-state heroes Steven Spielberg, screenwriter Tony Kushner, author Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Daniel Day-Lewis....

Oh wait, it gets better:

There is another surefire way to keep traditionalist audiences away from a movie, and the makers of Lincoln played that card as well: bad language...
“Sadly, the movie also contains about 40 obscenities and profanities, including four ‘f’ words and more than 10 GDs,” noted MovieGuide, a site that a good number of traditionalists consult before attending movies...

And another thing: What was all that anti-businessman talk in Citizen Kane? No wonder America hates Hollywood!

UPDATE 2. Jesus, Nate Silver knows everything.

UPDATE 3. Post-Oscar whining commences; I assume tomorrow there'll be plenty of rightwing argh-blargh about Michelle Obama's appearance. (Here's an early return from Todd Starnes on Twitter: "Tonight was supposed to be about Hollywood - but Mrs. Obama made it about herself." The concern of a Fox News shouter for the noble traditions of Hollywood is touching.) Meanwhile at National Review, somebody named Gina R. Dalfonzo:

Whatever one thinks of the movies being honored, and however fervently one roots for one’s favorites, there’s a depressing sameness to the annual Oscar ritual these days.

"These days"?

Chris Loesch was tweeting about how conservatives need to quit “belittling” pop culture, and start recognizing “the importance of engaging in and making good art.” He made a very good point. But the engaging would be so much easier if, on occasions like these, Hollywood’s best and brightest would give us something to work with.

The Oscars gets a billion viewers worldwide every year. Why would they give a fuck what conservatives think? See "market, free."

Still -- do read my Voice thing. They beat us if we don't deliver traffic.

UPDATE 4. Also at National Review, Wesley "Make Sure to Include My Middle Initial, I'm a Pompous Ass" Smith:

Can you imagine the Oscars allowing anyone to host the big show who had mocked defenseless minorities? No? Well, think again. This year’s host, Seth McFarlane, created Family Guy, a show which castigated the late Terri Schiavo as a “vegetable”...

I await Smith's denunciations of those who wring humor from the tragedy of people slipping on banana peels.

I CAN'T GO ON OSCAR PREDICTING; I'LL GO ON OSCAR PREDICTING.

This is one of those years where I saw practically nothing up for an Academy Award -- which judging from my past performance as a predictor can either be good or bad for my chances. So attend my belly-flop below.

I will add here, as I have been meaning to since I saw it, that Django Unchained is terrific -- by far Tarantino's best movie. (Mild spoilers.) In Inglourious Basterds I detected a great advance in his filmmaking, but also a lot of his usual annoying tics, such as the use of photogenic violence to resolve situations he couldn't think his characters out of. And that was strange, because if anything offers a good foundation for germane but over-the-top violent scenes, it's Nah-zis. But Tarantino doesn't make the same mistake with slavery: the eruptions of bloodshed make perfect sense, as illustrations of either the oppressive situation or of the hero's wrath. And Django Unchained is much more efficient than Tarantino's other scripts -- the hero's goal is always before us, and each ratchet of the building tension keenly felt; the digressions, such as the lovely snowy romp to "I Got a Name," are pleasurable interludes instead of oh-God-what-now-do-I-have-to-listen-to-David-Carradine. It's a cartoon, sure, but sometimes cartoons are pretty great; when the horrible Stephen bawls over his horrible, fallen master it's lurid, pathetic, and amazing. The only Tarantino thing still around to bug me is characters allowed to live for no discernible reason except to keep the movie going. But who knows; maybe he'll get to that next.

Okay, let's wrap this turkey before I puke:

BEST PICTURE: Lincoln. Nate Silver's method says Argo, but that method (largely based on other awards' histories) doesn't take Academy history sufficiently into account. What other movies have won Best Picture without a Best Director nomination? Driving Miss Daisy, Grand Hotel, and Wings. Even Michael Anderson was nominated for Around the World in 80 Days. The best chance for Argo is suggested by the weak field in which Daisy won; the enlarged Best Picture field would amplify the effect of a lack of consensus. But there's a big, popular, about-our-beloved-President movie in the running that voters can feel good about electing.

BEST DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg, Lincoln. Him again? Well, the voters seem to let him have it when he does something big and noble and (unlike Munich) uncomplicated.

BEST ACTOR: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln. Is there anyone in there they love as much as him? Denzel Washington by all accounts tore it up in Flight; his is the best outside chance.

BEST ACTRESS: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook. If the movie is popular enough, this goes to the new girl everyone loves. Plus, bonus, mental illness! And Away from Her taught me that old people in dire straits just make everyone sad.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR. Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook. Here's my sucker bet! (Carpetbagger's too.) They're all previous winners, so the give-him-one-already impulse is moot. Doing this by ESP, I surmise that there is a deep enough well of affection for the movie that voters would like to honor it beyond the Best Actress category. And I am told that in this one, De Niro finally figured out how to do comedy.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables. I'm not a total idiot.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Zero Dark Thirty. Shrouded in controversy, is it? Tough titty. This is the movies and movies are magic.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Argo. There was something they loved about it and it apparently wasn't the acting or directing.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Claudio Miranda, Life of Pi. I went down swinging with Roger Deakins and True Grit a few years back. No more! (Also, look at the Bond films' record at the Oscars.)  Life of Pi got a lot of nominations; there must be something they liked about it, and my uneducated guess is they liked the way it looks...

BEST SCORE: Mychael Danna, Life of Pi. ...and the way it sounds. I was going to pick Thomas Newman for Skyfall, on account of his long unrewarded nomination streak, but as the cinematography category shows, outside the top categories these people aren't sentimental.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN: Lincoln. As Bluto told Flounder, I've given this a lot of thought, and I just don't think the members will vote for Life of Pi three times.  

BEST SONG: "Skyfall," Skyfall.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN: Anna Karenina. Brutally Honest Oscar Voter is right: They love them puffy dresses.

BEST FILM EDITING. Zero Dark Thirty. It's got action, it's got suspense, Argo already got an award.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE: Brave. A lot of these voters have little girls. Also, daughters. (Steve Martin did this joke better.)

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: Searching for Sugar Man.
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT: Mondays at Racine.
BEST ANIMATED SHORT: Paperman.
BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT: Curfew.
BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM: Amour.
BEST MAKEUP: Les Miserables.
BEST SOUND MIXING: Les Miserables.
BEST SOUND EDITING: Zero Dark Thirty.
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Prometheus.

Good luck to us all.

UPDATE. The links are a bit wonky, but here's a fun Oscar quiz.

G.E. THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR.

Abraham Lincoln is an American saint -- well, for most of us anyway -- so there's not much you can do with him dramatically; either make him the absurd premise of a schoolboy joke (as in The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer or Hard Drinkin' Lincoln), or put him in the Disney Hall of Presidents. Even John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln isn't really an exception; I love it, but it's a great film about a myth, not a man.

I didn't expect much when I heard Spielberg was having a go at Lincoln, so I can't say the film he made about him is a disappointment. In fact it's very enjoyable in a nostalgic way -- like all those high-toned historical-biographical epics on which Hollywood used to thrive before audiences began to lose interest in history unless it flattered their self-image very specifically, as Gandhi and Braveheart did, instead of trying to elevate them as movies like Wilson and The Life of Emile Zola had.

If you thought Tony Kushner's involvement might make Lincoln an elevating experience, well, it certainly elevates the tone. Kushner's a serious writer, but so was William Faulkner and I don't see the Library of America publishing a handsome edition of the screenplays he worked on. (Kushner did write Munich, which was a little more grown-up than what we're used to from Spielberg. But as I said when it came out, while Munich has some existential-thriller trappings, it's existentialism for dummies -- compare it to a story about wet work like Army of Shadows and you can see how sentimental it really is.)

Here's something Spielberg said about Kushner to Deadline Hollywood:

SPIELBERG: It wasn’t anything that he did on Munich that convinced me. I knew he was the right guy for the job when I saw Angels In America for the first time on Broadway.
DEADLINE: What specifically about Angels In America swayed you?
SPIELBERG: It showed me that Tony has a vivid introspective knowledge of what makes people tick. And he expresses his thoughts in words, in sentences and ideas, and the silences between the words in a way that reminded me of Paddy Chayefsky in his heyday.   

Paddy Chayefsky! I guess it's possible Spielberg was making a mean joke. But I think he sincerely admired Kushner's dramaturgy, and also that, like Chayefsky, Kushner can make sententiousness go down easy; the audience wouldn't question that something important was being discussed, but they also wouldn't be bored. Look at the first scene of Lincoln, after a vicious, muddy skirmish between black Union soldiers and Confederates: A pair of black soldiers stand in the rain and describe the battle; one is slightly more aggressive in complaining about his regiment's privations than the other; Lincoln -- revealed only gradually to be the man they're talking to, and sitting under a canopy -- seems interested, even slightly amused, says little, reveals nothing. White soldiers come in; they recite the Gettysburg Address till they get stuck on the ending. When they have gone, the quarrelsome black soldier finishes it.

Okay, so it makes Chayefsky look like Friedrich Durrenmatt. It plays well, though, and is just Spielberg's speed -- uplift with class.  

The plot centers on the fight to pass the 13th Amendment, in the course of which Lincoln is revealed to be a consummate wheeler-dealer -- but that has always been part of the Lincoln legend; as Tad Gallagher observes about Ford's Lincoln, he's "not above a bit of dissimulation, cheating or force to get things done." Maybe this is part of why we love Lincoln -- he shows that even when your ambition is a little engine that knows no rest, you may still do great things that can justify it. That Lincoln's ambition was turned toward ending slavery makes it easier to believe; you probably couldn't get the same kind of drama out of a battle to pass the Revenue Act.

Munich was about idealists who wade in blood but somehow keep their souls clean, and Lincoln is about a man to whom the muck of politics does not adhere even as he clambers through the filthy roominghouse attic of his political fixers. Abe is practically magical; at one point he suddenly appears in Edwin Stanton's war room, unobserved till he breaks his silence. Several times (or maybe it just seemed like several times) his cabinet is near rebellion, and Abe defuses the situation with some cornpone humor (which, frankly, must be magic as the jokes aren't that good). Much of William Seward's dialogue could be boiled down to "Ooooh, you'll be the death of me yet, Abraham Lincoln!" Lincoln confounds friend and enemy alike, and finally gets the big job done.

There's also some Lincoln family drama in there, but rather than "humanizing" Lincoln it adds to his mysterious quality. Political talk frequently creeps into Abe's discussions with his wife Mary. She is shown more than once to use politics to communicate her feelings to him. Abe accepts and takes part in this mode of discourse. (In one scene, when she tongue-lashes Thaddeus Stevens within his hearing, Abe takes it with the same mysterious amusement he shows in his first scene; no "It's bad enough when you act like that in the privacy of our own home" for this Lincoln.) In another scene Mary has sunk again into her recurring depression over their dead son Willie, and Lincoln goes to comfort her; though his impatience flashes, he recovers and explains that he couldn't allow himself to be taken over by grief as she is; he explains this as his personal weakness, but it is evident that it also involves his duty, from which he must not waver. Thus he gently filibusters her into submission.

Americans have a nose for hypocrisy (and a distrust of ambiguity) and like to think their heroes are the same people at home as they are in the arena. This Lincoln meets that test to such an extent that the restless mind may wonder over it; when he is not engaged in politics, where dissimulation is taken for granted, what is he really thinking and feeling?

Gentle as he goes, Lincoln is shown to have a capacity for wrath, and at one point he slaps his son Robert for suggesting he's afraid of his wife. This moment stands out emotionally; for once Lincoln's reaction suggests actual self-doubt, rather than the ruminative self-debate he displays elsewhere ("Do you think we choose to be born? Or are we fitted to the times we're born into?"). We keep up our wondering about Lincoln in the actual political sphere: When he appears to get fed up with the cabinet and rails that he is "clothed with immense power," is this feeling overtaking him, or just a trick to sway minds weaker than his?

Simultaneous with this portraiture -- which is after all the come-on; there's a reason the movie is not called Team of Rivals after the book -- there's the Congressional fight over the 13th Amendment and various related intrigues; these are handled ably (even amusingly, as when W.N. Bilbo proposes a skeezy deal to the wrong Congressman, who is armed with a front-loading pistol), and achieve the necessary interest in how the thing was done. In this are some grace notes that are emotionally satisfying, none more so than Thaddeus Stevens bringing home the House Bill of the 13th Amendment and presenting it to a woman who appears to be his housekeeper. But by an large it's all just an excuse to bring back Lincoln, a reliable act on the circuit. The filmmakers even tack on a death scene and part of the Second Inaugural at the end, in case you feel you haven't gotten your money's worth.

Though I wonder what about John Williams' modest score rates an Oscar nomination, every craft aspect of the movie is very well done. The acting's a feast. Daniel Day-Lewis' approach is just right for the otherworldly Lincoln; he rarely meets anyone's eye, yet he seems sociable; his conversation is discursive, but you would never imagine that he isn't paying attention. Sally Field finds a way to make poor Mary Todd's neurosis interesting: She at least begins each outburst in the direction of her subject, and lets its energy build until it is clearly a little larger than the conversation. Tommy Lee Jones was clever to make Stevens so good at his job that he hardly has to think about the sequence of insults he's about to unleash.

I especially admired some short performances that haven't gotten much attention.  There are the Kushner stalwarts Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel as a regular, down-home, all-American pair of bigots, and Stephen Spinella as Stevens' purist associate Litton.  Jackie Earle Haley as the Confederate Vice-President, Alexander Stephens, figures in an interesting sequence. In a doomed negotiation with Lincoln, while his fellow Rebs bluster, Stephens (previously shown in a meeting with black Union officers to be smarter than his comrades) tells the President that the war will end not only slavery but the South's way of life. Stephens shows no obvious outrage over this, nor regret, though we may assume he has felt both. Here Spielberg does something that struck me as significant; he photographs the already strange-looking Haley in an unflattering light that makes him seem slightly deformed. I imagine the idea was not to dehumanize him in the usual sense of undercutting his argument by making him look bad, but to suggest that he represents a literally alien species, and that he is aware that it is passing from existence. Maybe there's just something in Spielberg that always makes me think of extra-terrestrials.

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT. Luke Thompson was hoping I'd do something on rightbloggers slagging the Oscars. Sadly I'm too busy to pick corn out of that particular shit, but this bit from one of the crazy fucks at HillBuzz ought to be enough for anyone:

Last night I recorded the broadcast, and later I watched small snips of it, fast-forwarding through 95% of it and just stopping at a few of the winning announcements:
Actress: The winner: Meryl Streep for a role that made Margaret Thatcher look like a senile old woman rather than the magnificent world leader she was and is
Foreign Film: nominees from Israel, Belgium, Canada, Iran, and Poland. The winner: IRAN
Supporting Actress: nominees were 4 white women and 1 black woman. The winner: the black woman
Supporting Actor: The winner: Christopher Plummer for playing an older man who comes out as gay later in life.

Inevitably:

I reiterate that I have not seen most of these films.

The whole thing's a treasure, especially when she does the "You Hollyweird lieberals are so 'courageous,' here's what would be really courageous" schtick -- in my humble opinion, as well as it's ever been done:

Here’s what I believe would have been courageous: And entire Oscar broadcast without one snarky remark about Republicans, conservatives, family values, Christians or Jews. Beginning the show with the Pledge of Allegiance. Or an invocation. Having a singer sing the National Anthem. Giving free front row seats to members of the United States Military, veterans, wounded warriors, family of troops currently serving in harm’s way. Creating an “American Patriot” award, analogous to the Lifetime Achievement awards they present to someone who has had a long, illustrious career in Hollywood. [I would nominate Gary Sinise for this]...

Don't dream it, honey, be it. I believe Rick Santorum's got an old barn in Bucks County. Let's put on a show!

UPDATE. Right up there with this cowgirl are some crazy fucks from Iran, in their celebration of the A Separation win for Best Foreign Film. Talk about sore winners:

Iran hailed the country's first Oscar-winning film as a triumph over arch-foe Israel on Monday... 

A state TV broadcast said the award succeeded in "leaving behind" a film from Israel. Javad Shamaghdari, head of the state Cinematic Agency, portrayed the Oscar win as the "beginning of the collapse" of Israeli influence that "beats the drum of war" in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Wow -- movies really are magic!

TONIGHT'S DEBATE. Except for Ron Paul they seem to have forgotten all about Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet they're eager to go to war with Iran.

The debacles of 2006 and 2008 were rougher on them than I thought. The Republican Party clearly suffers from a traumatic brain injury.

Are they going to have another one of these things? Then they should start by booing John King for 20 minutes for asking about birth control when it's clearly irrelevant to the Presidency, then spend 70 minutes talking about birth control and its irrelevance to the Presidency. Then, if there's time, Oscar predictions!

CHILDS' PLAY. At first I wasn't sure about Kermit's and Miss Piggy's press conference, in which they gave Fox Business' Eric Bolling a hard time for accusing them of communism:

While publicizing the upcoming U.K. release of the movie, Kermit responded, “If we had a problem with oil companies, why would we have spend the entire film driving around in a gas-guzzling Rolls-Royce?”

“It’s almost as laughable as accusing Fox News of being news,” Miss Piggy added.

In general, I prefer that my pop culture crap be left out of the dismal swamp of politics. In years to come, I don't want to see a noble biopic about Kermit's brave stand against McCarthyism, which took its toll and left him dead of an overdose on the toilet. (Wait, actually that would be awesome.)

On the other hand, it's hard to resist the rare and pleasurable spectacle of celebrities refusing to take Fox seriously. They act like it's no big thing to hit back at the people who had attacked them. Admittedly, as Muppets, they have a considerable power base; on the other hand, they are made out of felt and plastic. Also they presumably plan to keep making movies, and you can imagine how Murdoch will treat their product when next it emerges.

They show more guts, in other words, than most people in media.

But the thing I like most about it is John Nolte's sulky reaction at Big Hollywood:

As a response, and nearly a week after the segment aired, the Fox-hating entertainment media (which is all of them) viralized the clip, blew the controversy up into something it really wasn’t, and did so because they find it impossible to turn down an opportunity to prove they’re one of the minions in the club.

What effectively happened, though, is a week-old Fox Business segment was consequently amplified into the news narrative...

Week-old, huh? Let's take a trip down memory lane to Big Hollywood's 2009 attack on Oscar the Grouch, written by Larry O'Connor:

Last week, in a re-broadcast of an episode that originally aired two years ago...

Nolte reminds us that the Muppet movie "didn’t do anywhere near as well at the box office as some had expected and hoped," and predicts that the press conference clip "probably will go viral, and as a result this once universally-beloved brand will no longer be loved quite so universally." But, perhaps sensing that he looks like an ass trying even feebly to fight back against Muppets,  Nolte adds that the contretemps "wasn’t the fault of the Muppets. That was the immature, clubby entertainment media." Nothing personal, Kermy baby, call me!

Now I'm psyched for Yo Gabba Gabba! to do something about global warming.

JONAH GOLDBERG, GAY MARRIAGE, AND CHARLIE SHEEN: LINKBAIT FOR SURE. For your edification and my sins, I have examined a video interview by James Poulos of Jonah Goldberg on the subject of -- shudder -- gay marriage.

Poulos is bothered that judges may legislate America into gay marriage. But he's an intellectual, so not for him the usual goldurn-activist-judges yak.

"The problem isn't that judges are usurping the role of legislators," he says, "but that they're really usurping the role of philosophers. So as far as I see it, there's no way to get the gay marriage outcome through the courts without basically importing a new metaphysical view into the law as it stands."

Goldberg seems to like this "metaphysic" thing -- sounds fancy! -- and so lunges, grabs it, drops it, and watches it roll through a sewer grate. This section I reproduce entire:

…we now expect judges to do things that judges are not particularly well inclined to do. If you're gonna have people decide on a new metaphysic, if you're gonna have people decide, what were the crazy Kennedy decision about the sweet mystery of life kind of thing where they're gonna define what it means to be a human being in the universe? Then why have guys who go to law school do that? I mean it's sort of crazy. Why not have philosophers on there or theologians or just all-around really wise people from different walks of life?

This confirms my suspicion that Goldberg writes his columns by dictation.

Ultimately, Goldberg would "just push [gay marriage] all the way down to the most local level possible and if states or communities that don't want to recognize gay marriage don't want to recognize it, then they don't have to and vice versa." So he's sorta okay with gay marriage so long as it comes with states' rights. Or vice-versa, which I suspect for him means "whatever."

Poulos rolls a clip of Robert Scheer discussing gay marriage and saying "people define their own sense of happiness." Aha, says Poulos: "That leap from separation of church and state to separation of our individual sense of happiness from the content of the law, this is, as you I think hinted, Planned Parenthood vs. Casey all over again" -- now Goldberg's thinking, I gotta call this guy next time I forget junk like that -- "the plurality opinion there, about sort of the mystical experience of defining your own personal happiness. The idea, though, that law has no authority to reflect an understanding about the meaning of life, that itself is a metaphysical or religious idea, isn't it?"

"This is more your stomping ground than mine," says Goldberg, clearly dazzled. "I mean, but you cannot get out of the business of establishing sort of sweeping truths -- if you say the court can't impose sweeping truths, you're essentially establishing a sweeping truth, and all those sophomoric games we can play. The thing that bothers me about this -- or one of the things, I should say…"

Among the subsequent flailings: Atheists in the 19th century would find gay marriage absurd; Barney Frank is a hypocrite because he doesn't support polygamy; and "the difference between men and women are according to every biological textbook grounded quite firmly in nature."

Also, it's "ultimately an argument about elite populism," a term new to me, which Goldberg helpfully explains: "There's just a lot of people who now have decided that they want to redefine what the institution of marriage is, and because they have numbers and influence on their side they can make an argument that actually doesn't persuade very much I think on purely rational terms simply because it's a matter of power politics." So: Elite populism occurs when lots of people support an idea, which yet remains an elite opinion because Goldberg doesn't agree with it.

Poulos interprets the Frank anecdote as a sign of "tension that exists on the left," presumably between the left's warring monogamist and polygamist factions. Then he asks Goldberg what he thinks marriage is for.

"Historically, up until about five minutes ago, marriage was for forming the core basis of the family, right?" says Goldberg. "I mean I think that's sort of evolutionarily, historically the most obvious statement. It was a matter of forming a unit of two, a team of companions..."

Poulos, showing some spine, says yeah, but what does Goldberg think? The ploy seems to unnerve Goldberg:

"I'm more open-minded about some of this stuff," he stammers. "I mean marriage ultimately is what people who are married say it is, right? At some point a lot of these political institutions, they take on the meaning that people invest in them. And I am not the guy you want to have on if you want to me to make can objective have voice of God theological argument for the institution of marriage, even though I have great respect for that version of it…"

I'll be damned: Goldberg has imbibed some of that new metaphysic, and become a squish on gay marriage! But you know it can't last:

"In the Judeo-Christian Western tradition, marriage has meant something very specific for a very long time," he remembers to say, and so "from a libertarian perspective, I have great amount of trepidation about reaching in and just yanking out and messing around with an institution like that --"

(Libertarian perspective? Forget it, he's on a roll.)

"-- when you don't know what all the consequences are. It brings to mind Chesterton's famous parable about the fence…" Oh God.

"I hear your view on this," says Poulos charitably. He agrees that everyone's going gay and "this was captured in the Oscar-nominated film The Kids Are All Right," which he finds "an icon of where I think we're at in terms of mainstream culture right now. But culture is a funny thing, right, it can be stubbornly unofficial in some ways." (I pause to appreciate this rare acknowledgement by a culture warrior that culture may not be, at least on some occasions, within reach of his lance.)

"So you can have a very tolerant or even celebratory culture toward gay marriage," Poulos continues, "where nevertheless people tacitly understand that there is some kind of qualitative difference, between a gay household and a family with a biological dad and mom and kids…" Ah, rapprochement -- you can have your gay marriage, so long as we can keep our disgust at it.

"So a lot of conservatives I think would ultimately settle for that if that's where it ended," Poulos offers, "but not a lot of liberals would settle for that, I don't think."

Goldberg seems to recognize his cue, but not what to do with it. He points out that he's been in favor of civil unions for 10 years, but are the liberals happy? No, he says; "you have the left bring up hospital visitation rights for gay couples" -- Goldberg actually smirks at this -- " for 20 years now, when this has almost always been --" A spasm of uncertainly seems to seize him: "I think there were some real horrible cases in the very beginning, but for the last 15 years it's been a complete red herring made-up thing, but it so offends people's sensibilities that you can't have the people you love in the hospital room that they want to bring it up." It's amazing how conservatives suffer in the struggle for equality, and the visitation rights thing hardly ever happens.

Suddenly Goldberg remembers he's anti-gay-marriage again! "Let's not call these things marriage," he says, "because marriage is this word and this institution with this other meaning and history." Not only that, Obama's "lying in public" about his "evolving" stand on gay marriage, because really "he's in favor of gay marriage but he wants to get there incrementally." Between this sham anti-gay-marriage stand and Goldberg's forthright if sporadic anti-gay-marriage stand, it's clear which America would endorse if liberals hadn't hornswaggled them with elite populism.

Then Goldberg remembers when gays were against marriage and just wanted to get fucked at the Ramrod, presumably based on his extensive interviews of them, and denounces Andrew Sullivan for his "pro-cruising and anonymous gay sex position, which he was in favor of simultaneously while supporting marriage, which always seemed to me a pretty damning contradiction." Poulos gets excited, states that bourgeois straights as well as gays "especially want to do this kind of oscillating back and forth between the comfy enclosures of their domestic zone and the experience of transgression that they swore off as a full-time lifestyle when they went bourgeois. Case in point, Charlie Sheen…"

Charlie Sheen! Goldberg does his bit to make things worse: "One of the reasons why we're in trouble in this country is that we don't have as healthy institutions as we should, to create more decent people," he says. "Though I still think this is an inherently decent country with vast reservoirs of -- not to keep repeating the word -- decency to draw upon, but when you have people like Charlie Sheen…"

Oh Jesus -- Charlie Sheen is what's wrong with America! Him and gay marriage! Goldberg rolls off to a second lunch, leaving Poulos to editorialize about Marxism, democracy, Plato, and Charlie Sheen, and to declare that "gay marriage is a salient issue but it's not a root issue," and to predict is "homosexuality will only be as mainstreamed, in America at least, as far as Christianity will allow it to go. Judging by the sea change in sexual attitudes we're already witnessing in the churches, that might, at least in the very near future, be rather far indeed." Always leave 'em laughing! Next week: Natalie Portman's fetus and the left's tension over abortion.

MY WORST OSCAR PREDICTIONS YET! It's time for my annual Oscar humiliation! At picking winners I've had good years and bad, but the very compulsion to indulge this juvenile habit, let alone share it with the world, shames me deeply. Well, better this than Middle East policy, I guess.

As usual, I have seen but few of the nominated films, so these predictions are based mostly on ignorance and gut-rumblings. I will also say that I'm very nervous about these picks, as my Jesuitical reasoning has led me unto highly counterintuitive choices. But that's the story of my life. Now let 'er rip:

Best Visual Effects: Inception. Because it's a Best Picture nominee, and because everyone who gushes about it seems to be describing special effects rather than a movie.

Best Sound Editing/Best Sound Mixing: Toy Story for the former, Inception for the latter. There. We've taken care of two Best Picture nominees that won't win anything else.

Best Makeup: The Wolfman. A man turns into a wolfman!

Best Documentary Short. The Warriors of Qiugang. I just saw the trailers and Jesus Christ, all this stuff looks grim. The Chinese pollution and corruption theme in Warriors seems like something Oscar voters would go for.

Best Animated Short: Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage. Like a sap, I'm picking the one I liked.

Best Live Action Short: Na Wewe. A.O. Scott has me convinced.

Best Documentary Feature: Exit Through the Gift Shop. In my big 2009 win, I got burned betting against the front-runner in the category. Never again!

Best Song: If I Rise, from 127 Hours. It sounds like something a Hollywood factotum might play on his car stereo. And it's from a Best Picture nominee that won't win anything else.

Best Foreign-Language Film: Biutiful. Oscar likes Iñàrritu.

Best Animated Feature: Toy Story 3. Duh.

Best Art Direction: Alice in Wonderland. Something besides a Best Picture nominee has to win a meaningful award, and awful as this movie is, its look is highly distinctive and clever. Plus Tim Burton films have won this award three times before.

Best Costume Design: The King's Speech. Never bet against period dress in this category. But which period? I'm guessing many voters will boost the Oscar count for their Best Picture choice with this craft award.

Best Original Score: The Social Network. Yes, I agree, Trent Reznor winning an Oscar would be awesome. And I bet a lot of the voters think so too. (I know they're all supposed to be geezers, but surely you remember "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp"; maybe they take recommendations in the musical categories from their less-elderly children or mistresses.)

Best Editing: The Fighter. Tough call. It usually goes either to the Best Picture winner by default, or to a perceived flashy-cutting job a la Bullitt. The Fighter has jittery-as-hell sequences which David O. Russell will not win an Oscar for, so it's this or 127 Hours.

Best Cinematography: True Grit. Roger Deakins FTW. It's time.

Best Original Screenplay: The King's Speech. No way around it.

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Social Network. Release the Sorkin!

Best Director: Tom Hooper, The King's Speech. I sweated this one, and briefly considered Darren Aronofsky, and even the Coens. Carpetbagger thinks The King's Speech will win Best Picture but picks Fincher for directing because "best director-best picture splits are rare in Oscar history, but when they happen, they usually reward the edgier film’s director." But since 1972, those splits have usually happened because the Best Picture winners in those years (Crash, Chicago, Gladiator, et alia) really, really sucked. (Also, what's "edgy" about The Social Network?) Whatever its drawbacks, The King's Speech is a well-made object.

Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, The Fighter. On consideration, I'm halfway convinced by Jay B's reservations about this showy performance. But Bale's in front and there's no one they're drooling to replace him with.

Best Supporting Actress: Helena Bonham Carter, The King's Speech. Attend my brilliant reasoning! First, the last time a film won both the Best Supporting Actor and Actress Oscars was Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986. And that was by Woody Allen, a jackpot for supporting actors. Bale will win, so favorite Melissa Leo probably won't.

Till this very moment, and my fifth beer, I was going with Hailee Steinfeld. I really think that if the Coens and Jeff Bridges hadn't been so recently honored, and if the film hadn't been a remake, True Grit would win everything this year; it has deep feeling and great craft, and is just the sort of thing the voters would like to reward with a strong showing. And Steinfeld, who's the heart of the film, would be the logical beneficiary of their affection for it. But the energy is flowing toward The King's Speech, and HBC had a great year with this and Alice in Wonderland, of which she was the only really magical aspect. Well, her and the frogs.

Best Actor: Colin Firth, The King's Speech. I'm not a total idiot.

Best Actress: Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right. Or am I? But they've been trying to give this chick an Oscar for 20 years. When her co-star Julianne Moore, who was equally wonderful, didn't get a nomination, I sensed something was up. It may have been easy for voters to decide that Natalie Portman will get another chance down the road. And if it wasn't so easy, Warren Beatty may have made some phone calls.

Best Picture: The King's Speech. For all the reasons you've heard elsewhere. It's lush and uplifting and a massive hit.

These prognostications are made for entertainment purposes only. I'm sure not putting money on them. See you on the red carpet!

UPDATE. LE-O-O-O-O-O-O! Clearly this is one of my bad years. Alice in Wonderland takes both Best Costume and Best Art Direction, and The Fighter both Supporting Actor awards. Hmm. Not that you should listen to me at this late date (10:10 pm EST), but it's looking more like The Social Network's year.

UPDATE 2. No it wasn't. Ah crap. 12 for 25 -- great for batting, lousy for Oscar prognostication. Well, back to tedious political subjects.

OSCAR CATCH-UP, PART 2. The Kids Are All Right. Cholodenko's a weird one -- High Art and Laurel Canyon are like traditional Hollywood movies re-edited by someone with brain damage; all the right pieces are there, and sometimes beautiful, but they're stuck together in ways that vitiate rather than amplify their impact. (I really like High Art, especially when Patricia Clarkson's onscreen, but watching it is a frustrating experience.)

But The Kids Are All Right benefits from Cholodenko's discursive approach more than the others because it's unified by a conflict that is almost laughably formulaic: Daughter of uncooperative lesbian couple tracks down sperm-donor dad; hijinks and hetero adultery ensue! It's like someone smart and serious radically remixed I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. The plot is so strong that Cholodenko can mix and mash to her heart's content and never lose track of what's at stake.

Thus, we can have enjoy the bonding of the kids with the donor, and even have some fun with the (spoiler spoiler spoiler) affair between the donor and one of the lesbians, but the danger these developments present to everyone's happiness is never far from our minds. When the broken pieces are put together at the end, the resolution feels incomplete, not because the art has failed because it has succeeded -- she actually captured the messiness of life without making a mess.

There are plenty of good privileged moments in the movie, but I especially liked the scene in which the donor (the ultra-brilliant Mark Ruffalo, who reacts to the pain he's feeling with some petulance, as if it were something from which he thought he was exempt) explains to his usual fuck-buddy why he doesn't want to sleep with her. He wants to say what's in his heart without actually revealing anything -- the secret affair requires it, but we get the feeling this is not an uncommon mode for him. Finally he clumsily burbles about how at this stage of his life "I don't want to be that guy" who's still going around doing what... he obviously really still enjoys doing. The girl responds, with perfect appropriateness, "Fuck you." Life, ladies and gentlemen, captured on film.

The Social Network. A smart friend asked me: Why does anyone think this movie "defines a generation"? Oh, that's easy: Because they're old and The Social Network believably shows young shits acting like shits. Duh.

I'm old too, and a Leveller to boot, so my favorite part of the movie is the beginning, when the shittiness of Harvard shits is vividly revealed, and the Trent Reznor music has just started to kick in. Really, I loved it: For 20 minutes we're immersed in a milieu both dark-and-aged (kudos, DP Jeff Cronenweth) and totally frattish, and the kids are believably and expeditiously shown to be in equal parts callow and ambitious, and swimming in privilege. It's such a casually brutal portrayal that, at that stage, you might have convinced me that it defined something-or-other.

That doesn't last, but that's not so bad. Indeed, the ripping Alan Sorkin gabfest unto which we devolve is sort of the definition of not-bad. Sorkin's dialogue is always crisp, glib, and fun, and he's major enough that he can get top actors to supply the character attributes his writing by and large doesn't bother with.

In this regard he's extremely fortunate here, especially with Jesse Eisenberg. His Zuckerberg has been characterized as an Asperger's case, but the brilliance of the performance is that you can't write off his self-involvement that easily -- you can imagine all kinds of reasons for his behavior (parental coddling, youthful alienation, genius), and still be left wondering -- which, if I may say, is the kind of mysteriousness that distinguishes great acting, and probably why his narrow-band performance got an Oscar nomination.

But his singularity is something from which the other characters aren't exempt (except for his partner Saverin, very well played by Andrew Garfield). I still recall with a little shiver the shy arm-punch Zuckerberg gives Saverin when he arrives at his and Sean Parker's apartment, and it strikes me now that this is the reason: It's the most intimate gesture in the movie. Most of the characters are so absorbed in self-definition strategies that they can't bond. Maybe that's what really spurred the "defines a generation" idea -- unlike almost any other movie about young men (and it's almost exclusively about men) I can think of, The Social Network portrays a set of manhood rituals that drives them apart instead of bringing them together, and maybe people (and, who knows, maybe Sorkin) think that this is what the internet has done to them.

OSCAR CATCH-UP, PART 1. Black Swan. The Exorcist in tights. Instead of the struggle of God and the Devil, we have the struggle of the White and Black Swans driving our poor little girl unto her indignities. (The Swan fable is even spoken aloud for us at the beginning by the hilariously elevated ballet master with a vestigial sweater around his neck.) The film puts our ballerina Nina through much grisly (though hallucinated) physical trauma that compares nicely with Linda Blair's spinning head and crucificial hate-fuck. And since it's just about artsy people rather than a major religion, the dark forces get to win.

Darren Aronofsky, who likes to show the ugly-real's losing struggle with the seductive-unreal (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler), goes heavy on the fantasy here. The showmanship is dazzling, but I think he lost his grounding. Fantasies are powerful when they heighten a real-life feeling shared by lots of people. But Nina's need to be perfect is neurotic rather than transcendent; while performers may project enough of their own experiences onto Black Swan to buy it (and that may be why it's so acclaimed), ordinary people will wonder why she didn't go to a doctor when she saw feathers growing out of her skin. I don't think they'd question, say, Lust for Life the same way, because corny as it is, there they can see and feel where the drive comes from.

The acting's fine. Natalie Portman's persistently childlike affect is perfect for Nina; Barbara Hershey's game for Monster Mommy; Mila Kunis and Vincent Cassel are appropriately ludicrous as the life-force and the cock-of-the-walk, respectively. And thanks so much, Winona Ryder, for the unexpected laughs.

The Fighter. The last half-hour threw me (mild spoiler), as I didn't see the turn-around coming. I mean, what suddenly made family love real to all these people, who had previously expressed it only with insults and jealous rages, and motivated them to come together? Christian Bale's so good that I almost believed his pitch to his brother's girlfriend Charlene to come back and make things right, but with everyone else it was like, "Wuh-okay, guess here's what we're doing now." It's really just something you have to buy to get to the feel-good ending.

Maybe David O. Russell thought this hey-ho-let's-go approach had worked so well in the beginning that it should work at the end. And in the rest of the film, it does work. We get thrown into the story so fast that momentum carries us. The brothers' relationship we at first have to take for granted and on faith, but over time we get little glimpses of how growing up together might have been for them: Dicky the crazy cut-up, Micky the quiet, industrious plodder -- and Mom the breeder/empire-builder who decided long ago that Dicky was going to be the ticket out for them all. We get enough information that by the time the relationships break, it doesn't have to be explosive -- it's just right, and thereby dramatic.

In this context the more conventionally-developed romance between Micky and Charlene takes on added weight: You get the feeling that family was just something that happened to Micky, while Charlene is part of his underdeveloped adult life of choices and forward movement. No wonder his family hates her -- and that Micky clings to her like a life-raft.

All the acting is terrific (though at one point I wanted to yell STOP IT, YOU'RE MAKING ME GRIND MY TEETH at Bale), but I give special props to Marky Mark, who also produced the picture. I saw an interview recently in the Hollywood Reporter with filmdom's biggest producers, and Wahlberg was in there. He was very, very focused on the job of making the picture the best and most successful it can be, no matter what. His performance in The Fighter is unshowy, even slightly withdrawn. Wahlberg's a pretty good actor, and he knows what a star needs to get over in a big picture; I get the feeling he took one for the team here. For some reason that really impresses me.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B. demurs: "I thought Bale was overrated, actually. The clip of Dick and Mickey at the end shows what kind of juice the real guy had -- he was more charming in thirty seconds than Bale can ever be, and funnier too. Bale can act, but, for me, he can't connect. His eyes are empty." Hmm. I thought Bale was going full crackhead, which would make anyone a little opaque, but come to think of it I've never seen him do a lot of relating onscreen -- whenever I see him, all I can think is, "You like Huey Lewis and the News? Their early work was a little too new wave for my taste..." Anyone else?

WINGNUTS OCCUPY THE OSCARS! (PART I) The Oscar nominations are out, and so are the rightwing Zhdanovites. Roger L. Simon:

“The King’s Speech” – a conservative movie – leads Oscar nominations

“The King’s Speech” – an unabashedly pro-royalty, anti-fascist film – has received the most Oscar nominations (12) for this year’s Academy Awards. Does this mean that the normally liberal Academy has had a political conversation to the Dark Side? No. It shows that good filmmaking can sometimes trump ideology.

I guess he thinks a liberal film, conversely, would be anti-royalty and pro-fascist. (Like what? The Patriot?) Here's the saddest bit:

But it may reveal more than that. Movie business liberalism is only skin deep. It is all very much a show for self-aggrandizement. Deep down, they respond like the rest of us. They just won’t admit it. Unless the movie’s as good as “The King’s Speech.”

So Hollyweird liberals aren't even really liberal -- they're just pretending to be, out of pridefulness; but their sham is exposed by the magic of the movies, as seen through the kaleidoscopic chemical cascades in the brain of Roger L. Simon. Hollywood ending!

I'm surprised to see that other conservatives have also rushed to claim The King's Speech. (Conservative Lesbian, for example, headlines her review "Traditional Values Take Center Stage." She should share her idea of traditional values with the House GOP leadership.)

I saw and reviewed The King's Speech, which I enjoyed despite some risible bits. And I must say, if you wanted to stick politics onto it, you could just as easily take this one the other way.

To begin with, isn't the whole preoccupation with a speech impediment anti-conservative? It's the sort of therapeutic subject liberals allegedly love -- an affliction other people neither share nor understand, leaving the sufferer isolated and moody until he is "healed" and brought into the sunshine of a supportive community. If that doesn't sound like a pitch for one of Michelle Obama's fascist fat camps, I don't know what does.

In the course of the movie we are sensitized to (or, to use the nomenclature, blessed with "awareness" of) the problem. Thus we learn to care about yet another type of victim, just as we learned from other movies and TV shows to care about victims of autism, Tourette's, brain damage, depression, etc. Isn't looking at people as victims what liberalism is supposed to be all about?

Even worse, the film has excited yet another special interest constituency -- stammerers have glommed onto the movie as a fund- and awareness-raising tool. Why, next there'll be a fucking ribbon for it. Then it'll be classified a disability, and the speech-impeded will get their own set-aside information and customer service desks where they can stutter and stammer to their hearts' content without people yelling for them to get on with it.

Admittedly the King overcomes his problem eventually, but look how he does it! He actually goes slinking off for help for his problem! Fancy a Live Free or Die Tea Partier going off to a therapist -- with taxpayer money, yet! Why, a real rough, tough conservative King would just beat up any subjects who dared be unimpressed with him. (Maybe that'd be the Schwarzenegger version: "S-s-s-s-metimes ze v-v-v-v-v-vords f-f-ail-me [Head butt].") His tutor turns out to be an actor -- you know what they are -- who refuses to call him Your Highness and talks to him about his feelings and his childhood. The therapist even encourages him to yell and swear as if he were in a Primal Box. By God, it's a wonder the King didn't wind up gay and soaking in hot tubs at Esalen. They call this conservative? It's just Rain Man with royals.

Plus their beloved Winston Churchill is presented as yet another Timothy Spall grotesque.

Okay, now I'm warmed up for the conservatives who say The Social Network is about the magic of entrepreneurism.

I Love You Phillip Morris. Along with the pleasure of seeing Jim Carrey have sex with men, this is best seen as a big gay parody of Catch Me If You Can. The gag, at least initially, is that Carrey -- who has an authenticity fetish that manifests in compulsive fraud -- gives everyone what they want and expect, and they go for it, and for a while it's every bit as compelling as Spielberg's version while being totally, self-evidently bogus. The reduction of prison brutality to cheap yuks, and of Carrey's courtship of Ewan McGregor to something like Carry On Prison Queers, made me hope they'd go all the way with this subversive strategy into uncharted territory.

Alas, no: Big-movie sentimentality comes in hard. Once he's got a good, relatively straight gig and life with McGregor, Carrey gets offended by how "boring" his colleagues are (that one of them restates his joke as one about "a nigger and a jew" is the cheesy underliner that's meant to help us buy it) and goes balls-out with his shenanigans, leading to new incarceration. This gives him a new reason to want to get out -- love for his partner -- and for un-good measure the filmmakers give us an even cheesier underliner in a flashback involving Carrey's AIDS-afflicted ex-partner.

Then we get the strings and star-affliction and it all goes to shit. The final scam is supposed to be impressive, and gives Carrey some Oscar-worthy acting hacks. I feel sorry for the real person Carrey plays, Steven Russell (to whose fate we are alerted in supers), and it would be nice if this movie gave some attention to his sad case. But either the ending is a failure of nerve, or the movie should have been much, much sadder.

SPOILER ALERT. Culture warriors are starting early on the Oscar-related denunciations. There's Brent Bozell, telling us that liberal elitists want The Blind Side to lose. But he is heartened by the presence of blockbusters among the Best Picture nominees. "Even if this were simply a ploy for ratings," says Bozell, "Hollywood is sending a message that it doesn't hate and dismiss its audience as the ignorant masses." Whereas the collected works of Brent Bozell (see for example "Hollywood's Four-Letter Word: God") show that Hollywood does hate and dismiss its audience as the ignorant masses. I marvel he doesn't castigate Tinseltown for its duplicity.

But who cares about him when we have Jonah Goldberg to pick on? He announces at the start, "the Oscars are one of the most overhyped events in American life," so he chooses to discourse on "what [the movies] say about American life." What they say is what Goldberg already believes. That's why they call it the Dream Factory.

Goldberg says, sensibly, that "filmmakers aren’t always aware of their inspirations and that sometimes the best way to articulate a larger message is to not try." Then, perhaps remembering who he's writing for, he tells his readers what actually inspires moviemakers is hatred of America.

Since the end of the Cold War, Hollywood has been in desperate pursuit of enemies. You’d have thought that 9/11 would have provided a great opportunity for Hollywood to find a worthy enemy. But it turned out that moviemakers were more comfortable depicting jihadi terrorists before 9/11 than after (rent The Siege and Executive Decision if you don’t believe me). They’ve tried (and retried) aliens, drug kingpins, bad weather, and the always-enjoyable zombies. But, with a few exceptions, Hollywood is still most comfortable with the idea that the enemy is really us.

It's hard to tell from the way this is written whether the zombies, eco-cataclysms, etc. are supposed to be stand-ins for America in the treasonous parables of Hollywood, or what Hollywood settles on when it is frustrated in its attempts to destroy the country. What's clear is that Hollywood is against us, which is why no one ever goes to the movies, except when they do, which only happens when these America-haters accidentally make movies that people will like for sound ideological reasons: For example,

The Kingdom, another War on Terror movie, was a hit despite the best intentions of director Peter Berg, who wanted it to be a parable about the cycle of violence. It succeeded because it was a good action movie that depicted Americans as heroes.

Considering that Hollywood has made billions on movies that were supposed to advance their anti-American agenda but failed, I wonder why conservatives are so concerned about them. Maybe the bit about Hollywood needing an enemy is just projection.

RIGHTWING SPARKLE WILL TELL YOU WHAT'S FUNNY! "I used to think Jon Stewart was funny," says RightWingSparkle -- which already has me dubious, as dailyobamajokes seems more up her alley, but let's roll with it. What makes Stewart unfunny now, she says, is that only "once in a blue moon he might take a light jab at Pres. Obama. Which is absurd considering the wealth of comedy to be had at President Obama's enormous ego, his addiction to his teleprompter, and his constant need to bow to other world leaders."

Busting a gut yet? Wait, the real payoff's on the way. Stewart was mean to a picture of Bernard Goldberg becase Goldberg said liberals hate Sarah Palin because "she has five children, liberals don't have a lot of children. She has a down syndrome child, liberals don't allow that in their lives." Stewart then noted that Eunice Shriver had nine kids and founded the Special Olympics.

"Does anyone else find it amusing that he had to pick a Democrat who was 88 yrs old (she died earlier this year, so he couldn't even find a live Democrat) who had a lot of kids?" asks RWS, and adds, " I guess he couldn't find a Democrat who had a Down Syndrome child at all, so he just used the example of her starting Special Olympics." Presumably what Stewart should have done was gotten Ordinary American Democrats with multiple Down Syndrome kids, put then in the audience, and introduced them from the stage to thunderous applause like Presidents do at the State of the Union. But then, what do people like him know about comedy?

For the capper, RWS tells us that Shriver was anti-abortion, "just like Sarah Palin. So Jon Stewart ended the segment with a joke he didn't intend to make." And if you're properly informed, you can detect the humor in it. If only RWS could have handed out fact sheets to the audience before the show; then we'd see who's laughing.

I see a new conservative best-seller in this: a book of spoilt liberal punchlines. Take the 2006 Oscar show montage Stewart introduced showing the gayest moments from classic Westerns. A well-researched list of all the featured actors' heterosexual unions will prove its unfunniness. Add a section of jokes such people should have been making instead, and you'll have a gold mine. Because there's nothing people like better than someone telling them when to laugh.

NOTES ON THE CULTURE WAR. Big Hollywood:

Add one more soldier to the Left’s war on Fox News: Oscar the Grouch.

Oh, wait, it gets better:

Last week, in a re-broadcast of an episode that originally aired two years ago...

Aw, c'mon guy -- it only took Fox eight months to catch up with the Obama children's song.

Oscar starts his own news network, GNN (Grouchy News Network). An irate viewer calls in to berate him that the news is not grouchy enough:

“I am changing the channel. From now on I am watching ‘Pox’ News. Now there is a trashy news show.”

Later in the episode, Anderson Cooper from 4th place CNN, guest stars as a reporter for GNN. He interacts with “Walter Cranky” and “Dan Rather-Not” — Muppets representing real-life liberal news personalities — and they talk about “Meredith Beware-a” and “Diane Spoiler.” But no affectionate nicknames for Fox News personalities; no Spill O’Reilly or Brittle Hume...

Now they're complaining that the liberal conspiracy won't make up funny names for their heroes. Next week: Media fails to give Hannity a high-five.

The post is over 900 words long, by the way. But that's nothing -- Jonah Goldberg cracks 2,500 words with "How Politics Destroyed a Great TV Show" at Commentary (!). Warming up with a mixing bowl of warm cake-batter and a lament that one line in the last Star Wars movie "unraveled the entire moral superstructure of the Star Wars franchise," Goldberg goes on to bitch about a bunch of TV shows that offended him ideologically before deciding that "denouncing the ideological intrusion into the dialogue of Grey’s Anatomy as a corruption of artistic integrity offers such televised junk more respect than it deserves." So he jumps on his trampoline and heads for the loftier reaches of Battlestar Galactica.

Goldberg, who thinks Norman Mailer was overrated, explains that the show was boss when he was able to read its plot threads as against abortion and communism but sucked when he could no longer find a way to make it conform to his views on the Iraq War. In a final insult to all that's Goldberg, "for having the 'bravery' to tackle the occupation of Iraq, the producers and lead actors were invited to a panel at the United Nations to dilate on the war on terror." It's worse than when Joanie married Chachi.

Money quote:

It’s been said that the difference between the truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. After its third season, Battlestar Galactica steadily failed on both counts.

Well, I say the difference between a Magic 8-Ball and Jonah Goldberg is that a Magic 8-Ball has to be right sometimes, and Goldberg fails on both counts.

LEGACY PLEDGE WEEK AT NATIONAL REVIEW. National Review's having their annual (or is it monthly?) pledge drive. Let's see how it's going. First. a show of gratitude from Peter Robinson:

You make an extremely valuable point about the Progressive Movement and the New Deal, Jonah, and you make it splendidly.

If every time I miscalibrate an event in American history I prompt such a lovely, knowledgeable little essay from Brother Jonah, I'll plant half a dozen errors in every episode of Uncommon Knowledge from now on.

So shocked was I to find an admission of error at The Corner, let alone one so covered in slobber, I had to go see what had prompted it. Turned out Jonah Goldberg had informed him that the Franklin Roosevelt Administration started "a scant 12 years," rather than "a couple of decades," after Woodrow Wilson left office.

Those of you puzzled that Robinson would respond so obsequiously to Goldberg for correcting a date should know that Goldberg is a rightwing legacy pledge and therefore his every fart is worthy of great respect. Also, Goldberg took the opportunity to rehearse one of the speeches he gives at junior colleges ("The point here is that we shouldn't concede that the New Deal was the continuation of a venerable American tradition. Rather, it was the continuation of a radical" etc), for which he has to be applauded if you don't want to find itching powder on your office chair.

The mistake was made not by Robinson, but by one of his interview subjects, pimped by Robinson thus:

To learn how Woodrow Wilson and FDR begot Woodstock and free love, click here.

How could one resist? Throughout the day Goldberg rattles his cup for donations, emphasizing that National Review, like other rightwing magazines, doesn't make enough money in the free market (and never has) to continue raging at welfare bums without spare change from rich crackpots.

I expect they'll get it, as they scratch an important itch among the moneyed and mad -- or, as one sucker is quoted, "Some take Prozac; I read NRO." I have a sneaking suspicion most of them use both, and wash them down with gin. But it's an ill wind that blows no one some good, and somewhere Roger L. Simon is sobbing into his Oscar nomination certificate.

THE NIGHT BEFORE OSCAR. I never did get around to seeing more of the Academy Award nominated films, but I made some predictions anyway at Runnin' Scared, on the principle that ignorance is no more a disqualification than it is an excuse.

I did see Milk, and I thought it was good, though it's further evidence for my observation that, when it comes to biopics, the best ones either are mediocre or transcend the genre. But Harvey Milk's story is so fascinating that I was content to see it played straight, as it were, by Gus Van Sant in his Hollywood mode.

Some of the acting is very fine. Despite ample screen time James Franco, alas, barely registers as the boyfriend, and Victor Garber is eternally Victor Garber, an important man in a suit. But Josh Brolin's Dan White is frighteningly plausible as a successful small-time family-values politician wrapped tight enough to snap, Diego Luna gives some neurotic spin to the other boyfriend, and Emile Hirsch has the heedless, new-in-town gay-hooker vibe down cold, and shows enough intelligence to explain his transformation into a political lieutenant.

Penn is of course terrific, not only in his inspired mimicry of Milk, who was wrapped pretty tight himself, but also in showing the grace notes -- I suppose we should call them graceless notes -- of Milk as a politician. It's to his credit and the film's that we sometimes see Milk being a smiling shit in pursuit of his agenda. (This also helps motivate White's explosion.) Politics ain't beanbag, and if the movie has a message beyond Wasn't He Great, it's that idealists don't win without doing hard and occasionally nasty work. By noting this without making much of it, Milk suggests something bracing about the morality of doing bad things for a greater good, which many other films worry over: of course it's right, now go change the world. Milk isn't in the same class as Army of Shadows, but it shares some of the Melville film's clarity on that score, which pleasantly surprised me.

At its worst the film tediously fills in the historical record, in the classic manner of biographies like Gandhi ("You know what Churchill says about Gandhi? He calls him a half-naked fakir!") and indulges in bathetic gestures, like the rendering of Milk's death, both in the story (I really don't get the opera theme, except as a gay signifier out of Philadelphia) and in documentary footage at the intro -- which I immediately took for an awful, cheap shot that makes you cry if you remember that horrible event without the film having done a lick of work to justify such a response. Later this is revealed as a framing device -- you see the candles moving down the street again at the end, when presumably the audience will have a new perspective on the scene. But I didn't feel its significance. Maybe that's because the intro repelled me, or maybe it's because Van Sant really isn't much of a director and can't make such large formal gestures work. So Milk isn't great, but on its limited terms it does just fine.

MORE OSCAR STUFF. The Dark Knight. I can see why this film was so popular with culture warriors -- it is quite literally insane. An endless series of moral double-crosses by brooding, butched-up quasi-characters is meant to demonstrate that humanity is so corrupt, yet deserving of salvation, that the heroic Batman must become a fugitive in order to preserve order. Of course, to make it work, a cosmo burg like Gotham City must be subjected to Iraq-style chaos at the hands of a terrorist who is also, in Heath Ledger's performance, a disaffected youth who hates his father. It's as if Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause became the scourge of humanity.

At least the action sequences are lucid, which has been a problem in the past -- contra Dennis Lim (and his excellent slide show), Christopher Nolan handles the smash-'em-up segments far better than some recent Oscar nominees. I could follow the fight scenes much more easily than the shifting attitudes of the filmmakers toward the proper placement of right and wrong. Sometimes the mob is mindless, and sometimes moral; sometimes we are encouraged to cheer the philosophy of total war, and sometimes it's just a ruse by The Joker to kill innocents. The logic, such as it is, is that of a hormonal comic book nerd convinced that everything is rotten and that a magical being could set things right, were it not for the interference of Muggles, for whom the nerd yet retains some affection when they're not yelling for him to come out of the bathroom already. This kind of fantasy has been much tried in our era, but with the possible exception of Tim Burton's moody and unpopular Batman Returns never gets anywhere near the Mabuse films of Fritz Lang, which for all their paranoia are more firmly based in what grown people would recognize as reality.

Ledger's a gamer. The Joker is one of the great creations of comic art -- a Lord of Mischief like Loki and Puck turned sinister. I still like Cesar Romero's the best: a real clown, as unmodulated and unaware of his affect as a funhouse gargoyle. Jack Nicholson was obliged to be more of a head case, but was still able to rise to the required mania and weave it into some dazzling filigrees. (I'm unfamiliar with Mark Hamill's well-regarded cartoon vocal performance.) Ledger, a more thoughtful actor, can't match their brio, so he makes his Joker a plain psychotic with a high tolerance for pain and a gift for getting into his targets' heads. It's a rigorously psychological performance, and he was right to go that way: you can imagine even a good actor playing the same hammy lines for pure affect and making a horrible botch of them. Ledger gets inside the Joker and lets the cleverness of his verbal inventions tickle him into rancid pleasure. His performance is at bottom as dour as the film, but much more serious. If he had to go out, this was a good way for him to go.

UPDATE. Comments on this have been especially good, even from CG. I have a strong prejudice against comic book movies (though when they make The Lockhorns orAndy Capp I'll be there opening day), so I'm not the best audience for this one. I was struck by Chris Wren's remark that "It's a man... who dresses up a bat... and goes around beating up criminals. That's all Batman can EVER be." I think he may be right, and that serves what may be this movie's purpose; all Batman's meaning is impressed upon him from the outside, making him the sacrificial goat for the sins of Gotham. But what are its sins? Not wanting to get killed? Thinking about sacrificing others before not going through with it? There's only one sin you can pin on them: not being Batman. It's an adolescent rejection and retribution fantasy with a $185 million budget.

OSCAR COUNTDOWN BEGINS. As I unaccountably do every year, I've been catching up on the big award-nominated movies, and will start here to give my impressions.

The Wrestler. It's a neat trick to criticize the American experience, or facets thereof, without being snotty about it. I'm not sure how affectionate Darren Aronofsky really is toward the New Jersey working-class world of crappy jobs, hard rock, and fleeting glories depicted in The Wrestler, but what he knows and shows about it proves he understands it, and understanding is tribute enough. He also knows what's absurd about it: broken-down wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson keeps on the small-time sham-fight circuit because it's the only thing that gives him joy, and it gives him joy because it's a form of self-punishment that exalts rather than debases him, unlike love and less spectacular forms of employment -- which he nonetheless gives another shot. If you get this, and also feel the thrill of the Ram's "comeback" in a slightly less seedy than usual arena when everything else has failed, you get the whole, very sad joke.

Some of Robinson's adventures outside the ring are mismanaged -- the attempted reconciliation of Ram with his daughter plays like a series of botched improvisations. But most of the scenes -- playing with the kids in the trailer park, shopping for a present for his daughter with his stripper almost-girlfriend Cassidy (Marisa Tomei, very fine aside from some moments when she seems to get self-conscious), waking up alone in a county hospital, trying not to say the wrong thing to an asshole boss -- are nothing but the cold truth, as is Mickey Rourke's performance.

I never liked his acting before; I thought he tried too hard to be charming. And as I'm even less a fan of sentimental promo than of Rourke, the oft-noted similarity between his character's "broken-down piece of meat" status and his own wins no extra points from me. But Rourke just nails it: even the maudlin moments aren't about special pleading from an actor, but a simple man trying to say what's in his heart. It's also a smart performance; I'm especially impressed by his restraint when he tells Cassidy about his heart attack. (And by Tomei's, in her reaction.) And yes, he's charming, too. For real.

Frost/Nixon. The trailer had me worried: did they really think these interviews were "the trial Nixon never had"? Regrettably, yes. This results in talking-heads bullshit and Sam Rockwell freaking out about Cambodia and such. It also begs us to take the struggle to make money off a celebrity TV appearance more seriously than we otherwise might, which is unforgivable dramatic fraud.

There are two real stories. One is Frost's alleged growth, in the process of doing the interviews, from glad-handing presenter to serious journalist. But it's a shabby journey. Frost is motivated mainly by fear of blowing his chance, and is stiffened to action by a late-night call from Nixon that merely focuses Frost on the possibility of winning the battle, not on any larger stakes, personal or political. He's no more interesting or likable, nor indeed changed in any important way, at the end than at the beginning. He's just more successful.

The other story is, yet again, the fall of Nixon, which is always going to be interesting, if not illuminating. Apart from Oliver Platt's blessedly funny performance, the canny Nixon dialogue and Frank Langella's performance provide the only real pleasures in the film, and Nixon's late-night drunk-dial to Frost and the final interview have real juice in them, mostly because Langella has a clearer conception of Nixon than Ron Howard has of Frost/Nixon. His Tricky Dick is large and physically awkward, capable of wit and charm (though only in his own defense), and genuinely sad -- Frost's girlfriend, an otherwise useless appurtenance, tells Frost at one point that he has sad eyes, but Michael Sheen's eyes only betray fatigue and panic; Langella's, at the appropriate times, have the shallow, frozen glaze of old pain.

The Nixon theme has a more pointed dramatic payoff, but not a larger one. Unless you buy that Nixon's qualified admissions had a wider effect than on the fortunes of the main characters, what was won and lost? A TV star made a disgraced president look bad, and thereby promoted his own career as... a celebrity interviewer. If Nixon were Satan himself, and I admit there are some similarities, this wouldn't be enough to justify the film.

SOUTH CENTRAL PUT HIS SOUL IN THE DEEP FREEZE/SHE GAVE HIM HER KEYS. Forgot to mention that I saw Passing Strange just before it closed on Broadway. I understand that Spike Lee is preparing a film version, which pleases me, because the show demands far more attention than it got.

Some good friends of mine have been raving to me about Stew's songwriting for years. I never got around to seeing him before I saw this show, which he narrated and wrote with his collaborator, Heidi Rodewald. Stew's a large, ovoid black man who has clearly learned patience from being a major talent in a market ill-equipped to reward anyone like him for it. His stolid, ironical manner communicates this, as does his play. This is especially surprising because Passing Strange is frankly autobiographical and even more frankly about the burdens of artistry, like many awful plays, movies, novels, albums etc by artsy people before him, memories of which even now cause my sphincter to clench. But Stew's story, like The Sorrow of Young Werther and Withnail and I and "I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight" and The Ginger Man and a precious few others, muscles over the hump of narcissism into revelation.

The through-line is simple and time-honored: a callow youth, full of the desire to make good, forsakes his family and goes on a journey. Young Stew -- in the play, The Young Man -- is a moody black kid in suburban Los Angeles, endlessly annoyed by his bourgie Mom's insistence that he go to church and get with the program. Tempted by a cute chorister, he joins the local church music program, and the music director's tales of Jimmy Baldwin and Josephine Baker and the treasures awaiting the young, gifted, and black in Europe convince the Young Man to break out and claim for himself.

This is a fine start, elevated by the director's heartbreaking revelation that he himself has been denied the pleasures of European exile by his "slavery" to the church. It's a slavery that, the play suggests, is really his own cowardice, and it sets a tone for The Young Man's journey: wherever he goes, he takes his internal shackles with him.

The free-and-easy culture of Amsterdam gives The Young Man's soul some much-needed air, and his libido a workout, but he only learns too late the cost of free love: once he crosses certain emotional frontiers, even in an open city, he can't go back. In Berlin his mind is humorously but genuinely stimulated by performance-art culture -- when the hardcore Berliners intimidate him, he defensively intimidates them back with "South Central L.A." bullshit, aggressively confronting them with complicated soul-shakes. And when he chants in Germanic performance, "My pain fucked my ego and I called the bastard art," it's joke but it's also a window into his state of mind. When his Berlin girlfriend calls him on his poses, he can't give them up -- not just because he's ashamed to admit them, but also because they're part of the self that he created to get himself this far in a frighteningly unfamiliar word.

The Narrator is onstage throughout, watching both his young Self and the characters he encounters. In the Broadway production, Stew's performance mode was mildly engaged but mostly removed. I couldn't tell at first whether that was because Stew isn't really an actor -- Oscar Levant and Dexter Gordon were also impenetrable in similar circumstances -- or because the style called for the Narrator to bear witness stoically and leave the feeling to us. I began to lean toward the latter interpretation when it became clear that The Young Man's mother was dying, and that he would not make it home before she went. When Stew explained, blandly, that The Young Man "could not accept love without understanding," and his dying mother suddenly turned from The Young Man and cried directly to Stew, "How do you feel about it now?" I burst into tears. Was it because I had played Berlin and Amsterdam, too, and left behind a mother who never understood? Or was it because I was feeling what anyone with a heart would feel -- that when you dare to reach beyond expectations you must also expect to leave a trail of hurt? Busted up as I was, Stew didn't flinch, and I think it was better that he didn't. Nabokov told his Cornell students, when he read aloud to them the death of Jo from Bleak House, "This is a lesson in style, not in participative emotion." But he must have known some of them would weep, even as they took the lesson.

Stew was very much front and center at the end, tying up the loose ends. I'm not sure how successful he was at it. Certainly he didn't possess the certainty with which the Chimney Man redeemed Jelly Roll Morton at the end of Jelly's Last Jam. But Stew's story was less mythic than specific, and to the extent that it clicked -- not as a Broadway hit; it only lasted five months -- it was mostly in its resonance for any auditor that knew what it was to break through a barrier and still feel he had left something behind. One late line collapsed the house: "You know it's weird when you wake up one morning and realize that your entire adult life was based on the decision of a teenager." I think that line is practically Shakespearean, and reflects what's wonderful in the play: the deep understanding that we can't know what we've done, or who we've become, until it's way too late to do anything about it.

And oh, yeah, the production was brilliant, with good use of the stage and gestural Paul Sills acting. And the songs are beautiful. If you didn't like Rent, don't worry, neither did I, and this is much, much better. That Stew has a future, as of course he always had.