AFTER-PARTY.

The Oscars should be about the simple joys of life -- gambling and vanity -- and not about politics, but I see Charlie Pierce has people expecting me to talk about those poor nuts who hate-watched Libtard Hollyweird from their survivalist treehouses. Most of the best ravings have been well picked over, but there are a few morsels left to enjoy. First, Matthew Clark, "Associate Counsel for Government Affairs and Media Advocacy with the [wingnut front group] ACLJ" and author of the dystopian epic "Hollywood’s Self-Indulgent Delusional Demagoguery." Sample:

For anyone who has an ounce of critical thinking ability (critical thinking, not PC dogmatic zombism), [the Oscars are] almost unbearable to watch (it’s like watching sausage being made, with rotten meat, and then watching someone eat it, on prime-time TV).

This guy has a future in slasher films. Oh, also:

What if an actress said this award wouldn’t have been possible if my mother chose to abort me? 

Sarah Silverman hasn't done this bit yet? Get on it, Hollywood!  Next we have Young Cons and their wonderful headline:

Sean Penn Makes “Racist” Remark At The Oscars, Everyone Forgets His Party Affiliation

Similarly, when Jane Fonda does something stupid, the media just sits back and lets everybody think she's a Republican. My favorite, though, is the line from IJReview's "5 Hollywood Actors for Conservatives To Root For At This Year’s Oscars," introducing their #3, Michael Keaton:

Michael Keaton may not be a conservative, but his speech at the Golden Globes this year espoused strong conservative principles, even if he didn’t realize it...

Also, #2 Reese Witherspoon: "While she may not be a conservative, she espouses some refreshing ideas regarding modesty..." If this kind of thinking spreads, I could wind up on this year's Best-Dressed List. Thank you, good night!

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.

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!

TIME TO REVIVE A HUMILIATING TRADITION. Since childhood I have been an Oscar fan. I actually have a book of past winners and nominees, and find the artistic and political calculi by which they are presumed to have been determined more interesting than the equivalent readings of political apointments. I was fascinated to learn, for example, that some dark-horse results of Academy voting in the late 30s and early 40s are attributed by some to the voting strength of the Screen Extras Guild, who were then empowered to cast ballots. (The affected outcomes include former stuntman Walter Brennan's three Oscars, and the triumph of "Sweet Leilani" over "They Can't Take That Away From Me" in the 1937 Best Song competition.)

It is a silly thing, but mine own and, I judge, a harmless late-winter indulgence. Many find the ceremonies an incredibly lurid waste of time, money, and attention, but so is my job; the Oscars are more fun, and certainly less aggravating than politics. I once received a very nice note from John Podhoretz, whose beliefs emanate from a different solar system than mine but to whose authority on the Awards I bow, correcting me on the number of Oscars won by Katharine Hepburn.

One of the appurtances of my insignificent obsession is a tendency to make predictions on the Awards even when I have seen but very few of the nominated films. These are based on gut feelings and usually incredibly wrong, but no one has been able to stop me from making them, and I am unable to stop myself from publishing them:

Best Picture: The Aviator
Best Actor: Jamie Foxx, Ray
Best Actress: Annette Bening, Being Julia
Best Supporting Actor: Morgan Freeman, Million Dollar Baby
Best Supporting Actress: Kate Blanchett, The Aviator
Best Director: Martin Scorsese, The Aviator
Best Original Screenplay: Keir Pearson and Terry George, Hotel Rwanda
Best Adapted Screenplay: Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, Sideways
Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, The Aviator
Best Score: Jan Kaczmarek, Finding Neverland
Best Song: "Accidentally in Love," Shrek 2
Best Film Editing: Thelma Schoonmaker, The Aviator
Best Costume Design: Sandy Powell, The Aviator
Best Art Direction: Rick Heinrichs (Art Direction) and Cheryl A. Carasik (Set Decoration), Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
Best Makeup: Keith Vanderlaan and Christien Tinsley, The Passion of the Christ
Best Sound Editing: Paul N. J. Ottosson, Spider-Man 2
Best Sound Mixing: Randy Thom, Tom Johnson, Dennis Sands, and William B. Kaplan, The Polar Express
Best Visual Effects: John Nelson, Andrew R. Jones, Erik Nash, and Joe Letteri, I, Robot
Best Documentary Feature:Born Into Brothels
Best Animated Feature:The Incredibles

I am on record. Tomorrow I shall take my lumps like a man.

BUT IN THE END, THEY'RE ALL LOSERS.

The Oscar nominations are out, and if I get some time I hope to watch more of the nominated films and luxuriate in stupid prognostication like I used to do back when I was single and had nothing to do but attend the ci-ne-ma. Speaking of nerds, I see the wingnuts are having their usual allergic reactions. Kyle Smith, who went from pretending to be a film critic at the New York Post (and sometimes a theatre critic -- see his review of Will Ferrell's one-man George W. Bush show, "Is it too much to ask for Hollywood's leading comic actor not to use the deaths of our troops in combat for a giggle?" Never forget!) to full-blown kulturkampfer at National Review, tells his readers what they want to hear, i.e. that the nominations prove "#OscarsSoWoke" and are all about appeasing the dark gods of liberalism: in this "highly politicized year... Academy voters are going to be very eager to send a duly left-wing cultural message" and so, Smith predicts, moviecommies will vote for The Shape of Water which he says is leftwing -- because of the human/nonhuman miscegnation, I guess. Then he says,

As for Get Out, I think this is a very fine movie that is being hugely overrated because it’s about racism and I can’t imagine Oscar voters, who are mostly senior citizens, will be as impressed with it as critics have been.

So Academy voters are too "senior citizen" to vote for Get Out, but "woke" enough to vote for some other woke movie? Maybe there's something in there about Hollywood liberals being The Real Racists™ -- I'm stunned Smith didn't tease that out!

In another post called "The Anti-Trump Oscars" (these guys are nothing if not subtle) Smith explains why The Post can't win even though, if we follow his Zhdanovite logic, its journalistic-heroes-beat-Nixon story would seem to be the obvious choice: "Perhaps the Academy found the film just a bit too by-the-numbers... or voters thought the film was a bit too blatantly intended to capitalize on the anti-Trump mood. The Oscars are a fan dance..." It's all so complicated! Or maybe it's actually simple: the whole idea of everything that happens in movieland being a proxy battle between Republicans and Democrats is a bunch of bullshit. C'mon, Agent Smith, think outside the box!

Also, while I think people who mope about "snubs" because their personal love-objects didn't get Academy recognition are silly, at least they're just harmlessly indulging fan-crushes; Zachary Leeman's "Conservative Movies Snubbed by the Academy" at LifeZette, on the other hand, is like a cross between 1984 and Tiger Beat. For example, Leeman tells us Wind River is conservative because it's "about the mental and physical stability and fortitude still needed to survive in some parts of the country." You know, like Cimarron or Walkabout! Thus it "deserved recognition for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay," and because it didn't get it Leeman has thrown himself on his bed sobbing and kicked off all the frilly pillows. (The other snubbed movies were ignored, Leeman says, because they have uniformed personnel in them, and Oscar never honors servicemembers except for The Hurt Locker and Platoon and Saving Private Ryan and Platoon and Patton etc. etc. [voice trails off])

Speaking of snubs, if you thought Wonder Woman didn't get any nominations because, news flash, not every big-budget comic-book movie gets the prestige awards that lonely dorks holed up with their "light saber" and a box of Kleenex believe it should, Brandon Morse of RedState is here to tell you it's really because "Hollywood, being the left wing haven that it is, couldn’t stomach a few of Wonder Woman’s glaring politically incorrect flaws." That seems weird, as I remember when the movie came out conservatives were mainly tumescent with rage at all-female showings of the film. But no, Morse tells us,

For one, feminists didn’t seem to think Wonder Woman was suitable as a rep for their narrative. She was too sexy and too beautiful.

And when he unsheathed his light-saber, an usher threw him out of the theater.

Others among the brethren run their own little fantasy factories -- like Victory Girls' Kendall Sanchez saying Get Out is about "how progressives attempt to understand the cultural experience of African Americans." I know, that's what we all took away from it. Also, while Kyle Smith thinks Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is "about a vengeful feminist looking for answers after her daughter’s murder and also has a racist character" and therefore is "just as woke as The Shape of Water" -- a damning assessment, indeed! -- Kendall thinks "it’s a great movie about a desperate mother urging police to find her daughter’s murderer. I went into the movie thinking it would be a giant slam against police" -- and therefore bad! -- "but it turned out to be a humble and empathetic story that emphasized all humans are 1) intention-driven and 2) both good and bad." Ebbing, Missouri is a land of contrasts!

Maybe Smith and Kendall can do a podcast where they argue over whether a movie is conservative-therefore-good or liberal-therefore-bad. That'll really show the libs and send the walls of Hollyweird tumbling down, and our children's children's children will have nothing to watch on the telescreen but Veggie Tales, God's Not Dead 1-3,927, and the Two Minutes Hate, as God intended.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: For conservatives, culture war is not a war for culture but a war on culture.

DOGS AND CATS, LIVING TOGETHER!

There's been a lot of nonsense written about the Oscars, but Rod Dreher has surpassed everyone and even himself, through the agency of a "reader" "mail":

“The Academy used to play it safe with controversy, but now it’s moving the Overton window faster than in real life,” he wrote. “Who’d have thought one decade ago that the most prestigious award in the film industry would go to a film about bestiality, and casting it in a positive light?”

Yes, he's talking about The Shape of Water, which I told you about here -- but even if I hadn't, if you've had a halfway decent liberal arts education you'd recognize it from even a summary as a fable, like Ovid's Metamorphoses or Penny Marshall's Big.

But not Dreher. "I don’t pay attention to the Oscars, or Hollywood," he sniffs, "because I’m interested in other things' -- oooh he's an intellectual, look at his eccentric glasses! -- but though actually exposing himself to Hollyweird mindrot is beneath his dignity as a pedant, Dreher asks his readers to tell him about the movie -- and then he can’t even wait for that expedient before giving forth with the crack-brain hooey:

Could it be in this film, what happens at the Occam facility is Elisa, who works there as a janitor and first encounters the creature, learns to separate morality from matter, so that she can open herself to a sexual relationship with an aquatic creature? In other words, if there is no intrinsic meaning to matter, including humanity, then we can do with it whatever we want. Including submitting sexually to animals, or any creatures that give us pleasure and affection?

Here's another clue for you all -- the Walrus was Paul.

I don't know whether Dreher's gurus actually let him watch movies except to get something to yell about-- I remember him denouncing The Hours in 2003 as an "apologia for evil" -- but I like to imagine him leaping from his seat at A Midsummer Night's Dream when Titania makes love to the donkey-headed Bottom, screaming SACRILEGE, LIQUID MODERNITY! (I could go on like this all day -- e.g., Dreher sees Carl Dreyer's Day of Wrath and when it's over cries "I knew it! Witches are real!")

Imagine getting this far in life, and in a writing career no less, and having no fucking idea what art is nor what it's for. As I've said many times before: For these maroons, culture war is war on culture.

UPDATE. Dreher got mad because people made fun of him:

You guys, knock it off with “you didn’t see the movie so you don’t have the right to say anything about it.” I conceded early on that I hadn’t seen the film, and that my comments are based only on the Wikipedia description of its plot, and things both the director and others favorable to the film have said about it. Of course I could be wrong! If I’ve made a mistake in my description of the plotting, then I welcome correction. Nobody has yet said that I got that wrong...

It says right here in the review that she fucks a fish, so it's propaganda for fish-fucking -- because what else could it possibly be?

UPDATE 2. I saw a headline at Media Matters -- "Fox News keeps running columns from the same guy explaining, 'I'm a Democrat but [insert agreement with GOP]' -- and it put me in mind of two things: First, Harlan Hill; second, Rod Dreher, whose "reader" "mail" from Liberals Who've Had Enough is legendary. And he has a beautiful one today! Excerpts:

I read what you said about having spoken with four people recently who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 but are considering it now because of the left’s recent behavior. I’m not quite in that camp, but am close to it; I suspect my progress on the issue largely resembles those of your friends and (I suspect) a substantial minority of other Americans as well.

Oh that's another thing -- all Rod's apostate liberal "readers" have their finger of the pulse of America.

...I’m certainly not a typical Trump supporter — I believe in climate change and America’s responsibility to take policy steps to reduce our contribution to it, I’m anti-NRA, pro-Obamacare to an extent, and detest the Republican Party generally. The day after Trump got elected, I posted a scathing denunciation of everyone who had voted for him, which got the millennial social capital gold: hundreds of likes and almost 40 shares, including by several people I didn’t even know.

This is where all the folks on the Mourner's Bench go "oooooh!" 'cuz they know a conversion narrative's a-comin'.

...But leaving the nuclear issue aside, the Left’s behavior in the last year has pushed me steadily more and more in the direction of being willing to vote for a sort of lower-key Trump (someone like Ben Shapiro)...

I wonder if Dreher owed Shapiro a favor; if I weren't quite sure he's humorless, I would suspect him of making a joke.

UPDATE 3. Just had to share Dreher's sputter-back in his Shape of Water comments section:

I wonder if Rod really means to posit the Ancient Greeks as his socio-sexual model.

THE SPECIAL-NEEDS CHILDREN OF ZHDANOV.

Try and imagine being Jonah Goldberg:

As for the liberal bias thing. I absolutely agree there’s an enormous amount of leftwing bias in Hollywood, including often at the Oscars. But it’s hardly the case that pro-war or pro-American movies never get nominated. Last year, recall, Argo won best picture (to the dismay of some on the left). It beat out Zero Dark Thirty​, which was even more hated by the left but nonetheless received four nominations. The “Hurt Locker,” a more ambivalent war movie but hardly anti-American, won three years before that (it also won best director, a huge snub to her ex-husband, James Cameron, who directed Avatar). ​ ”Saving Private Ryan” was nominated for 11 Oscars and won five including Best Director — not exactly an anti-military or anti-American movie. 

There are certainly movies that benefited from being on the left. “Crash” didn’t deserve Best Picture. “American Beauty” is wildly overrated. But if the academy was really so leftwing in its tastes, it’s hard to see “Braveheart,” “Forrest Gump,” or even “Gladiator” beating out their competition.Warren Beatty certainly didn’t deserve an Oscar for “Reds,” a piece of soporific agitprop about American Communist John Reed. I think you can make a case for Oliver Stone getting the Oscar for “Platoon” without the benefit of politics, but not for “Born on the Fourth of July"...

That is to say, imagine that you are obsessed with politics but too stupid to say anything interesting about it, and so associate your crackpot ideas with things you do understand, barely, though they have nothing to do with politics -- such as one's choice of football teams, music videos, TV shows, and female body type -- and say things like "great novels are, by nature, conservative" with a straight face.

This is really why we have a "culture war." It's not a categorical imperative; it's a make-work program for unskilled wingnut dilettantes.

UPDATE. Goldberg's previous low-water mark as a kulturkampfer.

UPDATE 2. Commenter Ellis Weiner focuses on Goldberg's murky adverbial phrase "to the dismay of some on the left," which he finds

about as full of meaning and import as a teenager's "like." You can use it anywhere and not be entirely wrong. "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should--to the dismay of some on the left." "I AM your father, Luke--to the dismay of some on the left." "A specter is haunting Europe--to the," etc.

Other commenters come up with their own versions ("Baby, everything is all right, uptight, [and] clean out of sight (to the dismay of some on the left)"). And whetstone reminds us of John Rogers'/Kung Fu Monkey's definitive rebuke to anyone who seeks to anthropomorphize Hollywood as anything but an anteater that eats money instead of ants.

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.

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!

SHORTER ROGER L. SIMON: Like my asshole fans, I say fooey to Hollyweird and their ridiculous Oscars. (several hours later) Well, here we are at the Oscars! (And I brought my asshole fans with me!) He's good, she's not, she's good, he's bad, etc. Why is Chris Rock going on about black stuff? Doesn't he know I wrote for Richard Pryor?

BTW I am watching the Oscars now. It's a good, Chuck-Workman-like production. Steve Martin's funny, the glitz is edifying. I'll have to take their word for it that the set direction of Chicago is better than that of Gangs of New York. (Gangs is the only nominee I've seen.) It's nice to see you can still rely on the Oscars for distraction. I'm especially loving the tribute to Oscar musical numbers (is this Chuck, too?).

Oscar can make fun of itself, and other people can make fun of it, too, but when all's said and done, it represents admirably the big entertainment machine that has given pleasure to millions -- including even snooty Frenchmen like Jean-Luc Godard.

I know Hollywood is not too enlightened on digital copyright now, but as a celebrant of, and believer in, excellence wherever it occurs, I expect Hollywood will get that act together at some point. It's a huge nest of vipers, but it's also a huge nest of talent, and the latter, not the former, is its primary cultural tradition.

I mean, they're handling the short-speech thing well. That shows they've got something on the ball.

ROY’S OSCAR PREDICTIONS, FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY.

Regulars will know that I have a childhood love of the dumb old Academy Awards and have been running my own annual predix for years, usually not very successfully but sometimes beating the spread in the Best Picture and Best Actor and other categories. Even if you don’t want the betting advice, you can just share my appreciation of the excellent nominees and the fun of the guessing game.

This year I’ve seen all the nominated films, and you can see my reviews at these links --Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Licorice Pizza, West Side Story, Nightmare Alley, CODA, King Richard, Belfast, The Power of the Dog, and Dune. 

I’ve also seen all the nominated performances and nearly all of the other major nominees -- which in my experience is actually not helpful for predicting, because I can be swayed by quality and pure enthusiasm into error. But I did my best, and included second-guesses. Onward! 

L Best Picture: The Power of the Dog. I don’t see any way around it. I keep hearing intelligent people -- including the New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan -- say that CODA will win Best Picture. But, quite apart from it being the absolute worst film of the batch, CODA doesn’t have the traditional profile of the five previous No Best Director Nominee Best Pictures (Green Book, Argo, Driving Miss Daisy, Grand Hotel and Wings). Some of those films are sentimental in some way, as is CODA, but they also have at least one established star or, at the very least, a grizzled old-timer lead or two. (Sorry, Marlee Matlin!) With its teen lead and funny-horny parents, CODA would be a run-of-the-mill YA picture but for the deaf angle, and I don’t think that’s enough, especially since the Academy has elected art films the past two years in row -- could they backslide into feel-good goo-goo-ga-ga for such an unworthy product? Not out of the question, but to me at best CODA’s more like Breaking Away -- a scrappy also-ran. 

The other real serious contender (though I wouldn't completely count out the sentimental-but-actually-good Belfast) is Dune, an impressive chunk of movie- and money-making. But this is the same Academy that hasn’t put up any Star Wars films for any serious awards since 1978. Since the days of five nominees, at least one Best Picture slot has usually been dedicated to a big, sleek Cadillac of a movie that shows lots of flash -- but these only win when you can take them to heart, and Dune is just too freakish for that. (You could say the same for The Shape of Water, a Cadillac/art film hybrid, but that was also a love story.) Plus, The Power of the Dog is just really, really good. [If not: Dune.]

W Best Actor: Will Smith, King Richard. I really liked his performance; that it was delivered under the hagiographic pressure of Richard Williams’ still-living and powerful daughters makes the achievement even more remarkable. This is a rich field but Will Smith is a beloved figure in Hollywood and these guys really want to give it to him. [If not: Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog.]

L Best Actress: Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter. This is a tough one. Penelope Cruz is fantastic in Parallel Mothers but even with her moments of maternal horror it’s simply too subtle a performance for the Academy. Nicole Kidman did a creditable Lucille Ball, right down to Ball’s control freakishness -- which deprives her of the big emotional scene(s) that might have advanced her nomination. Spencer is a weird movie and Kristin Stewart’s Diana meets its challenge perfectly, but I think the eccentricity of the project cuts against her. 

That leaves Colman and Jessica Chastain, who in The Eyes of Tammy Faye really kills it; her and the other actors’ playing style is broad but rich in emotional truth, and she makes a woman who’s mainly remembered as a figure of fun into a sympathetic and even, ultimately, heroic figure. (Who didn’t feel that last parallel clip of Chastain and the real Tammy Faye deep in their gut?) The only question is whether the Academy will reward that kind of bravura loser story; it didn’t with Margot Robbie and I, Tonya. 

Colman’s performance, like Cruz’s, is subtle, but the character is not just experiencing shocks but also having an extended breakdown that’s brilliantly delineated by Maggie Gyllenhaal’s script and direction (and Jessie Buckley’s eerie flashback performance). And Colman approaches it with the guts of a cat burglar -- I was at several points shocked by how ugly and blinkered she allowed her character to be, yet I always saw where she was coming from (if only in retrospect) and was rooting for her all the way. Also the Academy has shown with Hilary Swank and Frances McDormand (and Luise Rainer and Katharine Hepburn) that it doesn’t mind giving Best Actress to the same woman within the same decade. [If not: Chastain.]

W Best Director: Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog. [If not: Kenneth Branagh, Belfast.]
W Best Supporting Actor: Troy Kotsur, CODA. [If not: Ciarán Hinds, Belfast.]
W Best Supporting Actress: Ariana DeBose, West Side Story. [If not: Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog.]

These are the kind of sucker bets I usually miss, but not this year! I’m sticking with the conventional wisdom. (Here’s my demurrer, though: If some older voters felt themselves giving short shrift to CODA and the gooey sentiment it represents, maybe Branagh has an outside shot.)

W Best Cinematography: Greig Fraser, Dune. All five movies are beautifully shot but Dune, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and Nightmare Alley are the least imaginable without their distinctive look. I would tip it toward Bruno Delbonnel, but the Academy may feel black and white is cheating. And Dune is the Cadillac of the bunch. [If not: Delbonnel, The Tragedy of Macbeth.] 

W Best Screenplay (Adapted): Siân Heder, CODA. It’s ludicrous, but if the news of a CODA groundswell is at all true, this will get past The Power of the Dog. (A spasm of insight would shift it to Gyllenhaal’s structurally brilliant script.) [If not: Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter.]

L Best Screenplay (Original): Adam McKay and David Sirota, Don’t Look Up. I was sure the backlash this film got from liberal know-betters would redound in the film industry, but this actually won the Writers Guild of America Award, among others. I guess it’s because Adam McKay does writing that really feels written -- almost as much as Aaron Sorkin, but he’s not up this year. [If not: Kenneth Branagh, Belfast.] 

L Best Film Editing: Myron Kerstein and Andrew Weisblum, tick, tick… BOOM! As the year’s big-movie nominee, Dune should tend to prevail in craft awards unless wildly outclassed, and I frankly admire that Joe Walker and Denis Villeneuve made sense of a convoluted story and kept the battle scenes intelligible. But the underdog rumblings for tick, tick… BOOM!, unlike the rumblings for CODA, make sense to me: It’s such a brilliant assemblage of a messy story (with a first-time director), and it catches the rhythm of both the music and the lead’s hyperactivity. [If not: Walker, Dune.]

W Best Original Score: Hans Zimmer, Dune. As important as the unified visual style of Dune is, I can’t imagine it without the score -- it’s mixed way loud whenever no one is talking and with its blend of noises and actual music it really carries the far-outness of the thing -- it's practically an athletic composing performance.  [If not: Jonny Greenwood, The Power of the Dog]

L Best Art Direction: Tamara Deverell and Shane Vieau, Nightmare Alley. Dune has a great unified vision but so do all the contenders, and -- well, the nearly-expressionistic Nightmare Alley sets are just too good. Also, in this category, the past trumps the future. [If not: Adam Stockhausen and Rena DeAngelo, West Side Story.]

W Best Make-Up: The Eyes of Tammy Faye. [If not: House of Gucci.]

W Best Song: "No Time to Die," No Time to Die, Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell. [If not: “Sometimes You Do,” Four Good Days, Diane Warren.]

W Best Sound: Dune. [If not: West Side Story.]

W Best Visual Effects: Dune. [If not: Oh who are we kidding.]

W Best Costume Design: Cruella. [If not: Cyrano.]

These I am really, really just guessing at:

L Best Animated Feature: Flee.
W Best Documentary Feature: Summer of Soul*.
W Best International Film: Drive My Car.
L Best Live Action Short: On My Mind.
W Best Documentary Short: The Queen of Basketball.
W Best Animated Short: The Windshield Wiper.

Place your bets [not with me, I’m unlicensed] and see you tonight! (Oh BTW, cutting eight categories from the telecast including Editing, Score, and Production Design is straight-up bullshit.)

*UPDATE: One hour since posting, I have already copped out on the Documentary Feature category -- I figure if they give Flee Best Animated Feature they'll feel they've done their bit, while Summer of Soul is a blast of joy that people really want in their lives. OK, I'll stop fiddling with it! 

UPDATE 2, 7:20 pm: Just letting you true vipers know they've started giving out the pre-ceremony Oscars and I'm doing great: Got Best Sound, Best Doc Short, and Best Animated Short right!  They gave Best Live Action Short to Riz Ahmed's anti-racist anti-fascist The Long Goodbye, which I thought was too pushy-prop but apparently they liked it. (I did like the rap, though.) So I'm three for four so far, hooray! 

UPDATE 3, 7:45 pm: But now I'm fading! Dune took Best Editing and Best Production Design. But it also won Best Score and The Eyes of Tammy Faye won the makeup award. It's not too late for me to pull it out.

UPDATE 4. Three hosts is [said with a rich lady gangsta lilt] attrition by addition [dance move]. 

UPDATE 5. That's just a matter of timing. Look, by herself Schumer is a stitch, especially making fun of Leonardo DiCaprio and young girls. The Steve Martin gag still works! 

UPDATE 6. After Ariana DeBose's speech I feel like a little theater kid sitting on the floor in front of the TV sniffling. Brava! 

UPDATE 7. I'm doing great but am mainly commenting on Twitter -- to the extent possible, because I want to relax and enjoy these. But you know me -- I'm a kibbitzer. 

UPDATE 8. Someone should have told Will Smith that Frank Sinatra never smacked people around when the cameras were rolling.  

UPDATE 9. Well. I still think CODA is a drag, but one of the venerable Oscar traditions is bitching about how Oscar doesn't know what it's talking about, and my 73% score is not so bad. So, really, we're all winners! From Hollywood for Ugly People, Good Night! 

TODAY IN FILM REVIEWS BY RIGHTWING PROPAGANDISTS:

Shorter Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institute: The Butler is bad for race relations in America, and I'll do my bit to reverse its effect by explaining why the Civil Rights Act was a mistake.

See, on the one hand, Title II of the Act desegregated some otherwise intractably segregated areas of American life; but on the other, "the constant use of disparate impact tests in education, housing, and employment led to an overreach by the new civil rights establishment of today."

Previously on Richard A. Epstein Explains Racial Justice: "The Supreme Court should strike the VRA down and let Congress return to the drawing board for something better." Epstein is also the author of Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws.

Sadly, I can't find anything by Epstein on Django Unchained.

UPDATE. In comments Fats Durston applies the Epstein method to Schindler's List: "its wrong narrative of the evolution of anti-Semitism serves to strengthen a set of misguided Israeli government programs at a time when it is no longer possible to bless all actions of the Zionist movement." So that's why it won all those Oscars! Well, you know Hollyweird.

Meanwhile in rightwing world,  Jim Hoft is moved to poetry, or some species of it:

HOW AWFUL! Oprah’s “The Butler” Is Chock Full of Racist Lies (Video) 

How absolutely horrible!
Oprah and Hollywood are going ga-ga over The Butler a project that is purposely filled with racist lies from beginning to end.
What horrible people. 

As Eric Bolling pointed out today on The Five that the “real” Butler was born in Virginia.
His mother was never raped by a white man.
His father was never killed by a white man.
That was just included as an extra jab at whitey.

I find it difficult to believe he typed this; it reads as if it were taken down by a psychiatric examiner. 

GREAT ITEM BY LANCE MANNION in answer to that stupid shit David Brooks, who sought to turn the presumed disappointment of an accomplished woman into an indictment of modern life as lived by anyone but his own manicured self.

Meryl Streep and her husband have been married for thirty-two years, Bridges and his wife for thirty-three. Maybe Brooks didn’t watch the Oscars so he didn’t hear Michelle Pfieffer gush about what a great family man Bridges is or hear Bridges himself make part of his acceptance speech a valentine to his wife...

Meanwhile, what about Sandra Bullock?

The answer to that is Tom Hanks.

Or Paul Newman.

Neither of whom managed personal happiness through a happy and stable first marriage.

Things didn’t work out for Bullock with Jesse James but that doesn’t mean that tomorrow she won’t meet someone who is not a sleezeball with whom she will live as happily ever after as anyone ever does with anyone.

Though I generally spend my time here beating on fools for being plain wrong, I must spare a thought from time to time for the possibility that guys like Brooks have been raised in veal pens or Skinner boxes and simply don't know what life is like.

The sad thing is, such writers are so plentiful and their poisonous work so pervasive that we need people like Lance to remind us of simple reality.

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.

HOLLYWOOD SQUARES. As you might expect, if you know his work, filmmaker Kung Fu Monkey finds Big Hollywood -- the would-be movie ministers of propaganda considered here earlier -- "a garden of crack pinatas." It sure has been; but two days in, it's already getting tiresome.

How many posts that say "the Hollywood culture that overwhelmingly favors the left and demonizes conservatives is a huge problem for conservatism, but not a hopeless one," can one bother to eviscerate in any given working day? How much pleasure can one take in answering "No one watches the Academy Awards any more" with the fact that the Oscars continue to draw massive global viewership? And as comical as the headline "Top 5 Conservative Characters On 'Lost'" undoubtedly is, what sane person would dig far enough past it to mock the contents, knowing that every day henceforth until the end of the internet will be filled with similarly risible gibberings?

With the Obama ascension we've entered a bizarre era of rightwing web commentary. Conservatives are pimping social media as their internet comeback device. But on the internet as it is, Big Hollywood represents their actual strategy: the usual culture-war guff with a new splash page. Their other new-media innovations are Joe the Plumber in Israel and reruns of Sarah Palin versus the press.

Endlessly they talk about the death of old media, but their new media options seem to be celebrities and show biz, and without nudity. How is that supposed to increase market share?

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.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I'm an idiot, I love this.

•   The Oscars are on Sunday. I've unlocked my newsletter reviews of Best Picture nominees Marriage Story, The Irishman, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Parasite, Joker, Jojo Rabbit and (new!) 1917 and Little Women. That leaves Ford vs. Ferrari, which I hope to see even though it's not really a contender because it looks like fun -- and the other nominees, for better or worse, are very stressful, or in any event I found then so (no Little Miss Sunshine in this bunch, let alone Mary Poppins!). I'll do my predictions day-of-show, and then -- magic time!

•   When he's right, our late president is right:

I read the Carville thing and his point, where he has it, is similar to the one we've long made. They should keep their eye on the ball. "Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it more difficult to buy food? Medicine? Do you feel war more is more likely?"

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) February 7, 2020

We have both David Brooks and Peggy Noonan going oh those Democrats are blowing it (I know, what a shock); Brooks especially says Democrats ought to capitulate entirely on the economy and make a lame nicey-nicey pitch:

...Democrats should acknowledge that the economy has done well since the Obama recovery in 2009. They should argue that this is the time to take advantage of prosperity to begin a moral and social revival. This is the year to run a values campaign, one that champions policies to make America more socially mobile, caring and interdependent.

In 2020, running on economic gloom or class war probably won’t work. 

I don't remember Brooks offering this advice to Trump in 2016 when the economy was climbing faster than it is now and Trump was still insisting the nation was on the verge of collapse and Trump was the only solution. Then as now, our go-go economy was leaving and continues to leave more people behind every day -- and once you fall off the gig economy merry-go-round, it gets harder and harder to climb back on. And get health care if you're sick. And food if you're hungry. To my way of thinking, when Trump blathers about the economy, Democrats should respond: "Forget what this guy says -- we all know what a liar he is." No stammering equivocation -- ask the people how they'd like not to have to live in terror of losing their jobs to a stupid tariff or their homes to an unregulated bank.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN

I just love it, okay?

•   Hey, it's almost time for the big game -- by which I mean the Oscars, a week from Sunday. Over at the newsletter (it's called Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, if you want to know what to ask for at the newsletter store) I've started my Best Picture nominee reviews. Last year I correctly predicted Green Book to win, so I'm feeling pretty damned cocky (though I only got 61% right overall). For those of you non-subscribers who want to get in on the tinsel and glamour, I've unlocked my reviews of Marriage Story, The Irishman, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Parasite, Joker, and Jojo Rabbit; -- the other three are coming soon. Oh, and as long as I'm here: Chiefs by 3!

•    I assume most of you are acquainted with the Rod Dreher "Letters to Repenthouse" shtick, whereby conservative operatives (compensated or not) pass him their "I never dreamed this would happen to me" missives and he posts them as Vox Populi. Here's his latest, in a post called "Actually, There Is A Christian Case For Trump"; Dreher explains that he's still only thinking about voting for Trump (LOL) but if he does it'll be for better reasons than those trashy not-artisanal Evangelicals have, and to back it up he dips into the ol' reader mailbag and finds a fellow who rails against "local, woke Democrats in positions like D.A., city council, etc. in cities." The rubes have a hate-on for cities these days, so you can see why Dreher picked it, notwithstanding its lack of relevance to Trump:

The ideology they are pursuing, of completely ignoring any quality of life related criminal behavior and deconstructing muncipal competence brick by brick, is horrifying. Decriminalization of theft, of open drug crime, vehicle break ins, public urination, etc. is turning our cities, and increasingly exurban towns, into absolute hell holes.

So far it's standard "Them there big cities what gawts fee-cees an' needles in 'em" boob bait, but how did our alleged correspondent come to know the horrors of city life?

These doofuses are bringing the medieval plague back to Los Angeles, where I recently visited my fiancee’s family. The stuff I saw there was shocking, and really sobering. It made me remember why I identify as a centre-right person to begin with, and why despite being a bit more on the Tucker Carlson side of view on markets, I will have no time for woke municipal governance.

I'm guessing the guy is a "centre-right" citizen of the Commonwealth. But couldn't Dreher have at least proofread his copy for Britishisms? They rather spoil the effect. The best part of the post is not from mailbag guy, but from Dreher himself on his big dilemma about voting for Trump:

If Bernie Sanders were a pro-life social conservative, I would strongly consider voting for him, even though I don’t like his economics.

If you don't like his economics, then why the hell would you be interested in voting for him? Maybe Dreher believes that bullshit about Sanders loving George Wallace.

•   One other thing: The Republicans laying down for Trump on impeachment is no shock. (Democrats will make it hurt for them in November, if they're smart, which, yeah, I know.) This is all Republicans are good at anymore. Here's a great example from the Washington Examiner, reporting that a "surge in meth could bring drug overdose death rates back up." This couldn't be good news for the god-emperor, especially coming after the Examiner recently said a 2018 drop in U.S. drug overdoses "offers President Trump a boost during his reelection campaign as Democrats criticize his administration for not going further in fighting the crisis." So here's how they spin it:

A top Trump administration health official is worried that meth-related deaths will counterbalance the progress the United States has made in reducing drug-overdose deaths

See, it's not that Trump isn't doing great against drug overdoses -- it's that his success has been counterbalanced by... failure. (Well, who could have guessed meth was a problem?) I'm going to try this at work: I didn't fuck up, my good work was counterbalanced! If only I had an entire political party willing to cover for me.

DAMNED LIBERAL OSCARS SNUBBED ROB SCHNEIDER AGAIN.

At rightwing ladymag Acculturated, Mark Tapson has written the ten millionth conservative complainer about how the artistic commissars are prejumadiced against them:

The culture leans sharply left, and in our current, highly-polarized political climate that means conservatives in the arts tend to be treated as outsiders at best and pariahs at worst. Listen to the personal experiences of conservatives in Hollywood, for example, whether “above the line” (the stars, producers and directors) or below it (the rest of the crew), and you will understand why most keep their politics in the closet to avoid bad vibes, ostracism, and/or outright hostility. The left, of course, dismisses complaints of blacklisting and bias as paranoid whining, but they are very real indeed.

Wow -- someone in Hollywood was hostile to you? Must be your politics!

Tapson has a more specific gripe, too: He claims the New York Times best-seller listings are cheating rightwing authors like Dinesh D'Souza of their proper rankings:

The Times says its list is based on “surveys” of “a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week. These standards are applied consistently, across the board in order to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular at that time.”

Confidential context? Best assessment? Broadly popular? This sounds suspiciously unscientific and non-transparent, and does not address the evidence of the sales figures themselves. The once highly-regarded “newspaper of record” is notoriously leftist and D’Souza is a lightning rod for Progressive animosity, so the idea that there might be some manipulation of the list is not only not ludicrous, it’s likely.

This goes back to something I've been saying forever about wingnut whining -- for example, when they complain that Yale and Harvard are prejudiced against them, I always say: Why not quitcher bitchin' and instead make Bob Jones and Liberty University the intellectual lighthouses to which the best students flock? Then you won't need to worry about Yale and Harvard! Bypass the gatekeepers! Be the star you are!

Similarly, why worry about the Times rankings at all? (Shoot, Regnery doesn't -- they say they'll stop using the Times rankings in their marketing which, given their bulk-sales-to-gomers approach, probably won't make any difference.) Conservatives having been saying for decades that the Times is untrustworthy and irrelevant -- why not instead lobby for the New York Post, Breitbart et alia to have their own lists, and then you can all enthuse that D'Souza's Liberal Fascism for the Even Dumber is #1 on the American Thinker Best Seller List?

The answer's pretty obvious: These guys don't really believe what they say they believe. They don't want the path cleared so they can be judged by the wide world on their own merits. What they want are the glittering prizes their enemies dispense, because somewhere deep in their blackened little souls they burn with desire for the approbation of the people they spend their days raging against, like spurned teenage suitors. And, if they can't have the prizes, they can at least retain the boogiemen -- Hollyweird! Eggheads! Shut Up and Sing! -- that they and their yokel supporters can invoke whenever they feel like having a good cry about how persecuted they are.

For his coda, Tapson then tacks on another popular rightwing favorite: Let's Put on a Culture! (A nice one, not that entarte kunst those liberals do.)

The upshot is, it’s time for conservative artists to do more than complain about the culture bias; it’s time for us to -- first and foremost -- create great art (or none of the rest of it will matter), and secondly, create alternative distribution channels to disseminate it: magazines, networks, publishers, production companies, studios, awards shows, foundation grants, everything the left used to create the current infrastructure that favors its worldview.

The technology for this transformation is available. The funding is available (if only moneyed conservatives had the vision to use it effectively). All that’s necessary is the will.

Yep, all it takes is the will, and the endless, fruitless quest to get Rupert Murdoch to finance your hard-hitting dramedy about the Knockout Game. I hear this kind of thing a lot, and the payoff is nearly always a dud or a grift -- take the sad cases of Liberty Island and Declaration Entertainment. It's not that I think they can't do it; it's just that I think the real conservative artists are just making their art rather than boo-hooing about bias -- notwithstanding the former is much harder than the latter. Try to imagine Evelyn Waugh crying that the Labour Party was keeping him down.

I understand the emotions, but outside of ungovernable obsession I don't understand why they post and print so much about the subject in public where people can see it. I can see bitching at the liberal media if you're a politician -- it may convince your voters the stories they tell on you are false. But what's even the point of crying about how Big Artistry isn't fair to your play, book or film when your readers probably only ever watch Game of Thrones and Clint Eastwood movies, and only ever pick up a book to smash flies? Maybe it's an easy space-filler for when one of their propagandists calls in sick.

UPDATE. I realize that quoting wingnut comboxes is the lowest form of comedy but I ain't too proud for it when the lulz are this good: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit aggregates the story and her commenters are -- well, look how some cowboys answered "Is it Time for Conservatives to Create an Alternate Culture?"

Go over there and look, it's hilair. Sample: "I thought conservatives already had an alternative culture. I thought it was called church."