Sunday, March 27, 2022

Oscar night

I'm sitting here with the Oscars on. I haven't seen a thing and it doesn't interest me. I used to watch in case something awful happened, and there were a couple of years where I wasn't disappointed. 

From A.S. Hamrah---read the whole thing here:

The atmosphere in which the highest honors in filmdom are now broadcast to the masses is more like an episode of Wheel of Fortune in which the contestants can’t solve the puzzle, no matter how many vowels they’ve bought. The audience on social media engages in Frustration Discourse as they watch loser-winners grapple with their moments of professional glory on live TV, all so ABC can continue to exist in a world that has left it behind. It’s also a world in which actual movies have become marginal, especially during the Oscars.

Every moment is confused, all of it a ritual no one in the film industry believes in anymore but enacts to ward off demons of their future: simultaneous release in theaters and on streaming, no back end, no residuals, voiceover work in animation and video games, shrinking foreign markets, foreign markets where film releases are moral quandaries, a series of bad decisions like the ones that led to The Suicide Squad, Cameo, and the final, furthest away specter: a world without an In Memoriam reel.
 
Okay, I turned it off

Now Gone with the Wind is on, on live so we can't go back to the start. Yes, it's racist and awful, but it was a hit in the Soviet Union.

The only credited cast member from the movie left is the little fellow who played Beau Wilkes. I've argued that there's still time to make a sequel to Gone With the Wind with the original cast, just Mickey Kuhn, now 89. His character was born in 1864 so, at age 89, the movie would be set in 1953. Beau would be living in a boarding house somewhere, perhaps supplementing his Social Security by letting the state medical school study the effects of his inbreeding.  With digital video, the whole thing could be done for a few thousand dollars if Kuhn would cooperate. I'm pretty sure you'd get sued though.

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