Atlas Refuses to Be Shurgged

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As a comedian, I often push a lot of buttons. One, because my kind of rough life experiences and mild deamnor give me a lot of currency to take my humor to the gallows. And secondly, because I like to think that I put a lot of effort into making sure my targets are clear.

It seems The Oscars has attracted a bit of controversy on all fronts: Which may or may not be what they wanted. There were some misgivings about Seth McFarlane coming along and doing what Seth McFaralene was hired to do. As a local from Rhode Island, it's funny to think his stuff actually may have been a bit too cerebral for his "never got off the ground " comedy career. But it may have created a little bit of "pushing the envelope" osmosis.

The Onion caused a stir when, on its twitter account, it made a comment saying " Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a cunt, right? #Oscars201". This caused an outrage, first of all, for using the last great four letter word that must not be said. Secondly, because of the racial connotations (the idea that a person of color is fair game, or that they seem more "required" to act demure as possible, with little wiggle room). The Onion says their intent wasn't in targeting Wallis, but in the snipes that people tend to make in light of these Oscar ceremonies. That somehow, the armchair analysts of popular culture have just gotten too mean-spirited.

I kind of have been going back and forth on this. I'm not the largest fan of the gossip industry. Now, I'm hardly going to pretend that the Academy Awards are an untouchable bastion of prestige...the very high school prom nature of it, in addition to the decadence of the jewelry, the food, the party has all pretty much rendered the purity of it all a lost cause. Nontheless, there's a part of me that always winces when the ceremony attracts people who aren't into it because of the movies. And even those who are, will say, glom onto say, the irritating aspects of Anne Hathaway. Hathaway has kind of become the poster child (or at least soup du jour) for how much media gadlfys like to really let Type-A seeming actresses have it. (Or Type-C, with Kirsten Stewart's fog apathy inviting equal criticism). I'm not the first, and I won't be the last, to point out that the one upmanship of snark that's started since "Best Week Ever" (is that show still on) has very few places to go. Making that comment about Wallis is the logical conclusion. "But she's just a girl", they say. "She shouldn't be in the midst of that", but the thing is, with America being on a first name with Brad Pitt and Aneglina Jolie's offspring, culturally speaking, they're already out in the open. The media, the paparazzi, the blogs, they've helped break down barriers turning children into fair game. It was only a matter of time before someone said that about a nine year old actress, and meant it. 

But there comes the rub. Sometimes excellent satire (which the Onion comment really wasn't, but anyways) is hard to distinguish from that which it's satirizing. People will take Fight Club at face value. People will take Dave Chapelle's act at face value. The Onions point was maybe to make people feel a little uncomfortable and shocked. But what if not everyone considers that a wake-up splash of water, but a refreshing dip. I've seen a lot of comments along the line of "To be fair, she did seem like a little bit of a cunt". Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a comedian is to be enjoyed by the very people being made fun of. So I think in the light, we should declare the experiment a failure, where the humor was more appreciated by folks the writers did not want to be appreciated by. Hence, the apology, which some champions of humor felt they should never have had to do.

Ultimately though, let's hope the day doesn't come when the Onion's affected faux-outrageousness doesn't become milder than the real thing. Especially since one wonders where one would take that?

The Dance Between Art and Commerce

A couple of years ago, I did a post here talking about the wide swath of populist-skewing Oscar pictures; winner The King's Speech, Black Swan, The Social Network, The Fighter, as well as "second tier" movies like True Grit and Inception. (Although to some degree, Inception wasn't so much an "Oscar movie" that was popular as a summer blockbuster with prestige.) It looked like perhaps a new trend in so-called adult movies gaining traction in the ticket sales. However, the next year seemed almost a complete reversal in that direction. In contrast, the only movie to cross the 100 million mark amongst the 2012 nominees was The Help. Scorcese's Hugo was much admired but couldn't quite appeal to the masses, Speilberg's War Horse was considered obligatory, Terrece Malick's Tree of Life made no pretense of appealing to the masses, and the Best Picture was French, silent movie The Artist. It was almost as if unto a rebuke on the Hollywood for its especially egregious year of sequels, remakes, reboots, whatever you want to call them.

2012 seems to have, for now, found a balance between the populist and the pretigous. The highest grossing film of the year, The Avengers, was of course, yet another comic book movie, and a sequel to four of them at that. But it was generally considered, at the very least, an exercise in how to execute the blockbuster in a comprehensible, crowd-pleasing manner. Skyfall was looked at as one the best James Bond movies ever made (and saw a recognition in many of the techs). And there seemed to be a strong trend of decent-sized hits in Argo, Lincoln, Les Miserables, Silver Linings Playbook, even the very hard sell in Life of Pie and Zero Dark Thirty.

Is there a trend here? Hard to say. It's possible that the success of non-franchise pictures gave the studios more confidence to do more of the same. (After all the Hollywood cycle takes a couple years to really take effect.) Maybe the large hits seen in the spring of 2012 gave much of fall movies a lot of publicity. Perhaps what happened was, after Aurora Colorado incident, which caused moviegoing to be lacklustre for a couple of months, there was room for Argo to break out. Argo in turn, advertised many future Oscar hopefuls, and its signaling that the race was on served as an incentive to see its competition. Maybe one solid film just drums up excitement about moviegoing, I remember 2005 got a lot ink as "the summer of the slump", and in turn, may Oscar hopefuls had a weak box-office. Maybe the relationship between summer movies and Oscar bait works at a kind of symbiosis. Lack of enthusiasm about on will hurt the other. Studios should make sure its meat and potatoes are in equal portions, and both the best at what they could be. But who knows?