MUGGER: Sucked In

Maybe it was a reaction to the glut of droning and repetitious previews and reviews of President Bush’s workmanlike State of the Union address (general consensus from the majority of pundits: it sucked), or the media’s obsequious stalking of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but last week I was uncharacteristically drawn to coverage of the Oscar nominations. Normally—although it can be argued that nothing in the expanding yet shrinking media world is normal today—I ignore most of the Oscars debate and haven’t actually watched, at least for more than 30 minutes, the televised awards ceremony since the early 1970s when Marlon Brando horrified the entertainment establishment with his at least temporary embrace of everything native American.

(One bit of commentary on the SOTU I did get a chuckle from was Tom Shales’ smarmy Jan. 24 Washington Post television column. This is one to remember: “Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) was caught by cameras reading [Bush’s] speech too, but he looks so venerable and distinguished by now that it’s hard to get a bad picture of him. [He’s not running for senator this year; wait until the tabs print snaps of Teddy and his gut sailing shirtless on Cape Cod.] In fact he seems more and more to resemble Claude Rains as a veteran white-haired senator in Frank Capra’s classic ‘Mr. Smith goes to Washington.’ Life imitating art’s imitation of life.” Never mind that the “liberal lion” is twice the size of the actor, but Rains was one of the bad guys in that movie. Is Shales simply shallow or getting in a roundabout dig at Robert Byrd’s apprentice?)

As it happens, though, one of my sons is far more passionate about cinema than say, books written before 1950, and even though at age 14 he’s unsurprisingly drawn to “indie” projects—especially those made for less than 100 bucks—he sees an inordinate number of movies, at least by my reckoning, no matter what the budget or what critics have to say. (Of course, that would require actually reading a newspaper instead of simply clicking on to Rotten Tomatoes.) As a young filmmaker, Nicky also has such a respect for the craft that, with the exception of the horrendous remake of The Alamo, he’s never walked out on a movie, no matter how awful. Over the holidays, Nicky, his younger brother Booker and I went to see The Pursuit of Happyness, a dog from start to finish, and he got really pissed off when the two of us tried to bribe him to leave early. I thought the offer of a new CD, so soon after Christmas, was pretty darn generous, but he just scowled, and the three of us sat through the miserable film, for which Will Smith inexplicably received a Best Actor nomination.

So, on the morning of Jan. 23, I got out of the shower and coincidentally The Today Show was cutting to Los Angeles at that very moment for the Oscars press conference. There’s no glory in admitting that I sat on the bed for the entirety of the industry’s gratis commercial, but at least Tim Russert never appeared to present his analysis of what it all meant politically for the remainder of Bush’s term and Nancy Pelosi’s tenure as Speaker of the House. What it meant to me, as usual, was the films I enjoyed in 2006 were passed over—like Inside Man, Clerks II and The Illusionist—in favor of stuff like the convoluted Babel and Martin Scorsese’s sub-par The Departed. (I was pleased, however, that Bill Monahan, who wrote countless memorable articles for this weekly in the ‘90s, has the chance to go onstage, maybe without a cigarette and accept a Best Screenwriting trophy for The Departed.)

Helen Mirren’s a doll and The Queen was fine by me, although not comparable to her starring role in the early seasons of Prime Suspect, and Eddie Murphy is also deserving for his role in Dreamgirls, an entertaining, if utterly flawed, musical. And even if Half Nelson was disappointingly flat, lead actor Ryan Gosling’s performance, like most of his work, deserves recognition, although Chris Dodd has a better chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination than Gosling getting chosen over Smith, Forest Whitaker, Peter O’Toole or Leonardo DiCaprio.

Anyway, the single weirdest article I read about the Oscars was Timothy Noah’s Jan. 23 post on Slate, “The Academy’s Fatty Problem,” in which he argues that Richard Griffiths, the star of the abysmal, mind-numbing, vaguely creepy The History Boys, was ignored because he’s somewhat obese. Maybe there is a prejudice against full-bodied actors when it’s time to hand out awards—and if so, that’s not bound to change with all the absurd trans fat laws and removal of anything remotely appetizing at public and private school cafeterias—but Noah’s defense of Griffiths in this dreary film seems misplaced.

I like British films a lot (television too, like MI-5, the late John Thaw’s Inspector Morse series and Jimmy McGovern’s The Street), but The History Boys was so completely a meandering clunker that even Griffiths’ decent performance as a jolly teacher who lived for frequent reach-arounds on his male students, while uncomfortable, couldn’t trump the movie’s overall dreariness. Somehow, Noah, in his defense of this particular fellow and other weight-challenged actors, didn’t even mention this particular aspect of the film. A better article on The History Boys, it seems to me, would focus on the critical raves it received from liberal reviewers, men and women who undoubtedly trashed the disreputable former Rep. Mark Foley, who at least, according to the hundreds of news articles last fall, did his underage trolling online.

There was one exception that I came across: Editor & Publisher’s left-wing Greg Mitchell, in a Jan. 15 column, wrote: “[I]magine my surprise when I saw [The History Boys] recently and discovered that it presented a pederast as something of a hero … Looking back at some of the reviews of the film, I was amazed at how little outrage or even criticism over the treatment of this character emerged. Can you imagine the response if that teacher repeatedly brushed an arm across his female students’ breasts—and still turned out to be a hero? … Given how the film ends, they might have called it ‘The Dead Perverts Society.’”

Clicking over to high culture, there’s little doubt that Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is an educated man, but also, in 2007, a dinosaur. On Jan. 23, the foreign sex-trade expert had a go at Bush and Iraq—nothing unusual there, since Times editorial employees are probably given a quota each month for ridiculing the President—and attempted to draw literary parallels. He said: “Maybe George W. Bush is the education president after all. Whatever one thinks of his No Child Left Behind initiative, he has made the classics powerfully resonant today.

“So for those schoolchildren and university students out there struggling through ‘Moby-Dick’ or the ‘Aeneid,’ take heart! They’re not just about white whales or Trojan wanderers—they’re also about President Bush and Iraq.”

And Art Sulzberger Jr. wonders why his newspaper is no longer at the epicenter of the, to borrow from David Dinkins, American Mosaic. Just how many “schoolchildren” does Kristof think are “struggling” with Virgil or Melville? I’d bet the number is even smaller than Times readers who take the incoherent baseball musings of Murray Chass seriously. Too bad that that’s the case, but in a country where a growing percentage of elite prep schools don’t even offer Latin or Greek as an language elective, much less a requirement, Virgil’s gone the way of cloth diapers and tiny bottles of Squirt.